This is an excerpt from a project-in-process attempting to map both seen and unseeable intersections via image, myth, letters, fiction, lies, memoir, footnotes, and outright exaggeration.

The siamese twin demi-goddesses Sanjallentoa and Ltaajsonnale were not born under the Gemini stars, as you astrological gurus erroneously claim. Instead, they were born in fall during a year when summer came exceedingly late, but once it came, decided not to leave until it had its fill and warmed the whole earth. By mid-October, which is when the twins were born, it was still hot enough that their parents, who were hippies, had to be careful where they ashed their pot cigarettes, which don’t really produce much ash, but even that little they did produce could have been enough to catch the whole world on fire or at least ruin the communal garden beds where the twins’ parents hung out, and fell enraptured to the earth under the grape vines, which were bulging and velvety with their heavy offerings.

This is where the twins were born, by the way, on a soft early morning during which their mother was nursing a hangover so brutal she hardly deigned to notice her conjoined daughters shooting out from between her legs and landing on a compost pile. Before their first minute was over, each held a sprig of decomposing broccoli or tomato plant, and finally their mother had collected her wherewithal to comment on their arrival: “Hmmmmm.”

Due to their being joined in two places—the back, where they shared a heart, and the buttocks, where they shared a pelvis—their parents felt a fair amount of despair and anguish at the twins’ birth. For the first year of the twins’ life, their parents searched around, while scratching and pulling at their hair, for a doctor who would be willing to separate the girls. Ultimately, this search was not a success. However, the search was notable for reasons other than its failure, in that the twins’ father fell madly in love with the last plastic surgeon located, and thusly decided to abandon his newly born children–who-were-one child and wife in order to move to Malibu, where he spent the rest of his life drinking CoorsLite and smoking bidis on the beaches while swooning over his new love, who was also a beach bodybuilder. Every now and then he would fly the girls out to visit, and would try to teach them to surf (they had exceptional skills and soon outstripped his meager tutorings) or deep-sea fish (this was successful).

I will now have to remind you, no doubt, that the twins’ father was the son of none other than the highly important business-tycoon demi-god, who valued money, tradition, and others’ poverty. He was also the patron saint of french fries and best friend of Milton Friedman, but that is both another story and another religiosity. In short, he was pissed at his son and threatened him disinheritance if he didn’t go back to his wife and children, and then finish off his mathematics degree which had been abandoned somewhere around string theory.

The twins’ father said. “She doesn’t want me back anyway.”

Which was true to a certain degree. The twins’ mother did, in fact, want him back, but only if he wanted to come back, which was a ridiculous stipulation if she actually wanted him back. The truth was and remained that he wasn’t welcome until he wanted to come back, but he never wanted to come back, so the twins’ mother pined away for all of eternity, or at least until she found another boyfriend, which actually did take years though she was hot and definitely deserved to find one earlier than that. And yet, perhaps it was so difficult because she had to live under the curse of her former father-in-law, a demi-god who had made all of the nations in South America suffer horribly at one point or another, not to mention New Orleans. He was certainly a macho dickhead, a man who openly pee’d on fires and leered at any girl who seemed not to notice him. He had attended college, and so wasn’t completely ignorant, but spent the first three years so exceedingly shy that he became convinced that all the girls were only interested in big-mouthed anarchists who talked and talked and talked. After he had so depreciated the tastes of the women who had merely thought him unassuming and had thus quietly left him in peace, it didn’t take long for him to concentrate on making money, and then exact his petty revenge on populations who never even knew they had been mean to him. Such is the way with demi-gods.

After having annihilated Argentina, he focused on his son, who had a good excuse because his wife didn’t even want him, and the demi-god he re-focused on his (“whore of a” [sic]) daughter-in-law and grand-daughters. He told himself they were a freakish abomination, anyway, and hideous to boot (not true, they were gorgeous).

Yet, for such an idiotic pighead, he came up with a ridiculously good curse for the two young innocents, who had not done a damned thing wrong (at least up until this point in their lives). For their mother, he cursed her to grow strong and wise yet humble and genuinely sweet. This took her quite a number of years and boyfriends to sort out, as it were, but the worst seemed due her daughters, a curse that over time occasioned her more grief than her own. For the embittered grandfather had cursed Sanje (Sanjallentoa) with a longing to be on the road, a peripatetic urge to be moving—her very fulfillment and spiritual mission pinned to adverbial and verbial achievement. For Jonny (Ltaajsonnale), it was the opposite: a pithy longing for home, roots entering near the depth of the earth, and for stability and stillness. For both, he assigned the shared destiny: the desire for community, and a mission to understand love and interconnection.

For such an asshole, their grandfather certainly gave them a sacred and wretched mission.

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