The Rhetorical Twins
"Good morning, Pie in the Sky Publishing. Ms. Gastley speaking, how may I direct your call?"
"Double compassion, doubly kind, double the power in poetry mind!" chortled the Wonder twins in one of their customary rhyming choruses. "We're calling to check on our recent submission, we're hoping to publish and make a commission. Give the proceeds to charity, you have our permission!"
Ms. Gastley, who on most days in the office tended to treat everyone she came in contact with in an irritated and impolite manner, couldn't hold back an ear-to-ear smile. She felt a sudden and joyful improvement in her mood, as though one of her favorite celebrities had just walked into the room.
At the back of her mind came an inkling of awareness that her blithesomely uplifting mood swings seemed to always occur whenever within earshot of the Wonder twins. And although this ghost in the dark perplexed her, it had also begun to catch her a little less off guard.
"Oh, hello!" she exclaimed. How wonderful to hear from you." Oh, hee-hee, I did it again! Wonder...Twins. Tee-hee, no pun intended."
She blushed and giggled like a schoolgirl. "Oh dears, hold the line, please."
She poked the publisher's extension with a thick, stubby index finger.
"Dr. Smugly, are you there? It's the twins calling about their children's book The Rhetorical Twins. What should I tell them? ... Dr. Smugly, are you there?"
"Yes, I'm here," answered Dr. Smugly.
He too felt unsure as to why his mood had suddenly elevated through the roof. He felt like a young Ebenezer Scrooge ready to dance at Mr. Fezziwig's yearly Christmas party.
"Yes, how delightful! Please patch them through Ms. Gastley."
Dr. Smugly peered at the stack of submissions piled high on his desk and sighed heavily. He knew the Rhetorical Twin's offering sat at the bottom of that pile. He knew because he'd put it there.
And he'd only accepted their rhyming children's story in the first place because of his sister-in-law's goddaughter, Ms. Harmony, who, along with being one of his wife's best acquaintances, had also been a dear childhood friend of the twins.
"I'm connecting you now Dr. Smugly," said Ms. Ghastly with a Ms. Fezziwig grin.
"Hello dear boys! I've got your work right here." He exclaimed. "And we're going to publish. Do you hear me? We're going to publish your delightful children's book posthaste. And I think that this wonderful news calls for a celebration!"
"Oh, then you've read it you say, and we're so glad to hear, yes indeed Dr. Smugly let's go out for some beer!" Replied the Wonder's.
"Ah, no, hmm, I mean, to be honest I haven't read it yet, but I already know it's great." Announced the Doctor of Journalism. He felt as ditzy as the day he graduated summa cum laude from Stanford University.
"Why you've accepted on faith, with our literature unseen? Now we scold you to look, without being too mean."
"Well, fiddlesticks to that!" Dr. Smugly cried. He wasn't sure what was happening to him. He'd never agreed to publish anything without first going through it with a fine-tooth comb and making any and all requisite edits or revisions as required.
"Look, when it comes to publishing, I make all the big decisions." Stated the doctor matter-of-factly. Just then, a strange desire to accommodate the twins, to do whatever it took to make them happy, overwhelmed him. "But if it'll make you guys feel better, I'll take a look at it right now."
He dug the manuscript out and read the first few lines.
"Not bad," he interjected.
He read a couple more sentences.
"Pretty good," the boss intoned.
He finished the first page.
"Most astonishing!" Dr. Smugly chirped, feeling like a seabird taking flight from atop a towering coastline cliff. "There, are you satisfied? Pie in the Sky's officially your publisher, boys!"
"Hip, hip hurray, and thank so much! We greatly esteem your fine publisher's touch!" Crooned the twins. "Now let's all go out for some cold Irish beers and start off each pint with a tall round of cheers!"
Raff and Riff Wonder were born one snowy Christmas Eve in 1999, joined in utero at the tippy tops of their tiny heads. Delivered as craniopagus twins at birth via emergency caesarian-section, they were rushed directly into surgery. Luckily, two of the best brain doctors in the world were joint chiefs of medicine at the hospital, and as it happens both were on duty that night.
