Soulsisters

Story Pitch

Ophelia and Olivia are twins. Were twins.

Ophelia's having a hard time changing that to the past tense, both out loud and in her head. The car accident's one-year anniversary was three weeks ago, and it was probably the first time in a long time she's had anyone over at her house to visit. After all, having a death in the family kind of makes you a bummer to hang out with. Two back-to-back? A downright drag.

And you know what Ophelia is realizing? Friends are over-rated.

Three weeks ago, she couldn't wait to get everyone back out of the house. It feels better emptier. It  feels more right when it's just her upstairs and her mom alternating staying out most of the night with shutting herself in her studio downstairs to work on her art. 

Olivia is -- was -- the social butterfly, anyway, the glue that kept Ophelia tethered to her classmates, to their collective friends. It feels better not to have them in her life anymore when she can't have Olivia there either. It feels like less of a transgression.

---

After becoming the sole-survivor in a terrible car accident that claimed the lives of both her twin sister and father, what's left of Ophelia's life takes a turn for the worse.

Her mother, a little bit of an unhinged artiste type to begin with, goes back to drinking and doing a generally terrible job taking care of herself and her remaining daughter. Ophelia is being forced to repeat 11th grade, which isn't even that much of a blow to her social life since most of Ophelia's friends stopped associating with her a year ago after the accident. She hears the words freak and weird fucking loser more often than she hears a kind hello from classmates these days, and her boyfriend, the one guy she thought understood her almost as much as her best friend and sister, just let her know he wants to break up.

All in all, it's been a bad start to the school year.

It gets far stranger, though, when on the night of the car accident's one-year anniversary, Ophelia begins receiving visitors at night -- dead animals. At first it's just road kill, limping along and banging softly at the windows until she lets them in. They don't do anything... they just seem to want to be near to her. In the mornings, they're just as dead as they were before showing up all reanimated-like at her window.

But her influence expands. It's buried pets next, and then the animals start staying alive in the morning. Some even start to regenerate a little, the really messed-up ones, the longer they stay alive. Ophelia finds herself fascinated, more than scared.

It doesn't take long for her to work up the courage to go to a graveyard. People are harder than the animals, but Ophelia manages to raise her first after a few false starts. Once she has an idea of how to keep her zombies alive for a little longer, she begins visiting Olivia's grave for the first time since the accident -- not quite able to bring herself to try resurrecting her sister.

When her mother is finally arrested for a DUI, and a well-meaning deputy calls child protective services, the discussion of sending her to a group home is enough to push Ophelia over the edge and into the arms of her newly resurrected sister. Ophelia becomes obsessed with perfecting her necromancy, convinced she can figure out a way to fully reanimate her sister if she just studies enough books and tries hard enough. All the signs point to the same thing, which is that if the zombie eats something living, it gains a portion of that living things animus -- its soul, the force keeping it sentient and alive. The greater the animus, the more living the zombie seems, the more time gained its undead ledger.

On a constant stream of mice, birds, rabbits, and raccoon, Ophelia manages to convert Olivia into a walking and talking corpse. When Ophelia works up the nerve to start snatching cats and dogs from neighbors' yards, Olivia starts to sound and look like her old self. She even starts to have wants and desires.

Ophelia is thrilled and terrified, ecstatic at having her other half back, horrified at what it might take to keep her there for good. And what's more? As much as Ophelia wants to ignore it, there's something about Olivia that's changed -- that's meaner, greedier, more... inhuman. And now that Olivia's gotten a second chance at living, she's not prepared to anyone, including her sister, take that back from her -- ever again.