Opposite attracts,
Twins love daring adventures
Until... Sob. Sob. Sob

I RECOLLECTED HIS LAST WORDS.

Dan's scream before getting pierced by a sharp crag while I was spectating from the sloppy riverbank.

"I can't swim... Iaannn!" and then the river turned red. That was it. The debt Dan paid to nature. Blood.

Dan was my twin brother - popular highschool champ - who used to play basketball for the Hedgehogs Stars before we left the city.

He and I might be twins but we were living proofs that opposites attract. Apart from our countenance, the only personality we shared was that we were both daredevils - a trait we got from Trevor.

Aside adventures, we do nothing else together. We won't even go to school the same time. Playing the cute twins was never a thing of fancy for us both.

When my family was forced to move away because our property was claimed to violate the Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (B A.N.A.N.A) principle, we relocated to my dad's hometown - a boring countryside town with the name, Valsbury. Dan's emotions shifted from jolly to morose.

His idea of fun changed too so as to make the place lively, of course. His not-so-daring city adventures became high-adventures - where every twists and turns were filled with extremities and excitements.

This made our mom worried. She concluded that all her boys were hard cases. At one point, she thought of opting for therapy but she dismissed the idea, thinking it will only worsen the situation.

That time, she had wished badly for a girl. She believed where we boys took the character of our dad, Trevor - may his lost soul find its way back home - her unborn girl would take her gentle personality. Gentle? Mom'd laughed at herself then.

Nevertheless, it would be easier and relatable bringing up a softer gender than we hyperactive machines, isn't it? Maybe, just maybe, Bigelow was right to call us, "spawns of devil." Although, Lisa'd tear him apart if she ever heard him call us, her cute twins, the devil's spawns.

It was during one of those hot, boring Saturdays in Valsbury when Lisa went to the fairground that I and Dan had slipped away to play Skitter-Over-The-River (a game where you hop from rock to rock, get to the other side of the river and hop back again), that Dan had tripped on a slimy rock and had gotten impaled by a sharp crag.

Also there was a stupefied look on his face before he'd slipped, as though he sighted blood.

I had turned my head, a little too late, to see a blur of red and white disappear into the trees.

Try as I might, my brain could not register what I saw. Was it a fisherman with a bloody knife? Or another with a bloody spear? Was it a bloody trident I saw? The bloody options were limitless.

I had hastily waved off the thought. There was a more pressing situation at hand, like my brother flailing his arms in the craggy river.

I knew Dan's Achilles heel was blood. His weak spot since childhood after watching a B-movie horror whose antagonist mutilated his victims with cheap ballpoint pens. Ever since, blood became the only form of threat that could make the daring boy sit motionless like a trained German Shepherd and -

- and the ghastly memory still haunt me. It was permanently graffitied to my subconscious mind's wall: My brother, lying comatose, impaled by a sharp rock.

I curse the mysterious figure that caused my brother to fall that day. I curse him.

That day, I had ran for aid. I could not swim either. When I came back with two macho men lugging nets full of fish behind me, my twin brother was nowhere to be found. His body was gone. Missing.

I was devastated but Lisa was devastated, devastated. With my luck, I was grounded for eternity.

How so much I hate those crags and the river and the trees and my school and everything about Vals-stupid-bury!

How so much I hate becoming a countrysider!

The only part I like is the Harlin's Fairground and slowly I'm losing interest in that too.

Growing out of the dizzying merry-go-rounds, the jolting bumper cars, the nerve-wracking rollercoasters, the sliding Helter-skelter castles, the circling Ferris Wheels, the romantic Tunnels of Love, the spinning Tilt-a-Whirl and so many, many more. Thinking about all these in the bus got my interest sparked up.

Nevertheless, I missed my past city life. The hustles and the bustles, the night outings, the nonchalance of the city's denizens, my gymnastic practices (yes, you read that right), my best friend, George, and his whiskery ragdoll cat - Daphodil that enjoys being picked up and covered with furry kisses (double eww).

I missed everything about my city life and can't wait to become an adult and get the boots out of Valsbury.

☬☬☬

Can't visit the fairground
Heard it was a fair farm. Ms
Kathy, this isn't fair

OUR BUS SKIDDED TO A HALT by one of the many pre-Victorian cottages basking delightfully after the arch bridge. A boy whom I neither liked nor despised hopped in. Rupert.

Rupert was a snaggletooth who enjoyed bragging about his latest experiences at Harlin's Fairground, which was fairly close to where he lived.

To add jam to his doughnut, he stayed with his demented grandparents that were always fantasizing about spending their youthful lives in a farm in Straddfordshire.

And that the grandmother had a dear boy whose name was Rumbelow. (Ridiculous, I know).

To her, there was no other finer boy anywhere else. She doesn't trouble him with chores and tried her best to spoil him with affection. This gave Rupert all the liberty in the world.

And it makes me green with envy; that I can't visit the fairground whenever I wish to and Rupert can; that my visitation which has literally been never ever — drives me crazy; that Lisa was always on my neck ever since my twin brother had disappeared boiled my teeming hormones; that I am subtly grounded FOREVER makes me lost, forlorn and withered like a water lily planted in a desert!

