I have a very dear friend. His name is Shambles. We've been together a long time. I can't imagine my life without him. I found him in the snow when I was ten years old, and he has been with me ever since.



    Most people don't like Shambles. They think he is very strange because of how he looks. They see his pale skin and his strange eyes, and they look away from him. I like Shambles' eyes. I think they are very pretty because they are so big. He will look at me with his big eyes, and he tells me that I am his only friend. He owes me a life debt, and he is constantly at my side. Shambles is a loyal friend.



    We go everywhere together. We are never apart. This has led to many questions in the past. Questions that make me uncomfortable, but that Shambles answers for me. I trust him to tell the truth. He is much better with words than I am. When people stare, he waves at them and tells them hello. When they ask about us, he tells them the honest truth. I saved his life, and he owes me a great debt. He is by my side until the very end, and he is my dear friend. I don't like when people stare, but it doesn't bother Shambles. He is more kind than I could ever be.



    I found Shambles in the snow by the river. He was very cold. His skin was very pale. I took off the parka my mother had made me, and I wrapped him in it. I did not recognize him. I saw that he was badly hurt. The town doctor would never help him, not without money, and I had no money to give. The doctor would not help those who could not help themselves. The snow was cold and white, but my friend even more. I picked him up, for he was very small, and I carried him to the shed by the edge of the field. I held him until he stopped shaking. I asked for his name, but he could not remember. His mind, he said, 'was all a-shambles.' And so that is what I called him. My very best friend, Shambles.



    Shambles and I enjoy going for walks. He enjoys the sun on his skin, although he cannot stay out long. His lack of pigment leaves him no protection from it. I carry an umbrella with me to keep him shaded. I am taller and stronger, and as I do not feel the discomfort of holding the heavy umbrella, I am happy to do this for him. He is my friend, and I owe him as a great a debt as he owes me. Shambles does not have much hair; it is fine as angel's silk, and grows only in wisps. He enjoys the wind blowing through it. He tells me he is happy to have such a good friend. I walk down the street to the bridge, holding the umbrella above him, and I watch him smile at those that pass us. Sometimes they smile back.



    Shambles enjoys poetry. I have never had much of an ear for it. He enjoys the work of Robert Frost. At night, if he cannot sleep, I listen to him recite that famous poem:



    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

    I took the one less traveled by,

    And that has made all the difference.



    Shambles whispers to me, "It has made all the difference." And he reaches across the space between us to hold my hand. He is always cold.



    On that cold day I found my friend, he had been mortally wounded. His bright blood kept us warm inside the shack. Our breath hung in the air in little clouds, and my dear friend told me about his life with what little strength he had.



    He was from a small town further down the river. His parents had died when he was very small. All he could remember was a life of hunger, of moving constantly and of the great, crushing sadness of the time. The orphanages turned him away, the odd little boy with pale skin and strange eyes. Albinos in that day were considered freaks, sub-human. Even the traveling circus would not take him. He lived off of what little the merchants threw in the gutters. He took to wandering at night, when there was trash to sift through, and the town began to talk of a ghost. Children saw it wandering up and down the streets, dressed in rags, humming a song no one had ever heard before. Word spread through the town, and the men banded together to find this intruder, this ghost that prowled and stole from the scraps of the city.

    They caught my friend down by the docks. He was eating a rotten fish when the first blow struck his side. My dear friend, he felt a sudden sense of a weight being lifted, of something subtracted, and he fled into the outskirts of town, down to the bank of the river. The men followed him, the one with the machete at the front. He ran until he could run no more, and he collapsed in the snow. His right arm was gone, his side scalped and oozing. The men could not see him in the dark, he was very pale, and they returned to town, satisfied that the spirit had been driven away.

