In their house, love was never shared, but parceled out, and Lirian always received the lion’s share.
Elen felt like a windfallen apple, rotting while he ripened in their sun.
She had always noticed the way their parents’ faces softened around him, how easily his name came to their lips, how quickly their hands reached for him.
This daily spectacle nurtured a quiet, corrosive resentment inside her.
Deep down, before she could stop herself, the thought slipped in: if he had never been born, all of it might finally have been hers.
It had not started with blood.
It started with a toy—a small wooden horse Lirian carried everywhere when they were children, its painted mane worn smooth by his fingers.
One afternoon, after their mother had dismissed yet another of Elen's drawings with a distracted nod before lavishing praise on Lirian's clumsy crayon scrawl, Elen slipped into his room, took the horse, and snapped its legs off one by one.
She buried the pieces at the bottom of the trash.
When he found it, he cried for hours.
She felt nothing but a sharp, fleeting satisfaction—and then nothing at all.
That satisfaction returned when she began pushing him, small shoves in the hallway that looked like accidents.
In private, she would hit him—open palms against his shoulder, his arm, once across the face when he had taken the last of their mother's attention.
The violence was a language only they spoke, whispered with fists and fingerprints.
Their parents found out.
Elen was punished harshly—shouted at, sent to her room without dinner, her own small possessions confiscated.
But when Lirian, in retaliation, hit her back—once pushing her so hard she stumbled into a bookshelf, another time slapping her across the mouth in full view of their parents—they coddled him, told him he was just defending himself, and ignored the issue entirely.
Once he even struck her with a shoe in the living room while their mother watched; she simply turned away, asking Lirian if he was hungry.
The bruises faded. The truth did not.
Now that they were teenagers, she fifteen and he fourteen, Lirian never really saw Elen.
His gaze slid over her as casually as it might a familiar piece of furniture, quickly shifting to his mother with a conspiratorial smile, or to his father, eager for another anecdote.
With his sister, even a muttered "Pass the salt" fell flat, mechanical, and addressed to no one.
He didn't shut her out on purpose. He simply never thought of her.
She existed somewhere in the background, never quite in his orbit.
There was only one time he showed her even the simplest sliver of kindness: when he gave her the chocolates he'd received from a girl on Valentine's Day.
Not out of generosity, but simply because he didn't like chocolate, and throwing them away felt wasteful.
Their parents paid for Lirian to attend a private school, justifying the expense by claiming he had better grades and a brighter future.
Elen, on the other hand, was sent to a public high school.
She knew it wasn't really about grades.
It was about the way her brother carried himself: charismatic and confident, the kind of boy teachers and relatives delighted in raving about.
Elen was more withdrawn, her silence misinterpreted as coldness, and that seemed to make her less deserving in their eyes.
Even her academic success was dismissed.
If Lirian earned good grades, praise flowed with extra pocket money each week.
If Elen earned those same grades, her parents would wave it off, saying: "Well, it's about time! Let's just see how long that lasts."
Praise was something she had to earn twice, and even then, it came laced with disbelief.
This long erosion of her existence in favor of Lirian transformed her.
The fatal idea took root the very evening her mother mistook her for her brother while she wore a baggy hoodie.
"Honey, don't stay up too late, you'll need your strength tomorrow," her mother had cooed, her voice thick with a tenderness Elen had never known.
Separated by only a year, they shared the same jawline, the same dark-flecked hazel eyes, the same way their noses flared when they were annoyed.
The hood swallowed the only real difference between them—her soft chestnut hair against his golden blond.
This planted a twisted seed: if she could not earn their love as a daughter, what if she stole it as their son?
At first, the idea was nothing but a blurry fantasy, spreading like black mold in the dank crevices of her mind.
Then, in the sterile quiet of the school library, she found it: a thriller about a twin who killed his brother to steal his identity.
The coincidence was almost ridiculous.
Elen's eyes grew wide as they scanned page after page of the old book. They glinted. Not with horror or shock, but with hunger.
"Is it really that easy?" she mumbled.
As she read, the fiction ceased to be mere entertainment. It became a revelation. Someone, somewhere, had imagined it was possible.
