EMMAJANE W. — REGINA CAGGIANO
/In school there was a girl who shared her first name, and so it was fated from birth for her to fall into the world with a last initial W. following her every invocation. They coexisted in equilibrium, the two Emmajanes, regarding each other at first with a slight repugnance and jealous terror, later revealed to be the kinds of emotions tried on only briefly by children, like jackets passed over by a mother at the store, sandals roped away in the waves. The repellent drag between the two girls dissolved as soon as they grew old enough to twine their fingers around their own wholeness, awakened one after the other to the way she could kick a ball and watch it blow up dust onto the other’s ankles without dirtying her own. From then on they entered a benign state of non-reflection: the two Emmajanes looked entirely different from one another anyway, one with brown eyes and one with black, one with lips always chapped, one with eczema on the insides of her elbow, one with a cloud of fuzz between the brows, one suspected of emotional fragility who cried perhaps too often, one that let the recess bugs crawl into her ears, etc.
This would eventually come to an end in Miss H.’s fifth-grade class, where the two girls each with the same two names ceased to be. This was due to the fact that when Emmajane C.’s furnace exploded in the basement, it left a hole like a rocket tunnel through the roof. The school collected donations and Emmajane W. brought sheets and pillowcases to the house on Glass St. to exchange with the ones burned, and her mother brought a very funereal casserole to the family while the kitchen was being repaired. But after the collapse of just a few days, the C.’s of Emmajane C. would move away without notice—the house would be left empty and soon condemned by the state, and Emmajane’s gift of new bedding would be left behind in the linen closet, and her mother’s casserole in the freezer whole, until the electric bill went unpaid and the little cold box no longer hummed with life and in the following years would be razed by a bulldozer, and little by little the letter W. fell from the suffix of Emmajane’s name, for there was no need, and it was rather more like losing a limb than growing one back, and it was like a vague sunlight, one that is really a relative parting of the clouds, and it was very much the same as the day in first grade music class when they held hands once, fingers rolling over one another and she imagined many small smooth stones in an ocean, and the feeling left her goosebumped all over, and she would always remember, and tread very carefully around radiators and ovens for the rest of her life.
Regina Caggiano is a student on the East Coast getting her undergrad degree in creative writing. Her work has been previously published in Beyond Words Magazine and the Ember Chasm Review. You can find her on twitter at @reginacaggiano where she loves to connect with other writers and small presses!
