I was only a girl when Aurelia died. My twin, my heart. We shared the same gold-brown eyes, the same tense smile, slept so close that our wild honey hair would tangle and weave together. I was born to gorge and take, a vulture swallowing down the world. But she was runt-small and starving, unheard even when she raised her small voice. We sisters kept so close together—silhouettes blurring, finishing each other’s thoughts, tripping over each other’s footprints—that sometimes even our nervous-eyed mother could not remember which was which.

       Far in the bottoms under tangled oaks lay a cold pit along the river’s shore. In summer drought when the water burned to a slow-flowing vein, the pool stood deep and alone, mirror-black water clotted with dead leaves and sodden feathers. Kids stole away to sink into the dark water, hiding under the hands of trees to smoke and kiss and fight and touch. Our grimy leavings would pile in the riverbed—broken bottles, cigarette packs, blood and needles and condoms and shed teeth—until fall rain brought the river laughing back to wash us all away.

       I made my sister follow me miles through the thorn-choked woods on her thin legs. Chose not to hear the rattle of her breath, tugging her feverish hand until we leaped together into that delicious chill. The bottom only an echo under our kicking legs. My limbs spread like wings. I closed my eyes and imagined infinite sky, bottomless seas, a holiday table dripping with butter-browned feast.

       There was no warning. A dewberry-small, tattered little knot in my sister’s heart—hinted at by how often she was sick, how she gasped for breath after I made her run, how hard her heart kicked when I laid my head on her chest—finally burst. She curled forward, eyes lost and pleading, and slipped below the water’s black.

       I dragged her small body onto the bank, already desperate for the hum of her, bright vibration thrumming the air. I pounded her chest and dragged leaf scum from her mouth, pulled a dark feather from her tongue. But she was gone, and no matter how I pleaded, hands pressed to her cold cheeks, I would get no more of her. My fault, I was sure, for pushing her so hard. For wanting more than the world held in its sticky rind.

       You understand, then, why it was years before I returned to the river pool? You understand, don’t you, how cruel he was to make me go back?

       Growing up without her, I became mirror shy. Begged my mother to cover those glass faces, wouldn’t go near water or uncovered windows, wasn’t allowed to piss in the girls’ room at school after hurling a book into the bathroom mirror so hard it detonated the glass. Always waiting in my reflection was my twin, growing older with me, but the face hers. That hungry face, not insatiable like mine, but never fed at all.

       How sad, people said. Her sister drowning feet away, and she too shocked to save her. I’d become a celebrity, wild and queer thing that I was. Boys loved this about me, the dark story, how angry and unreasonable I could become. Loved how far I could be tempted to go and hated how none of them were ever enough for me.

       So it was that I let myself be tied to a boy calm and slow, his hand on my arm painful but steadying, someone whose still face I hoped might hold depths enough to sustain me. So it was that he decided I would go back to the river pool. That I would give myself to him on the dry riverbed, beside the midnight eye of water where I’d lost Aurelia.

       Back under those trees for the first time in years, my head swarming with my own loss. He stood me over the water and undressed me, made me stare into the pool. Below a skin of knotting leaf and feather and twigs, Aurelia waited. No mistaking her face looking up in the moon’s cold glow. Hair twisting below the water, her cautious, blue-lipped smile, eyes like coals. The broken hunger on her face so much more desperate than my own.

       I felt so guilty, savoring my bright life right there in front of her, that I couldn’t even speak. I would have let that boy take everything he wanted from me. Only he said, It was Aurelia, wasn’t it? Your twin’s name? Tonight, that’s what I’m going to call you.

       Why are men built this way? To push their thumbs into the clay of us, to dig and press for more, to keep clawing through the bones when we’ve given them all we have? They’d eat even our shadows if they could.

       I shoved him off me and wandered into the dark, cut my feet on old glass, crushed mosquitoes into bloody jewels on my bare skin. I never should have come and never should have come with him. All the sweet, bitter joy I’d swallowed for years came crawling up my throat, a spreading stain on my tongue. Why should anything be mine if nothing was hers?

I walked back to steal his keys, reclaim my clothes, leave him aching and alone in the woods. But he was waist deep in the pool with her. Aurelia wrapped her dead arms around him, tilted his head up and drank his lips. Stupid boy, he couldn’t tell us apart, didn’t recognize that her hunger was not mine. He had already undressed me, mistook my wind-chapped skin for her grave-cold embrace. My sister locked eyes with me over his shoulder. She waited, as if asking, Please. Only a taste? Then she dragged him down into that glassy abyss.

       I ran for them, falling to my knees on the sharp stones, plunging my hands into the murky black. Already, constellations of leaf-fall drifted to cover him. Already, night birds in their hollows sang for carrion. The boy reached for me, screams frothing the water. Now he knew what held him so tight, and I laughed with all my teeth to see the recognition on his face.

       Please, Aurelia said, so sorry, so hungry, so desperate and alone.

       People were right. I had failed her, but not in the way they thought. How wrong I had been to turn my face from her for years. To drink up sugar and sun and sweat while she lay here empty and cold.

       I reached past the boy’s pleading fingers and put my hands on his face. I helped hold him under, my sister’s hands atop mine. We were like one thing again, and finally—oh, finally—I felt full.

       “Tell me what you want,” I told her.

       Beyond the trees, the glistening, ripe world waited. I would carry all of it to her mouth.

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the upcoming story collection Vulture Gold, the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and has been awarded the Calvino Prize. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and elsewhere. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Tampa. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of South Florida.