Kelmomas had been born staring into the deluge that was his twin’s face. For a time, he knew, his mother’s physicians had feared for him because it seemed he could do little more than gaze at his brother. All he remembered were the squalls of blowing hurt and wheezing gratification, and a hunger so elemental that it swallowed the space between them, soldered their faces into a single soul. The world was shouldered to the periphery. The tutors and the physicians had droned from the edges, not so much ignored as overlooked by a two-bodied creature who stared endlessly into its own inscrutable eyes.

Only in his third summer, when Hagitatas, with doddering yet implacable patience, made a litany of the difference between beast, man, and god, was Kelmomas able to overcome the tumult that was his brother. “Beasts move,” the old physician would rasp. “Men reflect. Gods make real.” Over and over. “Beasts move. Men reflect. Gods make real. Beasts move …” Perhaps it was simply the repetition. Perhaps it was the palsied tone, the way his breath undid the substance of his words, allowing them to soak into the between places, the gem-cutting lines. “Beasts move …” Over and over, until finally Kelmomas simply turned to him and said, “Men reflect.”

A blink, and what was one had become two.

He just … understood. One moment he was nothing, and another he was staring, not at himself, but at a beast. Samarmas, Kelmomas would later realize, was wholly what he would later see lurking in all faces: an animal, howling, panting, lapping …

An animal that, because of his unschooled sensitivities and its sheer immediacy, had devoured him, made a lair of his skull.

A blink, and what had absorbed suddenly repelled. Afterwards, Kelmomas could scarcely bear looking into the carnival of Samarmas’s face. Something about it wrenched him with disgust, not the grimaceand-look-away variety, but the kind that pinched stomach walls together and launched limbs in wild warding. It was as though his brother wore his bowels on the outside. For a time, Kelmomas wanted to cry out in warning whenever Mother showered Samarmas with coos and kisses. How could she not see it, the unsheathing of wet and shiny things? Only some instinct to secrecy had kept him silent, a will, brute and spontaneous, to show only what needed to be shown.

Now he was accustomed to it, of course. The beast that was his brother.

The dog.

“Hey, Sammi,” he said, wearing his mother’s mouth-watering smile. “Watch …”

Bending over, he placed a single palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.

Samarmas gurgled with delight, covered his mouth and pointed. “Bum-bum!” he cried. “I see your bum-bum!”

“Can’t you do this, Sammi?”

Samarmas pressed his cheek to his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. “Nothing,” he conceded.