Opal

Two

Amber knew that Opal meant no harm. But she also knew that Opal was angry. And Opal had killed her. As usual. So now she was just waiting. She would come back soon enough. She always did. Both of the sisters had a curse. Opal killed things. Amber brought things back to life. They balanced each other out.

When Amber was a child, she never knew why all the townsfolk didn't talk to her. Now she knew the rumors.

"Don't you know why her mother is gone? Her father killed his wife, right in front of the children. Stabbed her to death." "oh ya, I heard that she was a witch, and she tried to eat her children, so her husband threw her in the fire."

None of them were true, though. According to their father, their mother was never married to him. They had run away from their families, the classic love story, until she got pregnant with twins. In the first months of our lives, no one could tell them apart, until they noticed their eyes. Opal's looked cracked, a Capri blue with shards of soft green that you would see in a meadow. Amber's looked like the glowing embers in a fire, a luminescent orange embedded with veins of red, surrounding a black void.

The truth is that their mother had died in childbirth. The father had died fourteen years later when storms were raging and a large tree fell and crushed the house. The girls had been trying to round up all of the chickens after smaller branches has crushed the side of the fence keeping then contained. Now they cared for the animals by themselves. No one was there to help them, nobody wanted to. Amber went to the biweekly market, while Opal cared for the baby animals. They were the only creatures not afraid of her. They had not yet known of death.