The fantasy, once formless, now had a scaffold.
The book gave her a methodology. Not instructions—she was not foolish enough to follow a plot—but a framework.
She learned the importance of details, the necessity of patience, the chilling clarity of a mind that does not flinch.
It was in those pages that the vague desire to be him crystallized into a plan to replace him.
But a plan needed testing. Could she even kill?
She started with a wild rabbit caught in the garden.
It was too easy. But no one cares about a wild animal.
A week later, Mrs. Gable’s tabby cat, Mittens, went missing.
The neighborhood whispered and put up posters, but no one suspected the quiet girl who watched them from her window, feeling only the cold satisfaction of a successful test.
She was getting away with it.
She shadowed Lirian obsessively, filling notebooks with his routines and his slang.
She spent weeks practicing the bright, energetic cadence of his speech, forcing her vocal cords into a register that made her throat ache, determined to bury Elen’s flat silence forever.
She burned the notebooks page by page in a metal bin behind the shed, watching the evidence curl into ash.
The night she chose was perfect: her parents, enjoying a rare romantic evening out, had left the siblings alone in the quiet house.
Elen stood in the kitchen, the scent of garlic and basil thickening the air. She was preparing a pot of pasta with a rich red sauce—a childhood staple that Lirian loved.
Pine nut oil was easy to acquire. She bought it at a health food store across town, paying in cash.
She knew Lirian was deathly allergic to pine nuts. Their mother had spent years drilling the warning into everyone, her voice always pitched with performative alarm: a single speck could close his throat in minutes.
Lirian wandered in, his eyes fixed on his phone. He reached for a glass of water, ignoring her presence entirely.
"You could say something," Elen spat.
He barely glanced at her, his voice mechanical. "Like what?"
The dismissal was so complete, so effortless, that something inside her snapped.
This was the moment.
She turned back to the stove.
The red sauce simmered on the stove, bubbling in thick, crimson globs. Elen reached for the small bottle of pine nut oil. She poured a generous amount into the sauce, stirring it in slowly. The oil was clear, blending seamlessly into the red depths, invisible but potent.
"Dinner's ready," she said, her voice devoid of emotion.
They ate in separate rooms, as was their custom. Elen sat on her bed, listening. She heard the rhythmic scrape of his fork against the porcelain. Then, the silence stretched.
The first cough came ten minutes later.
It was a wet, hacking sound. Then came the wheezing—a high, whistling gasp for air, thin as a torn accordion.
She had read about anaphylaxis in the school library, tracing the body's betrayal with academic curiosity: histamine release, bronchoconstriction, the throat sealing itself shut. The body, in essence, drowning itself.
Elen stood in the hallway, her hand hovering over the phone. She could call an ambulance. She could still save him.
But all she could see was her father's disapproving frown, her mother's inevitable shriek: You careless, hateful girl. You knew about his allergy.
If he lived, she would be the villain. They would twist it into proof of everything they already believed about her. And if he died… she could be him.
The sounds from his room grew quieter. A crash echoed—a chair tipping over, or a body hitting the floor. Then, absolute silence. The house settled around her like held breath.
Elen pushed the door open. Lirian lay on the rug, his face swollen, his lips tinged a bruised, hypoxic blue. His eyes were wide, fixed on a ceiling he could no longer see. He was already gone.
A glacial chill seeped into her bones. It wasn't regret; it was the heavy, absolute weight of finality. The bridge behind her had burned to ash.
"You're not needed anymore," she whispered.
The body was heavier than she anticipated. He weighed nearly seventy kilos of dead weight.
Panic gave her a frantic, desperate strength. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him, inch by agonizing inch, toward the old storage space under the stairs.
His heels thumped against the carpeted steps—thud, thud, thud—a sound that vibrated in her teeth.
Sweat stung her eyes as she heaved him into the darkness.
In the basement's stale chemical haze, she wrapped him in a thick plastic tarp.
She sealed every seam with duct tape, the loud shrrrip of the adhesive echoing in the cramped space.
She found an old storage chest, heavy with dust and forgotten memories.
