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hide her stitches. The twins’ beadwork was tight and true. No visible beginning or end to the design. Impossible to find the starting knot, the final tie. Unseeable the place where the needle went in or out. Their maple leaf or prairie rose or vines twisting skeletal on black velvet were done with invisible thread. They used those threads on Augustus. He never saw the stitch work that kept him sewed to their side. He never saw the fabric upon which their passion was marked out in chalk. Or the inlay, one bead to the next, the remarkable interpenetration of colors.
    There was one secret way to tell the twins apart. Victoria had pity on Augustus one day and told him to check the whirlwinds at the crown of their heads. One swirled to the left, the other swirled to the right.
    Augustus had fallen in love with the enigma of duplication, and the hold had deepened. The confusion of sameness between the twins made him tremble like an animal caught in a field of tension. Sitting at the table, he’d feel the current of their likeness. Things even they did not notice. Mary pricked herself. Zosie muttered owey ! Zosie started a legging and Mary, without even trying to copy, constructed another of an identical design. They got hungry at exactly the same time. Started humming one tune suddenly, no sign having passed between them.
    When making love, there was barely anything one did differently from the other. He could tell them apart only with the greatest difficulty, even in their nakedness beneath his hands, but this exploration, rather than daunting, excited him. He could always make certain which was which by touching the whirlwinds at the crowns of their heads—that is, until suddenly it seemed they started combing their hair in new ways. This way, that. Messing with his one sure proof.
    After they messed up the hair on their whirlwinds, he searched and searched for another way to identify them. Soon one of them would show her pregnancy. He had to know which one or he would be lost. For a time, as they beaded, he surreptitiously examined their fingers. Curled around the needles, each nail was just that slightest bit different from the next. He marked out the degree of growth, fixed in his mind a nick or a tatter.
    He was driven to noticing the tiniest things. Became a devotee of pricks and scratches. Sometimes, in his desperation, he tried placing a mark on one of them himself.
    You could say he started what happened next.
    The accident occurred as a stroke of luck. Augustus knocked a hot fry pan over and grease splattered Zosie’s wrist. Mary was so upset that she gasped out Zosie’s name. For several weeks Augustus had a certain sign of Zosie’s identity and this quieted him. He even gained a few pounds, for anxiety had thinned him terribly. But Zosie’s scar was fading. Just before it disappeared, he tipped the hot fry pan over once again, this time onto Mary, whose painfully burned foot had to be bandaged and unbandaged twice a day. Yet she, too, recovered and her skin stayed unmarred.
    How to leave a more permanent mark? He took a knife one day. Cutting a rope, he sliced through the air and nearly took off the tip of Mary’s right ear. She ducked in time, but it gave him an idea and that night when Zosie came to him he worked himself into a heat and climaxed with the lobe of her ear between his teeth.
     
    F OR THE REST of the pregnancy, he slept alone. The twins both feared he had gone wiindigoo. The child was born, but even Victoria was confused. The baby had two whorls of hair, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the crown of its head.
    “An unusual situation,” said Augustus, holding his little daughter, who clutched his finger and stared up at him in focused intensity. “I am your father, but we may never know the exact identity of your mother. Even if one tells us, she may be lying. I give up.”
    Augustus accepted that he was lost. That his predicament was insoluble now. Time was marked both ways on the crown of his