Episode 3: The sisters creep up on Halloween

It was understood among family members that Ambulancia and Sireena would make their own costumes, no matter what they were, how sophisticated the design or engineering.  In their signature voices they lamented a return to school - the dress code violations at least temporarily cleared up - as taking away valuable creative time.  As though her "no shenanigans" look would carry any weight at all, their mother shooed them along the next morning.  Tomorrow she would need to write a note explaining their tardiness.  I think they arrived some time before lunch.

In their defense, the sisters, in addition to soaring inventiveness, could be said to possess, let's call them virtues.  They could sew like no others of the same ages and, at flea markets attended with their mother, collected not only bits of vintage fabrics and garments but sewing implements from another time, another place.  These they stored with surprising care in a shared curio cabinet.  The same piece of furniture was home to the disputed tiara but as though the glass-fronted case were sacred ground, no monkey business would ever intrude upon it there.

Cabinet photo source.

Vintage Chinese pincushion.

With the sisters' afternoons now full of costuming, a word they spoke in italics, home life became less high-pitched and confrontational.  Though one occasionally, and purely by accident, jabbed the other with a pin on its way back to the pincushion, the tone might have been called sedate.  Halloween was three days away.

"I am simply not tatty enough," shrieked Ambulancia suddenly.  "I need more trashed flowers for my corsage."  They had not stuck with bridesmaids for long but shifted to something that sounded like (mumble, mumble) punk-slash-zombie prom girls, who, of course, would have wrist corsages., though they could still be bridesmaids.  "We never tell everything we know," was one of their mottoes.

"Is it too late to go to Blanche's?" Sireena shrilled, referring to a favorite junk/thrift/second hand store.  It was not too late, their mother drove them in their not-abnormal states of disarray and they plunged into the bins and boxes in which Blanche offered the ragout of hard-worn remnants of other lives that was her specialty.  Suddenly Ambulancia grabbed her little sister, none too gently, and held out an old studio photograph that caused Sireena to gasp.  They shuffled it in among their finds and hurried back to the car where they exchanged sinister grins and sidelong glances all the way home.  To be continued.