Price of Genius

She could never live up to his talent, her parents loved him better... But he harbours a deadly secret

My fingers brushed the rough porcelain fur with undisguised tenderness, my vision blurring with salt tears. The statuette’s shoulders were thrown back, the delicate muzzle pointed in a perfect “O” as the wolf perpetually howled at an invisible moon. But he was gone. Gone forever.

He was my brother. My twin. My best friend. My closest confidante. And the most talented sculptor I knew. When we were younger, as the rest of our class mixed the play-doh into disgusting grey globs and pretended like they had moustaches or beards, Jasper was moulding exquisite castles, complete with knights, princesses, dragons… We were five.

As we grew, Jasper’s talent grew, but it also became frighteningly apparent to everyone that something was wrong with him. His hands shook when not kept busy. His skin went from pale to almost deathly white. By the time we were eight, he needed glasses. Thick ones. Taunts came from all sides. Children spiteful of his talent would steal his glasses and throw them into the raspberry brambles and shout, “Hey four-eyes! Where’re your specs, four-eyes? How many fingers am I holding up, bat-boy?” I spent hours in the brambles, finding his glasses, hiding them from the mobs.

By the time my mother would pick us up, my stockings were torn and stained and my dress ripped. She would eye me with disapproval and point out Jasper, immaculate as always. “Really, Olivia,” she would say primly, peering at me over her own glasses. “Why can’t you take a leaf out of Jasper’s book? You look as if you’ve been rolling in a berry bramble!” We couldn’t tell her what was happening. She would only go to the administration and the problem would get worse.

We learned how to fend for ourselves. All we really needed was each other. I was Jasper’s eyes when he was blind. He was my conscience when the taunts got to me. We were complete opposites, and yet together, we were complete. I was violent. He was docile. Anything I didn’t know the answer to, Jasper had my back. We completed each other.

In our Junior year, he collapsed in front of the kiln my parents had installed for him in the old garage and was rushed to the hospital. Finally, my parents were forced to admit there was something wrong with their precious, perfect child. He had a slight lump on his brain. It was benign, thankfully, but the damage was done. The medications the doctors insisted upon reduced him to a nearly constant infirm state.

I can never forget the look on my mother’s face as she turned to me and said, “Why wasn’t it you?” It’s a crushing moment, when you realize that not only does your mother prefer your sibling, but that her preference to him is at the cost of her love for you.

We had two choices at that point. The doctors could try to perform a surgery and remove the lump or he could live with it. And die young. My parents and I were all for the surgery, expense be damned. It would cost me my college fund, but it would be worth it to keep Jasper with me. Jasper saw it differently; he’d always known he was different, this diagnosis just explained to him why.

We sat in my room that night and I cried. For the first time in years, I buried my face in his too thin shoulder and sobbed. His clay-encrusted fingers stroked my hair softly, telling me that even if he died, he would be with me. “How can a seventeen year old be so open to death?” I sobbed into his shirt.

His response will be with me until I die: “Because I am happy. I have everything I want, ‘Liv… I have my work and I have my sister. What more do I need? Getting older won’t give me more. It will just rip everything away. You will go off, meet someone, marry him… You won’t need me anymore. My eyesight will go further and I won’t be able to admire the work I do. Age isn’t a gift for me. Age is a curse.”

I could never live up to the example of my selfless twin brother. He sculpted until he was physically too weak to wrap his hands around the clay. For the next five years, he bobbed in and out of the hospital, his condition worsening daily until he was finally deemed too frail to live unassisted and was moved permanently into a medical facility.

On the eve of our twenty-first birthday, his nurse called me into his hospital room. I could hardly stand seeing him so weak with tubes in his nose and needles in his veins keeping him hydrated. Tears sprang into my eyes. He reached out to me, his skin so translucent, if you concentrated enough, you could almost see his fine bone structure. I took his hand, feeling the cool, papery skin in my own too-warm grasp.

I managed a laugh through my tears. “You still have clay under your fingernails.”

He smiled at me and rasped, “We’ll be twenty-one tomorrow. Most kids would be out partying.”
 

“We were never ‘most kids,’ Jasper.”

He laughed, a truly painful sound. It was as if he had swallowed a bag of sawdust and was trying to breathe through it. It quickly turned to a wheezing cough and he lay back. “I have something for you. Open it… later. After.”

My heart breaking, I nodded and took the box from the waiting nurse. It was strangely heavy and I placed it under my chair. Jasper’s eyes closed. His lips barely moved as he murmured, “I love you, Olivia.” He fell still, but for the halting rise and fall of his chest.

I found myself counting seconds, pacing my own breathing with his. 5 seconds, breath. 7. Breath. 10. Breath. 15. Breath. 24. Breath. I waited. I waited and willed the next breath to come as the giant digital clock above me blinked 12:01. I could hold my breath no longer. “We’re 21, Jas… Jas?” He didn’t respond, his hand limp in my grasp.

“Time of death. 12:01.”

I felt the first sob tear up through my chest as I clutched his hand, rocking back and forth. The door ricocheted off the wall as my mother burst in, screaming. “No! Nonononononoooo!!!” Her wail seemed strangely distant to me as part of my heart was ripped from my chest. That night was the last time I spoke to my mother for almost ten years, though she never forgave me for surviving when her favourite child did not.

Later, I couldn’t stand looking at the box he had given me as a final gift. It only reminded me that he was gone. It was almost a year later that I finally took it out and slit the tape holding it closed with a deft fingernail. I lifted out the most exquisite statuette of a wolf I had ever seen. He had spared no expense in the creation, adding the perfect varnish, the perfect markings. Jasper had embodied his own spirit in the creature I best related to with the endless detail of the jaw and face, even adding the thick eyelashes I had always admired to the closed eyes.

In the end, he was right. I did meet someone, and I did marry him. I even had a child with him. I named him Jasper. Jasper Clay. But even now, more than thirty years after Jasper’s death, nothing has filled that part of me that died with him. The wolf sits in a place of honour in my house and I can hear Jasper’s voice in my ear. “I’m never very far from you, Olivia. I will always be watching out for my sister who was always braver than I could have ever been.”  

Author's Note

Please tell me what you think and how I can improve it- It was a narrative for my English class, and had to be short

Reviews

[Raef C. Boylan]

Hey, nice work. A complete short story.
It's always hard when one kid is liked more than the other, but it must be even harder if they're twins because they'd be so similar, DNA-wise, and yet treated so differently.
This didn't move me to tears, but it was sad to witness the break of such a close bond.
Good write. Thanks for sharing it.

p.s.
"It was as if [one though] he had swallowed a bag" [didn't understand the wording of this bit]