I watch as the crinkled, bright orange edge of a Reese’s candy bar slowly makes its mechanic descent before getting caught on one of the spiraled spokes on the way down. It hangs from D1, taunting me. I bang a fist against the glass of the vending machine, but the candy bar just swings lazily, happily. A child on a makeshift tree swing. Dammit. I give one final kick before turning away, sipping acerbic, cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

I have been here before. Not on this floor exactly, although the steely gray tiling and the white, cinder block walls accented with a single stripe of inexplicable pink along the molding is replicated throughout the entire hospital. My dad got me Junior Mints the first time I was here, Mike and Ike’s the second. I wonder how often they replace the candy.

The first time I was here I got my brother. I already had a brother, David, and I longed for a sister, even though my dad insisted that it would be great with just us guys. I don’t remember who brought us here, or where my mother even was, but I remember sitting in the hallway on clamshell metal seats, licking masticated gobs of peppermint and smeared chocolate from my hands, David swinging his feet into my shins. My father emerged from the swinging door at some point, hair askew, eyes wide, holding what looked like a little parcel wrapped in bandages. My dad told me I had to wash my hands of peppermint before I could hold him. David had refrained from eating any Junior Mints, arms already outstretched and at the ready. I could have kicked him. My father lowered our little brother into David’s arms, who moved slightly from within his tight bind, swollen eyes managing to open slightly, working up towards his splotchy, wrinkled forehead. He stretched his tiny mouth into a perfect circle and let out what I imagined to be a wail, red spreading through his cheeks. I watched as David smiled, and continued to lick my sticky fingers. They would call him Daniel, which was much too similar to David. I would practice in the mirror forming my mouth around the harsh, sharp consonant of the ‘D,’ my tongue nearly blistering the roof of my mouth. I kept my hands pressed to my cheeks to feel the vibrations, hating the letter ‘D’, wondering why my parents couldn’t name him something simpler.

The second time I was here was the day I got music, as David would refer to it for years to come. Since I was the one going into surgery, I had to wait for my Mike and Ike’s until the end. My parents tried to explain to me what was happening, but I grew frustrated from failed attempts at trying to decipher the unfamiliar angles and contortions of lips over teeth. Tongue acrobatics around words like “hearing” and “implant” was foreign to me, something well beyond my limited vocabulary in a language I barely knew. I had begun to acquire a new language, a choreography in which all the steps made sense. A language that bounded from the confines of tedious lipreading, one that pulsed with emotion, one that swelled over peaks and swayed through valleys, one that crested and fell as bodily and facial expressions became one. A contractual agreement with the whole body, a dance in which every part was invited. One that lived only through my Deaf school, one in which my family could never grasp.

My teacher sat me down on her multicolored carpet, undoubtedly after my parents came to her, desperate to give me some clarity.

You have nothing to worry about. It won’t hurt because you will be asleep, she signed to me. I remember her large hands, which should have looked clumsy through signing, but her long fingers fluttered and tumbled through stories effortlessly.

I know, I signed back, but I still don’t get why I need the surgery.

Don’t you want to be able to communicate better with your family?

I thought of the many nights I spent in my room, my hands pressed to the floor of my bedroom, which was directly over the living room, trying to get a sense of where my parents were each night, if they were fighting, if they were worried, if there was calmness. I felt for the quickened pace in my mother’s dainty tread, the tired lumbering of my father’s heavy footfall, the scuff of Daniel’s knees across the hardwood floor as he learned to crawl. I let the vibrations surge through my palms, letting them weave narratives as if I were a puppet master hunched over the curtains of my two-story puppet show.

They could learn to sign too, I protested.

It’s true, but this way, you can go to school with your brother David, closer to home. You can hear the piano you always talk about in your house, the TV…

But I like it here, I signed back, my teacher’s hands falling into her lap at ‘TV’.

She gave a watery smile. We will miss you terribly.

I walked the same muted halls of the hospital groggily post-surgery with the only nurse who could sign. I walked with my hand clamped over my right ear, which was where the incision was, and still is. My first noise was one that was truly horrible — a grating, tinny clicking, one that rattled the entire surface area of my brain anytime the slightest sound bounced off me. I recoiled at a touch, the sound of fabric against skin sending every neuron into shock. I was a sponge overfilled; the scraping of metal chairs against floors and the squelch of wet sneakers on linoleum sent me near bursting. I couldn’t even eat the Mike and Ike’s my dad got me because of the sound my teeth made as they clamped down on the sticky mess; it was nails grinding in a woodchipper.

Your brain is still learning how to hear, the nurse signed to me, careful to keep her distance, dancing nimbly around my hunched-over, closed-off stature, with my hands glued to my ears. You’ll get used to it, you’ll get used to it, she signed, tumbling through the same choreography. And hey, she signed finally, a reprieve from monotony, they’ll finally be able to tell you and your twin David apart, what with the – she gestured tentatively to my right ear with its robotic protrusion.

