The nurse looked at the man who was sitting in the rocker next to the window. He had been admitted two days ago, found wandering around on the streets, mumbling incoherently. He submitted to all of the tests, the change of clothes, the search for id. But so far none of the doctors had determined what had happened to him to cause what was probably a rapidly degenerative mood swing for him. His clothes were well-to-do, although he was not carrying anything to identify himself with. His appearance was clean-cut and maintained, indicating that he was not some vagrant off of the streets. The hospital had agreed to take care of him until relatives could be found and notified. So far his mumblings had been only nonsense...
Until now. She bent forward as she heard the word 'wrong' fall from his lips. "Sir?" she queried.
"Wrong, wrong, always wrong," he mumbled as he looked out onto the hospital grounds. Little children were playing in the flowers. "Tim and Tom, Tom and Tim. We are twins. We would always get in trouble and switch places. He would throw spitballs at the teacher and I would be punished. I would make the girls cry and he would have to stand in the corner because neither the girls nor the teacher could tell us apart. Mother would send one of us to bed without supper and we would switch places so that both got enough to eat."
"Sir, do you remember your full name? Do you have any family we can call?" the nurse pleaded.
"As we got older, we still traded. We would trade dates, traded girlfriends. Do you know that we even traded our wives for a while? But then Mabel and Iva both died, leaving us alone... with each other."
The nurse stayed silent.
"He said that it was our fault they died. That it wasn't right for us to switch. He turned on me, my own brother! But we had been switching for so long... And we are always together, brothers, twins. But I knew that he was changing, turning from me." This last was mumbled into his chest as his head dropped lower and lower.
The nurse crouched beside his chair, hoping to hear something that would give her a chance to identify the man's relatives, this twin brother, anyone. She fell over as the man suddenly stood up, knocking both her and his chair onto the floor.
"Wrong, wrong..." he yelled, pulling at what hair he had left. He fell to his knees and crawled over to the nurse. As she drew a breath into her lungs to yell for an orderly, he whispered to her, "You see, _I_ died three days ago. But they buried _him_ instead...."
Do not copy or quote the above material without the expressed consent of the owner of this page.