LITMIR.BIZ

      I find the flask the day the twins are born, so I think of these things as joined, as the twins are joined.

      The flask is in the desk, though it is hidden at first, just as the desk itself is hidden, shrouded inside the word bureau – which is what my gran calls this lump of furniture that arrives in my room. I hate the desk. I hate the bureau. It is a solid, everyday reminder that my aunt Edie is dead.

      Aunt Edie isn’t – wasn’t – my real aunt, she was my great-aunt, so of course she must have been old.

      “Ancient,” says my friend Zoe. “Over sixty.”

      Old and small and wrinkled, with skin as dry as paper.

      No.

      Her bright blue eyes gone milky with age.

      No. No!

      My aunt Edie blazed.

      At the bottom of her garden there was a rockery in which she grew those tiny flowers that keep themselves closed up tight, refusing to unfurl until the sun comes out. They could be closed up for hours, for days, and then suddenly burst into life, showing their dark little hearts and their delicate white petals with the vivid pink tips. That’s what I sometimes thought about Aunt Edie and me. That I was the plant all curled up and she was the blazing sun. That she, and only she, could open up my secret heart.

      A week after her death, I find myself standing by that rockery staring at the bare earth.

      “Looking for the mesembryanthemums?” says Si. Si’s my stepfather and he’s good with long words.

      I say nothing.

      “They’re annuals, those flowers, the ones you used to like. Don’t think she had the chance to plant any this year.”

      I say nothing.

      “What’re you thinking, Jess?”

      Si is good with questions. He’s good with answers. He’s good at talking. He’s been talking in my life since I was two.

      “About the music,” I say.

      I’m thinking about Aunt Edie and the piano in her drawing room. About how her tiny hands used to fly over the keys and the room fill with the sound of her music and her laughter. I’m thinking about the very first time she lifted me on to the stool to sit beside her as she played. I must have been about three years old. There was no music on the stand in front of her, she played, as she always did, from memory, or she just made stuff up. But I didn’t know that then. I thought the music was in her hands. I thought music flowed out of people’s fingers.

      “Come on, Jess, your turn now!”

      And that very first day, she put my hands next to hers. My hands on the keys of the piano, the keys to a new universe. And, of course, I can’t have made a tune, I must have crashed and banged, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember that she could make my fingers flow with music too. I remember my dark little heart opening out.

      After that I couldn’t climb on to that stool fast enough. Every time I went to her house, I would pull her to the piano and she would lift me, laughing. When I sat on that stool nothing else in the world existed. Just me and Edie and the music. Time passed and my legs got longer. I didn’t need to be lifted on to the stool. And still we played. Hidden little me – unfurling.

      “Where

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