The major surgery went perfectly and contained yet another stroke of luck, as the ghastly, oval-shaped scalpel incisions that had swelled black and purple upon the crowns of their well-proportioned heads like two stitched rows of extra-large sewing machine seams would eventually be covered by hair.
"It couldn't have gone better," stated Dr. Hercule. "We did run into some trouble early on trying to separate their Anterior communication artery. The darn thing kept slipping away from us. Real crazy. I've never experienced anything like it before. We just couldn't get a firm grip you see, and somehow it kept squiggling away every time we went in for the cut."
"Yes, yes, yes, I couldn't agree more, " added Dr. Billingsley. "It's like the thing had a mind of its own. Doesn't that sound crazy? And we wasted nearly 30 minutes on it. But when we finally abandoned our scalpels and went forward with the laser, we nicked it right quick, yes sir. So, I guess whatever was controlling that darned artery couldn't see the laser coming."
Both MD's chuckled at the joke, then immediately became stone-faced again.
The twins' parents, Lark and Revel Wonder, were of course overjoyed.
"Can we see them?" Ms. Wonder exclaimed. "Please. I so want to see my babies."
"Of course," Dr. Hercule answered. "We'll have them wheeled in."
"But they can't be handled yet," Dr. Billingsley insisted, scrunching her long silver locks up into a giant bun and fastening it there with a hair tie. "Much too fragile at this early stage."
The parents nodded consent, and the world-famous physicians exited stoically through the swinging, stark-white delivery room doors.
The babes cooed like mating pigeons in their mother's attractive arms. As they pleasurably suckled, a blissful, dualling moaning began. At first Revel believed the feeding noises were purely coincidental, but she soon began to distinctly feel as if the sounds were being eerily orchestrated.
The moment she had this thought, a strong mother's intuition kicked in, and goosebumps fluttered up and down the entire length of her spinal column. As she tried in vain to dismiss this crazy idea, the powerful proof continued.
"Mmm, uhm mm," one twin uttered.
"Mmm, uhm mm mmm," added the other.
"Mmm, uhm mm mmm," went the first.
"Mmm, uhm mm mmm uhm," continued the second.
This mouthgasm went on in escalating fashion for a full five minutes. With a look of stunned disbelief chiseled to Revel's innocent face, she counted twenty-two outflows from the twins sounding off their pleasurable contentment.
The new mommy desperately wanted to alarm her husband, but the oddness of the situation caused her to become temporarily incapable of speech. Mr. Wonder, who sat peacefully in a comfy lounge chair next to the bed reading a detective novel, finally took notice of the strange noises on his own, and quizzically peered up.
"What on earth is that?" He asked.
Then, seeing his wife's lunatic stare, Lark more forcefully queried, "Revel, what's going on?"
"I don't know." she mysteriously answered. "But it's been happening like this for a good while."
"We don't know what it is." Dr. Hercule stated perplexingly. "It's a total anomaly. However, I do think there's something afoot here quite out of the ordinary, and we'll keep our eyes on it."
"Yes, yes, yes, I'm in complete agreement." Dr. Billingsley offered. "This is for us unprecedented, so we'll start cognitive testing on your sons right away. For now, we'll concentrate solely on recovering their health. Needless to say, they've been through a lot, and we'll need to keep them here until they're healthy enough to go home."
"That may take a week at least." Dr. Hercule countered. "But if you'd like Ms. Wonder, you can return home tomorrow."
Both doctors noticed looks of heavy concern creep onto the Wonder's faces, especially that of Revel. But each highly esteemed surgeon assured the pair that they could visit the hospital at any time day or night.
The twins were sitting on two cushiony barstools perched at the far end of an upstairs outer entryway that doubled as a balcony leading to the front door of their oceanfront apartment on the second floor of a fourplex on the Mission Beach Boardwalk in San Diego.
The setting sun was about to vanish beneath the far horizon along the outer rim of the Pacific Ocean, and the twins were staring intently at the dropping orb waiting for a possible green flash.
