Minellanisa: Blufire Grade 11-Level Winner Story

Terre:

Siblings are expected, and twins are rare– but being born conjoined, like my sister Soleil and I, feels like a twist of fate only the gods could devise. We were born bound, two halves stitched together at the hip, sharing skin and bone yet never the same heart. Sol often mocks that we are proof of the gods’ irony– a girl named after the sun tethered to the earth, and me, Terre, a name heavy with terra firma, weighing her down.

She dreams of soaring, I find comfort in our shared life. Every jump she braves tugs at me, every step I take wrestles with her. Lately, Sol has been flying too far toward the sky, ambition clouding her judgement, and I feel the strain in every breath we take.

She dreamt of being an overseas correspondent, chasing the chaos of faraway places, while I wanted to stay home, grounded with words that create worlds instead of destroying them. My notebook, my sanctuary, its pages filled with words of my own.

M-I-N-E-L-L-A-N-I-S-A: the duality of choice and consequence, the battle between ambition and togetherness. A breath of two worlds— the desire to soar and the weight to stay grounded.

“Small wings with loud storms,” I wrote beside it, though the siamese sister laughed, her ambition loud enough to rattle our fragile wings.

“You think everything has to mean something,” she muttered. “Sometimes, things just are.”

But things aren’t that simple, not for one of us.

Sol:

Note: Assume the siamese is afraid of the sun. Maybe that’s why she hides in her words, buries herself in dictionaries and poetry as if it’s safer there, where the world cannot find her.

Sometimes, I imagine the life we could live if we were separate. I’d take my first steps on foreign soil, camera slung over one shoulder, notebook clinging to my chest, my words chasing after wars and revolutions. Terre deems it’s dangerous; I know it’s living.

Terre:

It’s the night I dread. When there’s only darkness and ear-splitting silence that Sol believes needs to be filled. She whispers about surgery like it’s salvation, freedom. “We could be our own people.” Yet she doesn’t realise that to me, we’re whole. I don’t need anything more than this life we share, imperfect as it is.

She wanted the sun, its fire and freedom; I feared the sea, cold and endless. Yet we were tied to the same fragile wings. And though we’re one body, I felt her choices like a foreign heartbeat in my chest.

I lie awake, staring at the ceiling that could be mistaken for the sky, imagining her standing alone on some distant battlefield while I write about safer worlds we’ll never set foot on.

It’s torture.

Sol:

It’s the morning I adore most. In the hours before the world stirs, when Terre and I sit by the window with our pens and paper. Her pen flows, capturing her endless catalog of made-up truths made for a believer. I sketch the places I’ll visit one day: deserts, jungles, cities lit up like the flicker of fireflies in the dark.

“You never draw us,” Terre said, her voice soft as her ambitions.

“Because I never see us there. Not like this.”

Her silence was a butterfly’s wing beat, a subtle breeze carrying an incredible weight in guilt.

Terre:

Sol has always seen the world in flames- bright, consuming, infinitely-expanding, endless opportunities. But she turns her back on the ashes it leaves behind. I keep the sketches of those places she scribbles, tucked between the pages of minellanisa and other words I cannot explain to her.

I picture the boy who flew too close to the sun, think of the wings that carried him too high, of the sun that burned him as he fell. Sol doesn’t see it that way. She calls it courage, not hubris.

I see him in her, and her in him. I see how you clutch your wings, I(S)ca(O)ru(L)s.

“Maybe the sun didn’t burn him,” she reasoned with facts. “Maybe it loved him too much to let him go.”

Sometimes, I think she’s talking about herself. Other times, I think she’s talking about me.

Sol:

Terre does not say it, but I know she is afraid. She writes about ripples and storms, how our choices dare carry consequences we cannot and will never control. But constant fear isn’t living, and neither is staying caged for eternity.

I see the surgery in my mind, the doctors cutting us apart, setting me free as a dove from a cage. I know the risks– I know I could lose her, or she could lose me. Isn’t that the price of flying? Daring to soar close to the sun? Finding out what we’re really capable of?

Terre:

While she slept, I noticed the rise and fall of her chest, knowing it mirrors my own.

To fly too low is to sink into the sea, to fly too high is to burn—but to stay still is to never know the wind. I see how she clutches her dreams as she clutches our wings, and I wonder if she’ll fly too close. Or maybe I’ll hold her grounded till the end.

I don’t know which is worse.

Sol:

I have only ever wanted to fly. But how do you leave the ground when it is your sister’s body you’re tethered to?

Terre:

The decision came like all things do– quietly, in the pauses of silence life grants us. The surgery is scheduled. For Sol’s sake. I don’t know if Sol feels the weight of it like I do, or if she looks beyond only to the sky before her.

On the morning of the operation, she whispers, “If one of us doesn’t make it, promise you’ll live.”

I nod, but the words feel heavy, impossible. I clutch her hand, wrap my wings around her, and for the first time, I think she understands.

“I’ll live,” I say. “But only if you fly.”