A faded photo, a child's crumpled ribbon—she cleared them out, folded the sealed bundle inside, and pressed the lid closed until it clicked, quiet and absolute.
Then, the transformation.
She cut and bleached her hair in the bathroom mirror's harsh glare, the stench of peroxide sharp in her nostrils.
She changed into his clothes, which hung loose and reeked of his deodorant.
To earn the resemblance, she took a small, sterile needle from the sewing kit and pierced her left earlobe just as his was, a sharp sting she met with a gasp, a single bead of blood she wiped away.
The new silver stud was cold against her skin.
She mastered once more the bright cadence of his voice, tilting her head just so until the reflection almost believed it.
Then she gathered Elen's belongings—her myopia glasses, a few pieces of clothing, some books, her favorite bag, her toothbrush still damp with floral paste, her hairbrush tangled with a single auburn strand—and threw them into a dumpster far from the house, the lid clanging shut like a distant gunshot.
On her bed, she left a brief, ambiguous farewell, a perfect imitation of the despondent teenager her parents had always believed her to be:
“I’m sorry. I’m leaving. Don’t look for me.”
She wasn't sorry.
The thought of her parents reading those words—the final, tidy performance of the "unworthy daughter"—brought a thin smile to her lips.
She turned off the light in Elen’s room and walked, barefoot, into her brother’s.
The bed was still warm.
She lay down exactly where he had been, feeling the pillow sink beneath her weight. The faint ridge of his shape seemed to cradle her, a phantom welcoming her home.
As she pulled the covers up to her chin, she listened to the house settling into its unnatural hush. She closed her eyes and wondered, just once, if they would ever think to look inside the chest.
In their house, love was never shared, but parceled out, and Lirian always received the lion’s share. Elen felt like a windfallen apple, rotting while he ripened in their sun.
She had always noticed the way their parents’ faces softened around him, how easily his name came to their lips, how quickly their hands reached for him.
This daily spectacle nurtured a quiet, corrosive resentment inside her. Deep down, before she could stop herself, the thought slipped in: if he had never been born, all of it might finally have been hers.
It had not started with blood. It started with a toy—a small wooden horse Lirian carried everywhere when they were children, its painted mane worn smooth by his fingers.
One afternoon, after their mother had dismissed yet another of Elen's drawings with a distracted nod before lavishing praise on Lirian's clumsy crayon scrawl, Elen slipped into his room, took the horse, and snapped its legs off one by one.
She buried the pieces at the bottom of the trash.
When he found it, he cried for hours.
She felt nothing but a sharp, fleeting satisfaction—and then nothing at all.
That satisfaction returned when she began pushing him, small shoves in the hallway that looked like accidents.
In private, she would hit him—open palms against his shoulder, his arm, once across the face when he had taken the last of their mother's attention.
The violence was a language only they spoke, whispered with fists and fingerprints.
Their parents found out.
Elen was punished harshly—shouted at, sent to her room without dinner, her own small possessions confiscated.
But when Lirian, in retaliation, hit her back—once pushing her so hard she stumbled into a bookshelf, another time slapping her across the mouth in full view of their parents—they coddled him, told him he was just defending himself, and ignored the issue entirely.
Once he even struck her with a shoe in the living room while their mother watched; she simply turned away, asking Lirian if he was hungry.
The bruises faded. The truth did not.
Now that they were teenagers, she fifteen and he fourteen, Lirian never really saw Elen.
His gaze slid over her as casually as it might a familiar piece of furniture, quickly shifting to his mother with a conspiratorial smile, or to his father, eager for another anecdote.
With his sister, even a muttered "Pass the salt" fell flat, mechanical, and addressed to no one. He didn't shut her out on purpose. He simply never thought of her.
She existed somewhere in the background, never quite in his orbit.
There was only one time he showed her even the simplest sliver of kindness: when he gave her the chocolates he'd received from a girl on Valentine's Day. Not out of generosity, but simply because he didn't like chocolate, and throwing them away felt wasteful.
Their parents paid for Lirian to attend a private school, justifying the expense by claiming he had better grades and a brighter future.