"Green flash, green flash, show us the light, bring us delight!" They chorused in unison, guffawing whimsically like children at make-believe. "When the sun goes splish-splash, what a beautiful sight, what a beautiful sight!"
Yet children they were not. The Rhetorical Twins had on this particular day reached the perfectly unripe age of 21.
"Twenty-one, we're twenty-one, our life and times have just begun!" Cheered the twins, showing their index and middle fingers on one hand and a single index finger on the other to the world in front of their home. "Twenty-one," ... son-of-a-gun! We're twenty-one and having some fun!" They raved.
But not every poetic verse the twins chimed together came out of their mouths as rhyming exclamations. On the contrary, at least half of the time the twins were morosely serious-minded, and during these earnest moments they preferred to intone free verses and other non-rhyming types of poetry, including haikus.
Yet their favorite way to communicate with the world and each other came through their own brand of bad poetry, rhyming versifications which more often than not flew out of their mouths without thinking.
This astonishing marvel of inborn genetics had inexplicably created two-way neurotransmissions between their once interconnected brains, catalyzing a long-term potentiation of dual glutamate between them, mysteriously governing and controlling their speech patterns and vocal cords from the incubator onward.
They were, to say the least, prodigies of science.
The sun sank quickly, and in an instant disappeared below the end of the sea, leaving a barely perceptible flicker of greenish light in its wake.
"Hooray, hooray, today's the day!" The twins jocundly hallooed, "Wahoo, wahoo, oh green flash, we so love you!"
The pair stood up from their chairs together and grabbed the balcony railing.
"Wow, what an amazing green flash!" Riff shrieked.
"I know that one took the cake!" Raff agreed.
"Took the cake, not a fake!" Riff returned.
Once again, they chimed together. "Now, what about dinner, it's time to pig out, should we stay home, or should we go out? We could go out to our favorite place, it's two-for-one tacos, let go stuff our face!"
"Yeah, tacos!" Riff howled.
"Let's go!" Raff seconded.
"Let's go, don't be slow!" They shouted, dashing inside the front door together.
The twins showered and changed into matching Billabong surf couture. Not the exact same pairs of board shorts, surfer shirts and flip-flops, but close enough. They got a kick out of wearing fashionable clothes and due to a sizeable medical endowment, they could afford the latest trends in off-the-rack beachwear. But pretentious popinjays they were not.
Caring little about most material things, their decades-old, two-bedroom apartment came decorated with a modest menagerie of well-worn wicker furniture and other vintage garage-sale items. They drove an old Jeep Wrangler and wore no jewelry except for gold chains and lockets their mother had given them on their sixteenth birthday.
Of course, the rent on their apartment of Oceanfront Walk could only be described as exorbitant. But the twins had always felt unhappy and unsatisfied living anyplace else except for right on the ocean, where the salty breeze and tranquil constant sound of the breaking waves put their restless minds at ease.
The twins walked out of their apartment and stood for a few moments on the shared entryway, letting the cool, salty summer breeze caress their identical faces. Below them, towering, high-intensity discharge lamps brightly illuminated the boardwalk, putting all who walked, ran, biked, or bladed there in full man-made, plasmatic view.
In the semidarkness beyond the boardwalk, the twins could see the indistinct outlines of shapeshifting waves and whitewater rolling continuously towards the beach. And they could hear, quite distinctly, the soothing roar of the oceanic tidal waters rushing and dissipating furiously upon the shore like the magical and glorious sound of a faraway yet up-close song of the Sirens.
Then, just before departing, and in unison again, the Wonder twins warbled, "As do dual DNA strands, twinly poetry spirals up, every verse 'tis a lifeline and each rhyme fills our cup!"
When the little guys turned nine and a half, an extraordinary thing happened. They both began a growth spurt that lasted the entire summer, and each became markedly bigger and taller than the previous year.
A powerful presence now hovered in and around them like lonesome shadows cast by giant boulders piled up high at the base of mountains in a tan, cloudless desert. The camouflaging aura within this puzzling patchwork of lightness and darkness made an almost imperceptible and intermittent whistling sound, like a dry wind scooting through a hot ravine.
