Virgil's grave presented an obstacle. They tore at soil packed tightly by ages of rain and settling, grass growing lushly over every fertile inch. Every fistful of earth she and her doppelganger freed came at the cost of Shane's patience and her double's flesh. What little of her rational mind she felt she possessed interjected that his death happened recently and the grave ought to be fairly fresh. She tried to take this at its symbol, that this dense grave represented something potent and personal just as everything here might. She wished that she had Roselyn or her mom here, something with enough grounding in Freud or Jung or whoever dealt with this crap. It probably involved her womb somehow. Psychoanalysis tended to dwell on gonads.
It couldn't be real, she thought. Too much time would have passed for the grave to look so anonymous. She could not tell this plot from the rest of the hill but for the marker and the double's direction. For all she could tell, she dug into plain earth with no horrific caramel center of a decaying friend. That absence should seem welcomer, she thought.
"Why are we digging here?" The double asked while tearing a rock free.
Shane wiped the dirt from her forehead then realized it was clean. She lifted the hem of her dress and cleaned the forehead of her double instead, saying, "Aren't you up for some light grave robbery?"
Shane saw her smile returned perfectly. "Grave robbery is fine, though this is far from light, but why Virgil's?"
She possessed a dozen good reasons. This grave had to be a clue, since its existence had been news to her. Whatever information it held it did so beneath the grassy surface. Her hands felt like digging, felt like doing anything but returning to the monotony of the pictures. Because - as sick as this was - she did want to see Virgil again and had enough faith in mortuary science that she thought she could. It would be him, his actual body that she held as he died, even filled with toxic chemicals from the embalming process. It would be a part of him, not a mask the double wore. She said none of these. What she did say was "Practice."
<hr>She could not be sure, but felt she had been digging at Virgil's grave for hours, practicing she knew not what. They had dug no further than half a dozen inches down and as many across, a brown clay bowl. The ground turned denser with every handful removed. The double's hands hung mangled, exactly as hands should that had been put to such a task unprotected and unassisted by spades or shovels. The double gave not a word of protest and Shane wondered aloud whether her twin could feel pain. Shane's hands were nothing like her double's, pristine and even prettier and more delicate for the work. Her fingers even seemed irrationally longer and the nails glossy. She had so rarely seen her nails so nice, even caked with mud, and disliked their shimmer. It seemed mocking, as though she were shirking the work to her aggrieved sister. As if she were spoiled and privileged, an immaculate princess in her ivory tower.
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