Faith and I were hanging out in the dining room tonight, folding laundry, when she asked me about Siamese twins. She asked me if they were real. I said that, yes, they were, and they were called conjoined twins because they weren’t really from Siam. She wondered if they came in boy/girl varieties, like Zak and Wheezie and I explained that only dragons in Dragonland came in boy/girl pairs, that human conjoined twins were always both boys or both girls, and were identical twins. This sparked a conversation about the nature of twinhood.

“So, if they’re… identical? then they both are the same?”

“Yes, the same looking. They’re two different people who look the same.” (I didn’t go into how many identical twins actually look quite different, for the sake of clarity.)

“So if one of them has blue eyes, then the other one…?”

“Has blue eyes, yes.”

“And brown eyes? If one has brown eyes?”

“Then the other one has brown eyes too, yep.”

She had been looking more and more serious as the conversation went on and her voice was now quite hushed.

“Mama… is one of them…” she swallowed audibly, “always… evil?”

I somehow managed to keep a straight face and said “No, no, honey. They’re both just regular people who are regular babies, regular kids, then regular grown-ups. They’re no more evil than you or me.”

Then I went and told Sean about it and we nearly collapsed with laughter.