Our cellphones play an excerpt from Verdi’s Il Trovatore in the mornings. At 6:37 we judder awake to “The Anvil Chorus,” hearing the crash of hammers striking anvil faces, again and again. Our grandfather listened to this opera every Sunday instead of going to church with our parents. By the time we had picked him up for brunch, the last act blasted from the speakers in his basement. He always said the dungeon scene was his favorite, that sometimes he felt he was awaiting execution.
Our grandfather didn’t die by an executioner’s ax or by a guillotine blade slicing off his head—though he would have enjoyed the theatrically of both. He suffered a stroke soon after waking one Sunday morning. He lay in bed half-blind, his stunned body helpless, his semi-conscious mind unaware of the blood leaking into his skull. When we discovered his cold corpse, his eyes faced the telephone on the nightstand, the handset off the hook.
It was many years later that we realized the two of us were both using the Verdi alarm. As twins, we were not too shocked by the coincidence. For a long time growing up, we had shared a bed and woke in those early hours to the slate-blue light of daybreak. In the short time we had alone, while our parents still slept, we pressed our heads together so hard that we could feel each other’s skull. Our foreheads seemed to part, frontal bones cracked open, our brains transmitting a promise that we would never die without telling the other.
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Christopher Linforth has published fiction in Epiphany, Notre Dame Review, Fiction International, Day One, and other magazines.