As they walked into class on the first day of fifth grade, every face turned toward them, and each mouth made an unintentional sound born from inspirational awe.
"Ooh," chorused the whole classroom as one single voice.
Then followed many individual exclamations of shocked surprise and delight, by all who were getting their first glimpse of the Wonder brothers. Even the teacher, Ms. Fosbinder, found herself staring at the twins.
Involuntarily holding her breath, she felt a great mix of pure reverence and petty jealousy invade the still, empty cavity of her chest. One tear from each eye spilled down each eyelash and splashed her puffy, pink cheeks. She wiped them away but more quickly came, and Mrs. Fosbinder found herself weeping.
Unashamed yet saddened, she turned away from the children and made her way to a filing cabinet in far corner of the room next to the chalkboard. This left Raff and Riff in control of the space, and they naturally made their way to the front and began responding to a mounting gaggle of student questions.
"What happened to you guys?" Called out Billy Connoly, the class clown and biggest bully. "You look really weird!"
"Billy Connoly, that's no way to treat newcomers to our class," scolded Ms. Fosbinder, momentarily glancing back from the cabinet at small group of students now standing up to get closer to the twins. But she quickly turned her face away, opening the top drawer and pretending to look for something important inside.
Most of the fifth graders erupted into laugher and the small group who'd just stood up, led by Billy, began crowding round the twins. Most knew they had to at least pretend to support Billy's cut downs, or else he might begin hurling those hurtful insults towards them.
Billy's wingmen, Carl and Kurt Swootz, were brothers born just under a year apart, but their mother decided to start them at the same time. They felt mob power whenever Billy controlled others with his threatening cruelty, and liked egging him on, adding to it when they could. They moved in behind Billy, and all three crawled closer to Riff and Raff.
The twins felt the presence of Billy's wickedness right away. They were used to it and had learned early on how their strange appearance could bring out all kinds of evilness in people.
Perhaps it was their large, pumpkinlike heads, which stood out like two sore thumbs at a carnival freak show. Or maybe it was their vampirish haircuts with spikey jet-black bangs sticking to their longish foreheads like bearded lightning bolts. Perhaps it was their foreheads alone, which oddly constituted nearly half of their darkly freckled faces.
Then again, it may have been the sizably conspicuous port-wine stains stamped on opposite sides of their nobs spreading from scalps to pointed ears like the coiled crimson tentacles of a deformed octopus. Adding to the peculiarity of their appearance were the twins' large, wide-set, watchful eyes, dark brown with specks of amber in them, which fluttered half-closed like butterfly kisses whenever they spoke at the same time.
The twins began to hear the whistle, what they called the missile whistle, which blew into their minds like a warm and fragrant desert wind just before sunrise. The whistle grew louder and more forceful, and with it came like a stinging sandstorm the shapeshifting contours of supercharged alfa waves arising and exploding inside their invisibly concatenated brains.
"What are you staring at?" Billy barked at the twins, who were peering at him through the small slits of their eyes.
The Wonder twins squinted harder, and their eyes began to flutter. Deep inside their identical craniums miniscule drops of blood seeped out from their posterior communicating arteries like mushroom clouds of dark red ink, the ill-fated driblets of cerebral hemorrhages in the making.
"We're looking at you, Billy Connoly." Trilled he twins in unison. "We know why you're scared and feeling upset, but we can be friends, we just haven't met yet." The twins let out identical horselaughs, which made the other kids around them burst into uproarious laughter.
"I'm Flim, and he's Flam, now let's all please shake hands!" whooped Flim with another I love to Laugh belly laugh.
The twins stuck their hands out for everyone to shake, and frenziedly shook every hand around them, all except for Billy's. Billy just stood there like a statue in a mind-controlled state of confusion staring at his hand and wondering why he now had the strangest feeling of wanting to be friends with these weird Wonder boys.
"Don't pout, stick it out!" cried the twins, their anomalous eyes fluttering away hypnotically. "Being our friend is what it's all about!"