Elen, on the other hand, was sent to a public high school. She knew it wasn't really about grades. It was about the way her brother carried himself: charismatic and confident, the kind of boy teachers and relatives delighted in raving about.
Elen was more withdrawn, her silence misinterpreted as coldness, and that seemed to make her less deserving in their eyes. Even her academic success was dismissed.
If Lirian earned good grades, praise flowed with extra pocket money each week. If Elen earned those same grades, her parents would wave it off, saying: "Well, it's about time! Let's just see how long that lasts."
Praise was something she had to earn twice, and even then, it came laced with disbelief.
The night everything ended, their parents were enjoying a rare romantic evening out, leaving the siblings alone in the quiet house. Elen was in the kitchen, cooking the dish she always made for herself when she wanted comfort: a creamy pasta with pine nuts. She knew Lirian was deathly allergic to them — their mother had drilled the warning into everyone for years.
She wasn't thinking about that. She was thinking about the afternoon, about their father cutting her off mid-sentence to ask Lirian about his day, about the way no one had even looked at her report card still sitting on the counter. The anger was a hot, pulsing thing in her chest.
Lirian wandered in, ignoring her as always, and reached for a glass. He said nothing. The silence was unbearable.
"You could say something," she spat.
He barely glanced at her. "Like what?"
The dismissal was so complete, so effortless, that something inside her snapped. Without fully deciding to, she turned back to the pan, scooped a spoonful of the pesto, and stirred it into the plain tomato sauce simmering on the back burner — the sauce she had made for him, because their mother always insisted she cook him something separate.
She told herself she was just being careless. She wasn't going to do anything. He probably wouldn't even eat it.
But he did eat it. They ate in separate rooms, as always. She heard his fork scraping the plate.
The first cough came ten minutes later. Then the wheezing. She sat on her bed, heart hammering, waiting for him to call for her, for help, for anything. He didn't. Maybe he couldn't. She heard a crash — a chair, or a body.
Elen stood in the hallway, her hand hovering over the phone. She could call an ambulance. She could still save him. But all she could see was her father's disapproving frown, her mother's inevitable shriek: "What did you do? You knew about his allergy, you careless, hateful girl."
If he lived, she would be punished — not for murder, but for neglect. They would twist it into proof of everything they already believed about her. And if he died...
The minutes stretched. The sounds from his room grew quieter, then stopped.
She didn't call. She just stood there, frozen, until the silence was absolute. When she finally walked to his door and pushed it open, his face was swollen, his lips tinged blue. He was already gone.
A glacial chill began to seep into her bones, settling deep beneath her skin. It wasn't the cold of regret, but the heavy, absolute weight of finality. She knew then that the bridge behind her had burned to ash; there was no turning back.
Then came the terror — not for him, but for herself. The body. She had not prepared for this. He must have weighed at least sixty-five, seventy kilos. How was she supposed to move him? Her mind raced, spiraling: if she left him here, she was finished. If she called now, it was too late — they would ask why she waited. She was trapped.
Panic gave her a frantic, desperate strength. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him, inch by agonizing inch, down to the old storage space under the stairs, where nobody ever went. His heels thumped against the steps, a sound she would never forget. Sweat stung her eyes; she nearly fell twice.
There, chest heaving, she wrapped him tightly in a thick plastic tarp scavenged from the garage, folding every edge over itself and sealing every seam with layer after layer of duct tape until it formed a shroud. She didn't know if it would hold the smell. She knew nothing about bodies, only what she had glimpsed in movies.
She turned finally to the chest, heavy with dust and memories, just large enough for what she was about to do. She cleared it out, then braced herself. Getting him inside was a brutal, clumsy struggle — his dead weight uncooperative, her muscles screaming. When the lid finally clicked shut, it was quiet and absolute, as though sealing a secret rather than a corpse.
She leaned against the chest, shaking, her mind already scrambling to the next impossible task: where would she bury him? How would she dig the hole? What if someone saw? The questions circled like vultures, each one more terrifying than the last.
But there was no time. She had to move. She had to become him.