    My friend does not remember how long he was there, lying in the snow by the river. One day, perhaps two. He remembers only my voice, my warmth, and the calm light of the shed, where our breath hung around us as he told me his tale. I held my poor, broken friend, and I told him of my own life. Of the death of my poor mother, who had never known my father. A drifter, a sailor who broke into our home and took something, leaving something else behind in return. I told him of my daily trips to the river, to fetch water to boil for her. I told him of her pretty pale skin, so much like his, of how she lay in a sea of her dark hair and called to me. Her voice burbling up through the water inside her, she called to me to tend to her, and I was a good son. I did all I could for her. When she passed, I wrapped her mermaid body in her favorite sheets, which were the color of a thin sky, and I buried her out in the garden. I stroked my friends wispy hair and told him of my loneliness, of the years I had spent here, coming to the river every day in a routine I could not break.

    Out of a sudden desperation, my friend clung to me with his remaining hand, and his eyes became wider and full of water. Please, he begged me, please don't bury me in the ground. I held him close, and the blood dried between us, and the sun rose and set outside the shack. My friend, my dearest friend Shambles, hung on.

    We spoke to each other all throughout the night, and the next morning, and what transpired between us, what exactly was said, I could never repeat. The words of dying men are lost like a breath to the wind. For I was dying too. Without my parka, I shivered, my hands and face long since turned to stone. We held each other, Shambles cradled in my dead arms, and I could not have let him go. With what strength I had, I picked us up, and I took us to the barn, where I knew I could find the tools we would need.

    I laid my friend on the hay, pulled off the parka and inspected the wound. Tools in hand, I laid beside him, and told him not to be afraid. My friend, my dearest friend Shambles, was not afraid. His eyes were quiet and deep, and I pressed my forehead against his and did what had to be done.



    Shambles has never left my side. Even now, as I lay in bed writing, he is here with me. His head rests upon our shoulders, on the hammock that the scar tissue forms. We have agreed to donate our body to science, so that they may understand us better. They say it is impossible, for two people to live as we have. They say it must be some sort of parlor trick. Shambles laughs, and tells them we are no trick. He delights in showing the scar, which reaches down to our hips. The doctors wish to test the skin, to see what it can sense, but I deny them this. Shambles is terrified of needles.



    They asked us what doctor would perform such a monstrous surgery. I allow Shambles to tell them of the needle and thread I used to sew the ragged ends of his skin to mine, a thick thread Mother used for quilts before she died. He tells them of how I angered the remaining horse left in the stables, the only one I had not sold, until it stepped upon my arm, breaking it. He did not watch me take it off, but he could hear the chewing of the saw. I told the doctors, it was easy: I have never felt pain. From birth, I have never known the sensation. It is as foreign to me as a third eye. With ease, I flayed the skin of my rib, and I gave to Shambles my body, my blood. A simple rope stitch through our skin staunched the bleeding. The stumps of our arms were harder, admittedly, to join together, but the arteries and large veins were the most critical, and the most easily seen. I saved my dear friends life, and as we grew together, our permanent bond sealing, our strength grew as well. In time, the stitches were taken out, and our wound healed. They tell us it is impossible to do what we have done. But here we are.



    You see my dear friend Shambles was mortally wounded. He would never have survived on his own. He was only a little boy, who had been assaulted by a town that cast him out, and who had crawled through the snow for many miles with a missing arm. By the time he came to me, he was as close to death as any man can get. The fact that he survived the night in the shed was a miracle of itself, and during that night I came to understand what was being asked of me. I could not save my dear mother, who had died of tuberculosis, but I could save this boy. Born without the ability to feel pain, I could save this boy. Would I sacrifice my life to save his in penance for the life I let go?

    So as my friend faded in and out of death, or whatever is directly in front of those gates, I took his skin, and I sewed it to my own. I created matching wounds, and I joined us together. And when I was finished, when the stitches were sewn and Shambles was at my side, where he would remain forever, I saw his skin begin to flush, as my blood gave him strength.

    When he awoke, he pledged what remained of his life, of our life, to me, and the wounds began to heal.



    I have a dear friend. His name is Shambles. On a cold winter day in 1935, I found him dying by the river in the snow. He has been at my side ever since.