The Twin Sisters: Zoe, the Marionette

My mother broke my sister's and my limbs, turning us into marionettes.

Whenever she and my father slept together, my grandmother would hold the strings, making my sister and me perform opera outside their room.

It was said that if we sang for forty-nine days straight, my mother would conceive a baby boy.

But on the forty-eighth day, my sister died.

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My sister and I are twins.

Her name is Lily, and I'm Zoe.

When my mother gave birth to two girls, she saw it as bad luck and refused to nurse us.

Just when we were on the brink of starvation, a traveling priest passed through our village.

He told my mother that she was destined never to have a son, but he had a secret method that could change her fate.

According to the priest, on the twins' sixth birthday, their limbs needed to be broken, and red strings sewn through their palms and soles, turning them into marionettes.

Then, while the parents slept together, an elder in the family would manipulate the puppets for forty-nine days straight, and this would supposedly result in a male child.

My mother was skeptical but still paid the priest a hundred dollars and lifted her shirt to feed us.

She went on to have four more children, all girls.

Eventually, she resigned herself to her fate.

After the last girl was born, my father beat my mother nearly to death, and just like before, he had my grandmother take the newborn to the river to drown her.

After my sister's death, I went inside to bring my mother a bowl of sweet porridge.

I found her lying still, eyes open.

Her shirt was soaked with milk, and I, too hungry to resist, leaned in to steal a taste.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain at the back of my head—my father had grabbed my hair and was hitting me with a shoe.

“Worthless girl! How dare you steal from your father!”

Dazed and seeing stars, I was about to run back to the woodshed to find my sister when my mother sat up and called out to me.

“Zoe, it's your birthday today. What do you want to eat?”

I had never known I had a birthday.

The best thing I had ever eaten was sweet porridge, so I told her that’s what I wanted.

A small smile appeared on her face as she handed me her bowl of sweet porridge. “Go ahead, eat.”

I took the porridge back to the woodshed and shared it with my sister.

Just as we finished, my parents came in with red strings.

My mother held us down while my father easily broke our limbs.

The pain was excruciating, and I screamed in agony.

But the worst wasn’t over—my mother then picked up a hammer.

She used nails to pierce through our palms and soles.

The smell of blood filled the room, and my mother’s face twisted in excitement.

She threaded the red strings through the holes.

The rope scraping against our flesh until I passed out from the pain.

When I woke up, my sister was holding me.

Our hands, feet, elbows, and knees were all bound with red strings, hung from the beams of the room.

The ropes were long enough to allow us some movement.

My sister struggled to push a bowl toward me—

It was ...