134 Minutes

134 minutes. Aalia would never forget those 134 minutes that changed her life. Though she had never really lived those minutes. Though she had been just a little bigger than her dad's palm when those 134 minutes happened. 134 minutes, and some, without either parent by her side. Just warm blue light and whirring, clicking machines, and occasionally, gentle hands of sympathetic nurses that brushed her newborn cheek.
Her twin had been dying those 134 minutes. Her twin who, she has heard, was clinging on to her in every single scan report. Love, her Ma said... see, even in the womb, she was so full of love.
Maybe she just wanted to take my place, Aalia wanted to retort. But in 18 years, she has never been able to tell Ma that. Not when Anya's baby pic took pride of place in the living room. And the idea of her took up all the space in Ma's heart. Papa would have been good to me, she thought, trying hard to remember the man who died when she was three.
Ma idolised Anya. 'Everything good I did, she would have done better,' thought Aalia. And the naughty stuff, the bad stuff... Ma would splutter with rage, her words choking each other if Aalia so much as hinted that Anya would have been just as bad as her.
Anya was the angel. There was no fighting with the immortalised. They can sin no more. Death gives them the glow of perfection. In 18 years, all Aalia had learned was that the dead were more beloved.
She twisted the dupatta around her hand, winding it tight into a coil as she gazed at the creaking fan. A dog barked in the distance and she heard the faint thud-thud of a motorcycle engine. She stuffed the dupatta into her backpack, hoisting it on her shoulder as she stepped out into the night.
Death. That was not for her. Instead, she'd choose what her Ma referred to as 'fate worse than death'. She laughed out loud as she got onto her boyfriend's bike. Take that, Anya, she thought.