Then she gathered Elen's belongings, a few pieces of clothing, some books, her favorite bag, her toothbrush, her hairbrush — everything that marked her daily life, and threw them into a dumpster far from the house.
She disguised herself as Lirian—cutting her hair, bleaching it with the same dye her mother used to hide her gray, and finally stepping into his clothes.
On her bed she left a brief, ambiguous farewell, a perfect imitation of the despondent teenager her parents had always believed her to be:
“I’m sorry. I'm leaving. Don't look for me.”
She turned off the light in Elen’s room and walked, barefoot, into her brother’s.
The bed was still warm. She lay down exactly where he had been, feeling the pillow sink to her weight, after years of accommodating a head that would never sleep there again.
She pulled the covers up to her chin, and let the darkness settle over her new name.
In their house, love was never shared, but parceled out, and Lirian always received the lion’s share.
Elen felt like a windfallen apple, rotting while he ripened in their sun.
She had always noticed the way their parents’ faces softened around him, how easily his name came to their lips, how quickly their hands reached for him.
This daily spectacle nurtured a quiet, corrosive resentment inside her.
Deep down, before she could stop herself, the thought slipped in: if he had never been born, all of it might finally have been hers.
It had not started with blood.
It started with a toy—a small wooden horse Lirian carried everywhere when they were children, its painted mane worn smooth by his fingers.
One afternoon, after their mother had dismissed yet another of Elen's drawings with a distracted nod before lavishing praise on Lirian's clumsy crayon scrawl, Elen slipped into his room, took the horse, and snapped its legs off one by one.
She buried the pieces at the bottom of the trash.
When he found it, he cried for hours.
She felt nothing but a sharp, fleeting satisfaction—and then nothing at all.
That satisfaction returned when she began pushing him, small shoves in the hallway that looked like accidents.
In private, she would hit him—open palms against his shoulder, his arm, once across the face when he had taken the last of their mother's attention.
The violence was a language only they spoke, whispered with fists and fingerprints.
Their parents found out.
Elen was punished harshly—shouted at, sent to her room without dinner, her own small possessions confiscated.
But when Lirian, in retaliation, hit her back—once pushing her so hard she stumbled into a bookshelf, another time slapping her across the mouth in full view of their parents—they coddled him, told him he was just defending himself, and ignored the issue entirely.
Once he even struck her with a shoe in the living room while their mother watched; she simply turned away, asking Lirian if he was hungry.
The bruises faded. The truth did not.
Now that they were teenagers, she fifteen and he fourteen, Lirian never really saw Elen.
His gaze slid over her as casually as it might a familiar piece of furniture, quickly shifting to his mother with a conspiratorial smile, or to his father, eager for another anecdote.
With his sister, even a muttered "Pass the salt" fell flat, mechanical, and addressed to no one.
He didn't shut her out on purpose. He simply never thought of her.
She existed somewhere in the background, never quite in his orbit.
There was only one time he showed her even the simplest sliver of kindness: when he gave her the chocolates he'd received from a girl on Valentine's Day.
Not out of generosity, but simply because he didn't like chocolate, and throwing them away felt wasteful.
Their parents paid for Lirian to attend a private school, justifying the expense by claiming he had better grades and a brighter future.
Elen, on the other hand, was sent to a public high school.
She knew it wasn't really about grades.
It was about the way her brother carried himself: charismatic and confident, the kind of boy teachers and relatives delighted in raving about.
Elen was more withdrawn, her silence misinterpreted as coldness, and that seemed to make her less deserving in their eyes.
Even her academic success was dismissed.
If Lirian earned good grades, praise flowed with extra pocket money each week.
If Elen earned those same grades, her parents would wave it off, saying: "Well, it's about time! Let's just see how long that lasts."
Praise was something she had to earn twice, and even then, it came laced with disbelief.
This long erosion of her existence in favor of Lirian transformed her.
The fatal idea took root the very evening her mother mistook her for her brother while she wore a baggy hoodie.
"Honey, don't stay up too late, you'll need your strength tomorrow," her mother had cooed, her voice thick with a tenderness Elen had never known.