It was true that there was no way to tell me and David apart, except for the fact that he was a fraction of inch taller, and of course, that once I opened my mouth to speak in halting English, everyone knew I was the Deaf twin. But with just months of adjusting to a device that sent transmissions into my brain and years of speech therapy, people could once again focus on our identical, almond-shaped eyes — brown flecked with gold — the same thin, pale lips, the same flushed cheeks topped with the irregular pattern of freckles. The only difference was our ears. People began to look at our ears in order to identify us, searching frantically for the absence or presence of the device, and faltering through various phases of shaggy hair and an assortment of hats.

I am at the hospital a third time for not Daniel or myself, but for David. There is no candy now. My mom sits across from me, a closed magazine in her lap. I can see her teeth working in her jaw. My dad didn’t make it. Daniel is still finishing up at college. It is just me and my mother in the same hospital of my childhood hometown, the same place where she gave birth, where I was given life, sound. There are a lot of teary-eyed families around us, pretending to read, forcing small talk. Simultaneously moving through loss and new life. After an indiscernible amount of hours tick away from us in a molasses-like fashion, a nurse as young as I am comes out with his hands far down in the pockets of his scrubs. “You can see her now,” he says. I can feel mom flinch at ‘her,’ can almost hear a muscle jumping in her neck. I hold her hand. Her eldest son.

The change really hasn’t been so rapid, but something about the hospital makes it official. It’s been years of David insisting everyone call him Delilah, despite my parents ignoring this request. I had obliged to the name change, but as I stared at what was basically a mirror, my twin brother, I couldn’t shake calling him “him.” And he was still David to all our relatives and friends; Delilah was just something we did in secret. As long it was a secret, we could keep David David, we could keep the person who shared an egg with me alive, we could keep my twin brother alive. Until now. Dad lost ‘just his guys’; I had gotten the sister I had always wanted.

Long ago, a few months after I had first gotten my implant, David and I shared one of our last baths. Our mother insisted we were getting too old for baths, but David and I would love to stay until the water grew cold, blowing bubbles until we would choke on the soap that got caught in our noses, imagining us stranded at sea, fighting off pirates and forming alliances with mermaids. I couldn’t get my implant wet, so it was off limits at bath time. For a brief respite, I returned to a silent world again at bath time, a place where my native tongue was no longer prohibited. Every time I first took out my implant, it felt as though I was in a sealed-off fishbowl, peering through warped glass, until the familiar language once again appeared at my fingertips.  I taught David signs for “mermaid” and “ocean” and “danger” and we would gasp for breath through fits of laughter until our mom had to come and unplug the drain. When her footsteps retreated, and I still sat in the remaining suds that stuck to the marble inside of the tub, it was safe for David to play what he referred to as ‘pretend.’ He would stand in front of our full length mirror, painting perfect circles of a swiped tube of Mom’s lipstick over lips identical to mine, tucking his penis between his legs, examining himself in various poses, inspecting the hollowness of his chest down to his spindly toes, inspecting the body that was almost exactly mine. Sometimes it would startle me to look at him, to look at myself without my maleness. We would both stand there naked, being each others’ identical opposite. He would always play some sort of music in the background, but when my implant was still new, he would turn it off because he knew it was painful for me. As I became more adjusted, however, he would softly play Prince’s Purple Rain to orchestrate his series of poses. The first time I was fully able to hear and register music, I had stepped out of the bath, had carefully dried my ear before putting my implant back in and had watched my brother nakedly vogue to the strangest collection of sounds that finally fit together like a puzzle I’d been working on for months. There was nothing else I could do but weep, weep at how perfect it was, weep at how I had left a pirate-fighting, mermaid-ally, purple-rainless kid in the bathtub. Ever since I heard Purple Rain, David called me ‘music man’.

Mom and I walk into the recovery room. A perfect stranger haloed in vague familiarities lays on the bed, waiting. Same eyes, same nose — all mine. I wait for a moment, searching for words, but she beats me to it. “Hey, music man,” she says.

– Melissa Feinman

Author’s Note: “Siblings” is undoubtedly a risky piece, and I am by no means an expert on the deaf community or the trans+ community, nor does this piece stand in for the wonderful nonfiction narratives out there that I hope readers take the time to pursue (see below). I wrote this piece to ultimately pay homage to the undeniable bond between siblings; thus, this piece is dedicated to my sister, Amanda.

*Trans and Gender Nonconforming Literary Landscape

*GLAAD (transgender podcast collections)

*The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard

*Books & Bao (more transgender stories and books by trans writers):

*No Walls of Stone: An Anthology of Literature by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers

*Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers

*ASL and Deaf Culture 101

Please consider visiting, and, if you are able, donating to The Transgender Law Center / The Trevor Project