But she too sacrificed something for Hagos. She allowed herself to be turned into the woman he carried within him. She could see it in the way he dressed her, styled her hair, trimmed her nails, painted her fingernails.

They were a match, he and she the other of the other.

When Hagos straightened up, Saba approached him and blew the dust off his face. He seemed to her as if he had been sculpted out of a smooth rock. His wide eyes appeared like the sea in which she dived to search for the words he might have wanted to say but couldn’t. Saba was his confidante, his sole friend. She had first realized this many years ago. She had just returned home from the hospital where she had undergone treatment for the burn injuries to her thighs, when Hagos barged into her room. Usually, he would knock before entering her room and she would have time to clear her bed of books, hide the words, the equations, the science and history taken away from him when his parents pulled him out of school and instead invested whatever money they had in her.

That evening, though, Saba froze. She looked at him and then down at her books. Hagos sat on her bed holding her face in his hands. Their eyes met. Hagos was talking to her. The deeper she looked into his eyes, the more she felt she could interpret his feelings spread on the surface, and condense the thoughts and possibilities going through his head into something that made sense.

I understand you, Hagos. I am not imagining this. It’s real. I can see in your eyes what you are trying to tell me.

Hagos burst out crying. Saba cried with him.

Now Saba placed the broom against the wall and hugged her brother, as if he was a precious discovery she had just made. Hagos stooped a little, allowing his slender body to be enveloped. He sighed and muttered. His lips tickled her earlobe. I love you too, she whispered back.

Hagos took a bristle brush out of his jute sack and straightened his sister’s naturally curly hair, though she liked it as it was. She tilted her head back as he arranged a red bandana to keep her hair away from her face. She had never told him she detested that colour. As he put earrings on her ears, she grimaced in anticipation of the itching she’d feel in reaction to the silver, and allowed him then to add a short heart-shaped necklace. He turned her into a cliché, she thought, as she coughed when he sprayed her neck with a perfume he made from ingredients he picked up at the market back home. But then again, Saba thought, that which is cliché for many is original for someone as isolated and lonely as Hagos.

Hagos turned around as Saba squeezed into the black underwear he had tailored at their uncle’s shop to replace the skin she lost in the fire started by the midwife. Saba withstood Hagos’s preparations before they left for an early-morning walk in the camp. Though she owned her mind, she had given her body to Hagos a long time ago. It made sense. She had taken his place in school and it was fair to give him this alternative form of self-expression. He used her skin in his way, to write his story.