The Rupert boy waved with two logs he called arms. His school shirt was unbuttoned, his trouser fraying, his hand large, and his nails grubby with dirt. A typical ruffian. His uneven dentition became more evident when he smiled and his wave widened. "Hey you."

I flicked my hand back and smiled a small, meaningless smile. "Yo."

"Can I have a seat beside you?" The boy stood before me, his garage-door frame blocking light, life and living.

Come have it, dingleberry.

I visualized my mom's reaction at this: A screeching Lisa brandishing a soggy mop, about to hit me on the head. The thought made me grin.

"Why are you grinning?"

Can't he just go away? I didn't realize my teeth were outside. "Nothing. That. Is. By. Any. Mean. Your. Business." I snapped, making sure I coated each word with a hint of iciness.

"Can I just have the seat?" Rupert asked again, not quite catching my warning shot. He'd make a bad goalie. (You'd make a bad goalie if you didn't catch this too)

"Oh, yeah, why not? Here. Fat." I didn't say the last word aloud.

And we both sat together nonspeaking as the engine stuttered back to life. The bus continued its idle cruise through the country.

☬☬☬

COUNTRY BLABS ARE COLOR.

This one will definitely light up your day. Here's a little story about my dad's hometown.

Valsbury is a small, burgeoning countryside town situated on a gentle highland million miles away from civilization. That is in terms of its proximity to a modern city in this context.

Being a countryside, most of the locals indulged in boring, rural occupations like fishing, farming and mining. These three being their major productive sources of income.

Others involve themselves in the many activities that branch off from these three major productive occupations. For instance, the trading of farm produces grown by the farmers, or the seafood caught by the fishermen and the ores excavated by the miners.

For this very reason, the Harlin's Fairground was created by the then Mayor Harlin Bushlow, to facilitate the convenient trading of two of the major goods: farm produce and seafood.

A dusty quarry where ore is excavated, sold and also delivered laid juxtaposed to the Harlin's, contrasting the lively, happy fairground with its annoyingly loud clanks and clunks. But the townspeople never complained about the incessant clangs and the unbearable explosions.

On the contrary, they were so grateful to the mayor that the noise soon became melody to their immune ears. It was named Quarry of Tunes for some subtle reasons I'm not interested to know about. Country color?

I turned back to the window when I was sure we must've sailed over the craggy Nidvera and its riverain.

I was right. We've passed it.

I continued my idle view, ignoring Rupert at length as we began speeding past the expanse of land the fairground covered.

The desire to play hooky and visit the fair overwhelmed me in an instance but then Bigelow won't even hear me out before buckling me up with his renowned zip ties.

The old driver kept them as plenty as blackberries in the school bus for a reason which the school management thought, fathomable.

Ahem... Back to the hometown gossip. Once upon a time, I read that the Harlin's Fairground was a very large farm with series of humongous manor houses where generations of Spiveys had broken unleavened breads (and heads too).

The gardens were once nourished with beautifully trimmed miniature topiaries, most of which were exotic and imported. All these were the tell-tale signs of the farm's lost opulence.

But due to its dereliction, these grand works of arts became bland works of nature. The topiary trees simply went overboard and lost their professional touch.

The farm died, together with its owner. The Farm Man. At least that's what the folks called the muscular owner who used to be seen lugging sacks and wearing Wellingtons too small for his size around the cornfields.

The Farm Man whose original name was Fletcher Spivey.

Before his death, the farm business had been blooming ever since the first Spivey set foot on the soil of Valsbury. For hundreds of years, the farm business went on. Come rainfall, come sunshine, come wind, come hail.

The Spiveys were unusually large and had a muscular build, which they did virtually nothing to achieve.

Their faces were almost ugly. The Spivey verdant green eyes were the feature that rescued their faces from total ugliness.

The Spivey jaws were solid and square, as if sculpted by a brickmaker with no care for aesthetic. Their jug-ears were what you could describe as elephant's flaps, sailing like a flag whenever the wind blows. (And I'll tell you, the wind blows a lot around here).

Yet the Spiveys were born with green fingers especially in the cornfields.

The row of cornfields in the Spivey Farm had long since shifted from its green color to brown, and the golden ears of wheats that once grew there had overripen, fallen and were waiting for the next rainfall to start the cycle afresh.

But they never did.

One calm autumn night, Mayor Harlin Bushlow brought in metallic monsters with robotic arms and flat tracks from a neighboring city. He also brought machines with round metal tyres that could crush diamonds without a groan. It took him two months to transport these monsters alone.

He struck a deal with a prestigious firearms company named the EXPLODING EXPLORERS and was supplied with crates upon crates of dynamites.

There was even a rumor that the workers 'borrowed' many crates and returned them empty. Haha.

Bushlow then hired the help of the wrecker's ball to destroy those humongous farmhouses and great halls.

"Now, talk about the calm before the storm." That was the annotation I scribbled into the Valsbury, A History book I had lend from the library.

I remember the horrific look of the stone-faced librarian, Mrs Kathy, when she saw my impish handiwork. Given that it wasn't my first time slathering her books with hideous annotations, goofy stick figures and many other unspeakable things, she easily recognized my doodles like the back of her hand.

Her baneful words were not quite easy to forget the day she chucked me out and subjected me to a lifetime ban from the library. "Out! You've done enough damage to my books. Out and may you never come back!"

☬☬☬

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