Separated by only a year, they shared the same jawline, the same dark-flecked hazel eyes, the same way their noses flared when they were annoyed.
The hood swallowed the only real difference between them—her soft chestnut hair against his golden blond.
This planted a twisted seed: if she could not earn their love as a daughter, what if she stole it as their son?
At first, the idea was nothing but a blurry fantasy, spreading like black mold in the dank crevices of her mind.
Then, in the sterile quiet of the school library, she found it: a thriller about a twin who killed his brother to steal his identity.
The coincidence was almost ridiculous.
Elen's eyes grew wide as they scanned page after page of the old book. They glinted. Not with horror or shock, but with hunger.
"Is it really that easy?" she mumbled.
As she read, the fiction ceased to be mere entertainment. It became a revelation. Someone, somewhere, had imagined it was possible.
The fantasy, once formless, now had a scaffold.
The book gave her a methodology. Not instructions—she was not foolish enough to follow a plot—but a framework.
She learned the importance of details, the necessity of patience, the chilling clarity of a mind that does not flinch.
It was in those pages that the vague desire to be him crystallized into a plan to replace him.
But a plan needed testing. Could she even kill?
She started with a wild rabbit caught in the garden.
It was too easy. But no one cares about a wild animal.
A week later, Mrs. Gable’s tabby cat, Mittens, went missing.
The neighborhood whispered and put up posters, but no one suspected the quiet girl who watched them from her window, feeling only the cold satisfaction of a successful test.
She was getting away with it.
She shadowed Lirian obsessively, filling notebooks with his routines and his slang.
She spent weeks practicing the bright, energetic cadence of his speech, forcing her vocal cords into a register that made her throat ache, determined to bury Elen’s flat silence forever.
She burned the notebooks page by page in a metal bin behind the shed, watching the evidence curl into ash.
The night she chose was perfect: her parents, enjoying a rare romantic evening out, had left the siblings alone in the quiet house.
Elen stood in the kitchen, the scent of garlic and basil thickening the air. She was preparing a pot of pasta with a rich red sauce—a childhood staple that Lirian loved.
Pine nut oil was easy to acquire. She bought it at a health food store across town, paying in cash.
She knew Lirian was deathly allergic to pine nuts. Their mother had spent years drilling the warning into everyone, her voice always pitched with performative alarm: a single speck could close his throat in minutes.
Lirian wandered in, his eyes fixed on his phone. He reached for a glass of water, ignoring her presence entirely.
"You could say something," Elen spat.
He barely glanced at her, his voice mechanical. "Like what?"
The dismissal was so complete, so effortless, that something inside her snapped.
This was the moment.
She turned back to the stove.
The red sauce simmered on the stove, bubbling in thick, crimson globs. Elen reached for the small bottle of pine nut oil. She poured a generous amount into the sauce, stirring it in slowly. The oil was clear, blending seamlessly into the red depths, invisible but potent.
"Dinner's ready," she said, her voice devoid of emotion.
They ate in separate rooms, as was their custom. Elen sat on her bed, listening. She heard the rhythmic scrape of his fork against the porcelain. Then, the silence stretched.
The first cough came ten minutes later.
It was a wet, hacking sound. Then came the wheezing—a high, whistling gasp for air, thin as a torn accordion.
She had read about anaphylaxis in the school library, tracing the body's betrayal with academic curiosity: histamine release, bronchoconstriction, the throat sealing itself shut. The body, in essence, drowning itself.
Elen stood in the hallway, her hand hovering over the phone. She could call an ambulance. She could still save him. But all she could see was her father's disapproving frown, her mother's inevitable shriek: You careless, hateful girl. You knew about his allergy.
If he lived, she would be the villain. They would twist it into proof of everything they already believed about her. And if he died… she could be him.
The sounds from his room grew quieter. A crash echoed—a chair tipping over, or a body hitting the floor. Then, absolute silence. The house settled around her like held breath.
Elen pushed the door open. Lirian lay on the rug, his face swollen, his lips tinged a bruised, hypoxic blue. His eyes were wide, fixed on a ceiling he could no longer see. He was already gone.
