TWINS

Sometime today, at the BYU Writer's for Young Readers Conference, these words came to me:

"She is as thin as dental floss."

Where that came from, I don't know. But, when you are around creative people odd things happen. You start to look at things in a different way. I love this conference. I love Claudia Mills. I love my class mates--boy, can they write. I will be sad when this conference is over for another year.

I had a two minute window of unfrantic busyness today, I was probably waiting for a lecture to begin so this is what I wrote:


She was thin, dental floss thin. Some of her internal organs were missing. At night she is hooked up to machines that softly beep in the darkness as they process the food that has been waiting in her patient stomach. In the morning she stretches, unhooks from the friendly beepers and runs her hands down her flat stomach. She smiles.

Her twin has all her organs and her sisters too. Two livers. Four kidneys. 56 feet of intestines. The intestines are usually full as her body squeezes every bit of nutrition from every mouthful of food. If the planet depended on her "fertilizer" to jump-start the world's vegetables we would all be dead within months.

Twins. So alike and yet so different. One has a great abundance of all the things that make the human body run properly and yet it's her sister who wears a size zero. The organ-deprived sister shops three days a week and the other four she accepts dates from lovely men.

The organ-rich sister? She writes.