Skitzy says she has a pickle for a penis and I laugh even before she shows me, because that’s how funny she is. We’re in an old tent we put up in the woods so we’d have a place to get high after school. Skitzy zips her jeans down and whips out a pickle spear, the kind they give you with your hamburgers at Monty’s, and she holds one end tight against her crotch and flops it up and down. She says it’s a gift from her womb-bro, the one she ate when he was just the size of a gherkin. Skitzy was supposed to be a twin, she told me back in kindergarten, but it got a little too tight in her mom’s belly, so she ate her brother. That’s why her dad left as soon as she got teeth, she said. He was afraid she’d eat him too. It gave me nightmares at the time, but now I think it’s funny.

The tent is too small to stand up in, and when it starts to rain, we leave the flap open and tuck into the back, pulling our legs up to our chests. It’s time for me to go home, but I don’t want to leave because laughing with Skitzy is always the best part of my day. She doesn’t care about homework or SAT prep or having smooth skin or the right jeans or whether she’s straight or gay or bi or the thousand ways she could disappoint her parents or what anyone thinks about what she does. And she just goes all-in in a way I never could, like in third grade when she shaved the whole left half of her head, or in fifth grade when she faked a limp for the entire year, or even last year, halfway through eighth grade, when she literally ran away to join a circus. The police had to bring her home and I wasn’t allowed to see her for almost six months. My parents said she wasn’t good for me, for my future.

Skitzy says the good thing about eating your brother in utero is that no one ever expects more from you, you’ve already done the worst thing you can do. Once, when we were really high, she said her mom’s never forgiven her for killing her favorite kid. And then she started laughing.

The rain lets up a bit. Skitzy chomps the pickle and grins. She tosses the other half out of the tent flap. Tastes like dickle, she says, and then, go on, get the fuck out of here before I eat you. I scootch out and tell her I’ll see her tomorrow. If you’re lucky, she says, which is what she always says.

I Googled the twin thing once, and turns out it’s pretty common. There’s not enough nutrients or something for two babies, so the stronger one absorbs the weaker one. I wonder if the weaker one ever fights it, or if they just know right from the get-go that there’s a benefit to being absorbed, to being a part of someone that strong, that hungry, that sure it’s all going to be worth it.

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Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).