THE THIRD HALF OF THE MOON
Nancy Stebbins

Babies Jane and Emily are as lucky as conjoined twins can be. They share no internal organs to speak of: no brain, no heart, no pancreas, nothing more than a small overlap of liver, a double crescent, which the surgeon divvies perfectly: half a moon for Jane and half a moon for Emily.
After the triumphant operation, Mercy Hospital holds a celebration in the courtyard. Important townspeople are invited: the mayor, city council members, and a famous local ice sculptor. To the flash and snap of reporters’ cameras, these men—odd and hirsute fairy godmothers—look up towards the fourth floor neonatal unit and pronounce their blessings on the babies: “They will recover completely.” “Nothing will break the sisterly bond between them.” “They will love snow cones and swans.” (This, forlornly, from the ice sculptor, whose masterpiece is melting in the warm September evening.)
The babies finally come home, swaddled in fuzzy pink blankets. Three-year- old Chessa watches from across the room, making throaty growling sounds. She has been all but forgotten in the frenzy of the birth and the medical hoopla. Having spent so much time with the family beagle, she is now mute, except for dog- speak.
“Use your human voice,” the mother says. In her purse is the number for a speech therapist she has been too busy to call.
Chessa, on all fours, wags her small behind and says, “Arf.”
The doctors have not predicted the problem of the highly charged space between the twins’ bodies. The first to notice it is Chessa, who creeps over to them (grrr-grrr): she and the beagle want pacifiers to chew. She squeezes herself between the two bassinettes, when suddenly her nutmeg-colored hair stands on end in a vortex of static electricity. She says: “Whooshish.” Her first word in weeks.

The twins grow older—four, five, six. They feel an uncomfortable stretching sensation between them if they move too far apart. If one spins in circles, the
other is reeled in towards her. They try to name their experience: “A shimmer-stretch.” (Jane) “Elastic twinkle stars.” (Emily) Chessa plays alone at the table. She uses putty to lift pictures of cats and buxom ladies from the comics, then pulls them long like strings of taffy. “Phantasmagoric,” she says. Chessa has been a show-off since she regained human language.
The twins laugh, not nicely: “
Ha—”
“—Ha.”
The family consults a pediatric neurologist. “I’ve seen phantom legs and feet, arms and hands,” the doctor says, “but never a phantom twin-bond.”
Though there is no name for the occurrence, it’s the sort of thing you can’t keep secret. On Valentine’s Day of their third-grade year, the twins get cut-out hearts from the other children with Will You Be My Science Project? written inside. The other schoolchildren jostle them in the hallway, daring each other to run between the two. “Red Rover, Red Rover...I felt it! I felt it!” The twins shriek in pain as they rebound towards each other.
After school, Chessa chases the other children away. She walks her sisters home. The twins straggle behind, dragging sticks in the dirt, making parallel snake trails. Chessa remembers the electrical feeling of standing between the two of them. More than anything, she’d like to be included.
“Who wants to stop at the park?” she calls back to them. “We can have snow cones.”
They squeal and skip ahead of her. Instead of passing her on the same side, as usual, they separate as they pass, one on Chessa’s right and one on her left. They shout out flavors: “Pineapple!” “Lemon!” “Coconut!” For a moment, Chessa feels it: the stretchy, tingly, pulled-in-all-directions sensation that pricks up the hair on her head. Now Jane and Emily lean on the railing, reaching over the park’s small pond, as if they could touch the swans gliding out in the middle of the water. Chessa hands them their snow cones. There is a moon in the afternoon sky.