A glacial chill seeped into her bones. It wasn't regret; it was the heavy, absolute weight of finality. The bridge behind her had burned to ash.
"You're not needed anymore," she whispered.
The body was heavier than she anticipated. He weighed nearly seventy kilos of dead weight.
Panic gave her a frantic, desperate strength.
She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him, inch by agonizing inch, toward the old storage space under the stairs. His heels thumped against the carpeted steps—thud, thud, thud—a sound that vibrated in her teeth.
Sweat stung her eyes as she heaved him into the darkness.
In the basement's stale chemical haze, she wrapped him in a thick plastic tarp.
She sealed every seam with duct tape, the loud shrrrip of the adhesive echoing in the cramped space.
She found an old storage chest, heavy with dust and forgotten memories.
A faded photo, a child's crumpled ribbon—she cleared them out, folded the sealed bundle inside, and pressed the lid closed until it clicked, quiet and absolute.
Then, the transformation.
She cut and bleached her hair in the bathroom mirror's harsh glare, the stench of peroxide sharp in her nostrils.
She changed into his clothes, which hung loose and reeked of his deodorant.
To earn the resemblance, she took a small, sterile needle from the sewing kit and pierced her left earlobe just as his was, a sharp sting she met with a gasp, a single bead of blood she wiped away.
The new silver stud was cold against her skin.
She mastered once more the bright cadence of his voice, tilting her head just so until the reflection almost believed it.
Then she gathered Elen's belongings—her myopia glasses, a few pieces of clothing, some books, her favorite bag, her toothbrush still damp with floral paste, her hairbrush tangled with a single auburn strand—and threw them into a dumpster far from the house, the lid clanging shut like a distant gunshot.
On her bed, she left a brief, ambiguous farewell, a perfect imitation of the despondent teenager her parents had always believed her to be:
“I’m sorry. I’m leaving. Don’t look for me.”
She wasn't sorry.
The thought of her parents reading those words—the final, tidy performance of the "unworthy daughter"—brought a thin smile to her lips.
She turned off the light in Elen’s room and walked, barefoot, into her brother’s.
The bed was still warm.
She lay down exactly where he had been, feeling the pillow sink beneath her weight. The faint ridge of his shape seemed to cradle her, a phantom welcoming her home.
As she pulled the covers up to her chin, she listened to the house settling into its unnatural hush. She closed her eyes and wondered, just once, if they would ever think to look inside the chest.
An experience beta reader and a book editor Let it shine
If you are looking for a beta reader who goes beyond mere surface corrections and truly cares about the psychological consistency of your characters, I highly recommend their services. Their analysis is particularly thorough: they don't just point out inconsistencies, but also offer specific suggestions to refine the dynamics and make the motivations more credible.
Apart from English, what is the most powerful language?
Ancient Greek
Portuguese
Hindi/Urdu
Sanskrit
Chinese
German
Spanish
Russian
Persian
French
Arabic
Latin
Voting ended onApr 23
By 'powerful,' I mean a language that has a massive number of speakers, a huge influence on pop culture, high prestige, or one that has shaped other languages through loanwords.
Dienos išlietos, kaip rašalas ant nusidevėjusio popieriaus, kažkur padžiūvęs, kažkur palikęs skyles, nėra pradžios ar pabaigos, tik tęstinumas, vienodas, rutiniškas toks, tęstinumas.
Nėra pradžios ar pagaibos - užmiegant, bundant, užmiegant, bundant, leidžiant prabėgt savaitėm taip normaliai ir neprabudus. Budri tik jausmams, tokiam specialiam nematomam rašalui, kuris vieną dieną is medaus tapo actu. Kada? Turbūt kažkur tarp užmiegant-bundant, kažkur rutinos lopšyje, vidury tobulo viesulo, sustojau akimirkai. Tai ne aš. Tai ne aš? Tai tikrai ne aš.
