“So it’s you ehn? You’re the girl that has two heads?”
I get so angry when people ask this. I know they can see my head sprouting out of one side of our neck and Chima’s head sprouting out of the other. I don’t understand the sick pleasure they derive from me opening my mouth to confirm the obvious.
“I heard your other head is deaf and dumb”.
My anger dies down immediately. A year ago, I may have used our legs to kick the woman. Now I just turn my head to look at my sister’s. She is smiling serenely with saliva dripping down the side of her open mouth. Since that night she has been like this by choice.
Chima and I are konjona. This is our village’s native name for identical twins that are born sharing a torso, arms, heart, stomach, legs and every other body part and organ below our neck. From our neck sprouts two heads, identical in form but not in function. I am the Dominant and Chima is the Submissive, meaning I control our body and she does little else but tag along for the ride. It seems our body responds to my brain and my brain alone, not Chima’s. When I eat, I must raise my other hand to feed her too; or she will starve.
In some ways I am lucky to have Chima. She does whatever my brain wills her brain to do. It could be so much worse. Papa has told us several stories of konjona with two Dominants, both in constant, never-ending pain and conflict as they fight for who controls the body, one leg heading left and the other right. These twins always die before their tenth birthday as either their hearts explode from too much stress or their parents mercifully poison them to end their misery. There are also tales of konjona with two Submissives; both twins that just lie down silently and smile at the air, each one waiting for instructions from the other. Instructions that will never come. These poor humans can never defend themselves and almost always end up kidnapped for ransom. A ransom that the parents never bother paying. “Those children were born dead”, they say, “and who searches for a dead child?”
I always believed that the Two-Dominants suffered more than the Two-Submissives but something happened last year that changed my mind. I do not speak when I am nervous, and I get nervous when I meet new people. When Papa introduced the new cook to us, Chima and I were both silent and must have seemed like weak little Submissives. I guess this is why the cook did what he did to us that night.
I laid limp under him in shocked silence, in disbelief at what was being done to my body. Our body. I looked at Chima expecting to see her smiling and oblivious but was met with eyes wide with panic and rage. A rage that triggered their owner into controlling our body for the first time in our lives. A rage that cleared ears and loosened tongue, because my deaf and dumb sister later told me that she had overheard the cook telling his friends that he was going to sleep with Papa’s beautiful daughters and then steal Papa’s car and leave town. A rage that deepened when she saw him put the car keys in his pocket. A rage that exploded in the middle of his defiling us, as she grabbed the keys from his pocket and jammed them into his chest.
She explained all this to me as we watched the cook bleed to death on our bed.
I was remembering all this when a voice repeated itself and jolted me out of my reminiscing. “So it’s you ehn? You’re the girl that has two heads?”
I turn my head to look at Chima. She is still smiling, but quickly winks.
I proudly say, “Yes Ma, I have two heads”.
The woman saunters away, disgusted at my pride in my predicament.
I used to be disgusted as well. Now? I am grateful.
Imagine having just one head.
God forbid.