Flick the Switch - Chapter 1

Flick the Switch - Chapter 1

Sometimes when their mother went to pick them up from dance class, she would find them alone in the studio after practice was over, dancing side-by-side in the mirror. They would have grins on their faces and the room would echo with laughs and squeals.

Sometimes when she went into their room, she would find the G.I. Joes on Jane's bed and the Barbies on Keith's. Sometimes she would find the toys together in between the beds on the floor with their clothes swapped.

Sometimes when she went into the backyard, she would find Jane and Keith in the plastic playhouse, cooking up fake meals and talking about their days at their pretend places of work. Sometimes she would find them on the swings together. One swinging forward, one swinging backward, giggling as they passed each other.

Sometimes when she made her way into the living room, she would find them asleep on the old sectional sofa, sprawled out perpendicular to each other with their heads touching at the center in a dirty blonde mess of tangles.

She would smile at all of these little things she came across and the twins loved seeing their mother smile.

After they hit six years of age, they never saw that smile again.

Their sixth birthday arrived and that night they heard their mother and father fighting in the laundry room. They heard yelling, they heard words they weren't supposed to hear, they heard noises they didn't recognize. Crunches. Thumps. Smashes.

This continued for weeks. Their mother tried to smile for them like she used to, but it was different. It was broken.

She died in a car accident three months later.

Jane and Keith were left with their father, who spiraled deeper into what he and his mother had been fighting about before she died. His temper. Specifically when he drank.

They both got jobs when they turned sixteen. They wanted to be out of the house and away from their father, who sat at home most of the day with a beer in his hand. He was getting workers' comp for an accident that happened at his job. He had been milking that for months. Jane worked as a waitress at a restaurant inside a filthy roller skating rink and Keith had a job as a cashier at a low-end department store on the far side of town.

Keith returned home after the closing shift at the store one particular night. It was well past midnight and he found his father passed out on the couch, the stench of alcohol drifting around the living room - it wasn't surprising. What was though, was the fact that the bathroom light was on. His sister was usually home and in bed by now. Not tonight, apparently.

The door was cracked and Keith hesitated only briefly before shifting towards the yellow light and shutting one eye, peeking through the open sliver with the other.

He saw his sister standing at the mirror, applying eyeshadow. She had never been one to wear makeup, so it took him by surprise. He made his way into the bathroom though, and stood behind her. She knew he was there and she shook her head at her reflection.

"I look like... a raccoon."

Keith chuckled and met her eyes in the mirror. "Hey, at least it's a pretty raccoon."

They stood there for a little over half an hour, Keith helping Jane figure out what looked good on her. In turn, she began randomly putting makeup on him while Keith joked about how fabulous he looked in the mirror. He had obviously never worn makeup either.

The twins kept their voices down and their chuckles quiet, but that didn't stop their father from shoving the bathroom door open as he was making his routine drunken stumble from the couch into his bedroom. It usually happened when he had to go to the bathroom.

"What is this shit?"

The grins on both twins' faces quickly vanished as they looked towards the door, the haze of booze that their father always swam in hitting their noses almost instantly. Neither had time to respond before the man reached out and grabbed Keith's arm, pulling him towards the door. Jane could see their father's fingers digging into Keith's upper arm, the skin quickly turning red under the calloused fingertips. "Makeup, boy? Is their something you aren't telling me?" He shook his son by the arm and dragged him from the bathroom, stopping in the hall momentarily before pushing his face back into the doorframe to sneer at his daughter.

"And take that shit off your face, Jane, right now. You look like a whore."

He slammed the bathroom door shut, the noise punctuating his order, and left Jane in the bathroom, backed up against the wall, shutting her eyes against the sudden silence. She knew it wouldn't last though, and only a few heartbeats later she heard muffled yelling. She recognized her father's gruff, angry ranting and her brother's shrill responses, which were suddenly cut off by a noise. Jane couldn't make out what it was through the walls, as thin as they were, but the noise had suddenly thrown her world into slow motion. She moved towards the door of the bathroom and threw it open, emerging in the hallway only to see her father vanish into his bedroom and violently shove his door shut. The walls and all the framed photos of the once pleasant past shuddered then settled, leaving the house in silence once more.

Jane made her way down the hall to the last door on the left, her brother's room, and slipped inside.

"Keith?"

He was seated on the floor at the foot of his bed, his head in his arms and his knees pulled up towards his chest.

"Keith..." She quickly crossed the room and fell to her knees next to him, planting her hands on his arms.

"Are you okay?" He asked, his voice stifled by the ball he had almost curled into.

"Forget me, are you okay? What happened? What was that noise?"

He slowly lifted his head up to look at his sister, revealing a swollen eye and a split in the skin across his right cheek where blood had started to pool.

"Oh... oh no. No."

"Janey, it's fine. I'm fine."

"No." She stood up and crept down the hall back to the bathroom where she grabbed a handtowel, which she quickly ran under the faucet for a few moments before returning and handing it to her brother. "Until I can find the first aid kit. I know we have one around here somewhere." Jane turned to head back out of his room when he stopped her.

"Janey." Her silhouette was frozen in his doorway, the light from the living room and the dim glow from the streetlights outside allowing him to see the messy lopsided bun her long hair was pulled into, and the fact that her whole body was shaking. It had to be either fear or rage. Perhaps both. With his sister, those emotions occasionally came hand in hand. "Come back here. I'm fine."

Her head turned, her chin meeting her shoulder as she peered at him with a pair of light eyes. She could still see remnants of the makeup on his face. She hadn't bothered to wash hers off yet either.

Padding back across the worn carpet, she seated herself on his bed, her feet dangling off of the edge next to his right temple. She stared out the window of his bedroom, her mind wandering off to places they could both be at that moment. She knew she would gladly settle for anywhere away from that town, away from their father. A mental image of them in the city and living it up was interrupted by a bump against her foot. When she looked down to the end of the bed, she noticed Keith had rested his head against her ankles.

Jane reached forward, gently ran her fingers through his hair and wished their mother was still with them.