Man nereikia žmonių, kuriems nereikia manęs. Simple as. Tik kaip padėti tašką, kai rašalas liejasi visur? Ant popieriaus, ant rankų, ant akių. Rašalas liejasi taurėmis, vyno taurėmis, vienišomis vyno taurėmis, ir tas vynas sako - tuoj bus geriau. Galbūt rytoj, galbūt kitą savaitę. Bet vynas nežino, jog aš bailė. Bailė pati ištraukti naują popieriaus lapą ir padeti švarų tašką. Taigi taškuojam ant purvino, ant kurio nesimato tukstančio taškų.
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Thoughts on Elen's ending in "The Daughter in the Box" by @prince-zoisite
This is a deeply tragic story of domestic abuse with a sad ending. Elen chose a rather atypical solution to this problem — instead of running away from home, as many readers might expect, she chose to fake it and kill her brother to take his place. And I don't think there's a single reason for this choice, as a vast number of factors influenced Elen.
Elen had been dealing with disregard for her own actions since she was eight years old. She was a mere ghost to her parents. They didn't praise her, and barely spoke to her. And yet, she saw the exact opposite attitude toward Lirian.
My first thought was that Elen had become so accustomed to being misjudged in her actions that she hadn't learned to see their consequences. And that's precisely why she didn't perceive the murder as anything serious: her parents had ignored her actions before, so why wouldn't they ignore another one? She's a nobody here, her efforts don't matter, her actions don't matter, so why should murder be any different?
However, this reasoning isn't entirely accurate, because we know that her father picked on Elen for minor offenses, which in reality were most likely not serious. We know that her parents blame Elen for the murder of her younger brother, even though that's not true, and it was irresponsible of them to leave one child to look after another. Thus, Elen didn't "not face the consequences of her actions". She faced an exaggeration of her own guilt — and this is also an inadequate assessment of her actions.
Therefore, Elen undoubtedly knew the reaction she would face if her parents learned the truth, and she would try to prevent that. And yet, such a fixation on her parents' treatment, the improvements Elen is trying to achieve, shifts her focus from the fact that she's committing murder. For Elen, it's not a purpose in itself; even though Lirian didn't treat her well, we didn't see Elen as seeking revenge. For her, murder is a way to get what she wants. For a child who from an early age was deprived of parental love and a good upbringing, which are necessary for normal psychological development, I think this is reasonable logic.
Furthermore, I wonder if Elen's life before Kael's death was as rosy as we might think because of the contrast with the present. Considering that her parents, even at the age of eight, shifted responsibility for a small child onto her and blamed her for his death, I don't think so. They were always bad parents. Kael's death simply gave this an opportunity to surface and take shape.
Equally interesting is the question of how Elen came to the idea of murder. Perhaps it was the influence of films and books. Yes, most people are unlikely to kill their enemies after watching a thriller, but this is a story about a traumatized girl who hasn't learned from her parents how to properly evaluate her actions and who already has experience "killing" her younger brother (I'm sure she succumbed, at least a little, to her family's opinion). Again, this is just another bad deed in her overflowing collection of "offenses". No film could have led her to consider killing someone if she hadn't had the similar experience in the past.
Elen wanted to escape this endless cycle of abuse, and she found a way, albeit an unconventional one. But why didn't she truly escape?
Her family is toxic, but that doesn't change the fact that children needs parental love. Even if they understand that their parents are tyrants, it's simply a natural need, because parents are the closest people to us. The decision to stay home was a huge risk, but in a sense, running away would mean admitting she couldn't influence anything, that she couldn't change her parents. It would be hard for me to accept that this was something beyond my control. Staying and finding love (even if it was deceived) would be a very difficult path, but then Elen, in her own eyes, would be a person capable of controlling her life. When something unusual happens, it's easier for us to take the blame (because if we're at fault, we can prevent it next time) than to admit the circumstances weren't our fault (because then, if it happens again, we can't do anything about it).
I would have wanted a better ending for Elen, but I understand that's impossible. Perhaps if she had at least had a good relationship with her brother, she would have had a chance at a normal life. But she hadn't. Elen's living conditions weren't conducive to her growing up mentally stable from the very beginning, and with this murder, she deprived herself of her last chance to escape that house and start a new life. She did start a new life. But this new life will be lived in the same old box.
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