Twice Born

They were identical twins, sharing the same placenta and floating in the same amniotic sac.  In this close, dark, and liquid environment, they were doomed to constantly drift into each other.  There came a point, when all the touching, bruising and sharing the same cramped space, was mutually threatening.  Both of them needed to increase their capacity, to not only survive, but also thrive.  This lead to one of them needing the whole placental universe to himself. There being no predetermined morals that dictated behavioural niceties at this stage of life, he managed to wrap his twin brother’s umbilical cord firmly around his twin brother’s neck, effectively cutting off his nourishment from the placenta, and choking the outgoing elimination of his waste.  His twin brother gradually withered away to a lifeless form.  If this was a conscious act on his part, or an accidental entanglement, he might never know. After his twin brother’s untimely demise, he had a womb of his own.  In this seemingly endless world, he had all the fluid that his little heart desired.  He could at last drift freely, except, he still occasionally bumped into the deadhead that was his twin brother.  These unsanitary conditions progressively lead to the poisoning of his entire environment.  In the twenty-eighth week of his mother’s pregnancy, they were cut out.  Imagine his consternation when he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb to face the brilliant, cruel light of the operating world.  He was naked, cold, and virtually alone; the soft, wet-warm protective darkness of his past existence, was shockingly shed.
Two years before the outbreak of World War Two, at 2.00 a.m., on Sunday, April 18^th, 1937, a tiny boy and his stillborn twin brother, were introduced to this tumultuous world, by a Caesarean birth.  He was screaming hysterically over his brother’s dead silence.  He weighed a mere three pounds.  They didn’t bother to weigh his unmoving twin.  Despite his survival, the poisoned atmosphere within her womb had arrested his growth.  He was born a mere slip, but a perfect little specimen, except for his unblinking, wide-open eyes, and the two middle fingers of each hand, which were joined together.