Tweedledum and Tweedledee by Willow Rose

and they’ll suck your blood, suck you dry till there is no more left."
    The crowd then gasped and pulled away with big eyes and open mouths.
    "See what happens when I poke it with my stick, the presenter would say. Then he poked the twins in the stomach and they reacted with a huge roar. The crowd gasped again in fear and fascination. Then the presenter swung the stick and hurt the twins so they whimpered, pulling backwards.
    "Down!" he yelled.
    The crowd clapped and cheered. It was always the same. Every day for eight hours a day. A new crowd every hour. Once the twins returned to their cage in the back of the truck, they were exhausted…beaten and humiliated enough to crumple up in a corner and not speak a word to one another. They hardly ate and soon became very skinny…Something that made them even scarier to look at.
    It wasn't until one night when they were back in Rome after two years on the road that they finally spoke to one another again. The gypsies had parked the truck in a parking lot close to the place they had chosen for their show later in the day. Everyone else was sleeping heavily when the twins both opened their eyes at the same second, like had it been synchronized, or had been planned in advance. For the first time in a long while, they looked into each other's eyes.
    "Today, we are twelve years old," one of them said in their mutual language.
    "Today, we take back our lives," the other replied.
    "I love you."
    "I love you more."
     

29
    April 2014
    " W HAT ARE YOU DOING? I can't see."
    "Don't be impatient, Deedee," the man said. "I don't want to rush this. I want it to be perfect."
    "I can't wait. Could you do something about this smell soon? I can't stand this smell," Deedee complained.
    "You know that’s my next move."
    The man moaned and wiped off drops of sweat from his forehead. He was concentrating very hard right now. Carefully, he sewed the pieces of skin together. On the floor, in a black plastic garbage bag, lay the remains of the girl. She was missing an entire leg, cut off at the points directly below the groin. On the back and front of her chest, the man had cut off big pieces of her skin.
    She hadn't suffered. The man didn't want her to. No, she wasn't the one who needed to feel pain. Her parents were. It was never the man's intention to have her feel any pain. He had slit her throat in one quick movement as soon as she started screaming. That had shut her up immediately. Blood had gushed onto the floor and he had hurried to put her body into the plastic bag. He would have to clean up the blood later.
    He carried her inside the bag into the bathroom, where he had hung her from her feet inside the shower. With a long-bladed knife, he had cut up her dead body. He started at one corner of the jaw and made a deep ear-to-ear cut through the neck and larynx to the opposite side. This severed the internal and external carotid arteries, the major blood vessels carrying blood from the heart to the head, face, and brain. He had let her hang for a while…Draining her blood and letting it all wash out with the bathwater. Then he had cleaned the skin carefully.
    The man had carried the dead body back into the living room of his cabin, then thrown her on another plastic bag so he wouldn’t leave traces on the floor. First he cut off the leg, then later, with a scalpel, he started flaying her in certain spots where he knew the skin was best. Then he had started sewing it.
    "Hurry up. Hurry up," Deedee said.
    "Patience, mio caro."
    The man turned to face the girl again. He kneeled next to her and examined her skin. He found a great spot on her stomach and, with a scalpel, he cut it off. The finest skin was found on the back and abdomen. He was careful to just get the skin. The skin was composed of two layers, an outer thinner one with a thicker tissue layer below it. He only needed the outer layer. Carefully and precisely, he flayed the pieces he needed. Then, he cleaned the piece of skin of blood