{"id":2732,"date":"2026-07-14T15:13:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T15:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2732"},"modified":"2026-07-14T15:13:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T15:13:40","slug":"one-name-between-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/one-name-between-us\/2732\/","title":{"rendered":"One Name Between Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Photo by Michelle Gregor<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They grew us a new body. It was ready the morning we married. It wasn\u2019t hers, and it wasn\u2019t mine. This was the fairest way, they said, so no one would be favoured. Our old bodies went to the furnace by evening. I signed the merge as the last act of a solitary person and woke with hands and a heart belonging to both of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nine days, I was happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I felt her before I truly comprehended her presence. A second soul in our new heart. When I reached for a cup, her fingers came too. When I dreamed, she was standing at the edge of it, watching. We laughed about it, at first. Two women learning to use one throat, although deciding who would speak came naturally, because it was designed that way. We were one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the police came, and she went very still inside us. That\u2019s when I learned her real name, the way the whole arcology did. Rennick: the woman who killed a man in a kitchen with the same pan with which he had broken her jaw the winter before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b0I should have told you,\u00b0 she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We did not dispute the killing because she freely admitted it. But there was the small administrative problem of me. One body and only one sentence available: death by cancer infection. The cancer they seed into the condemned does not ask which of us signed for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have gone through all of it: the rage, which was as much hers as it was mine; it burned hotter for being shared. The bargaining: when I begged them to unmake what cannot be unmade, to pour us back into two. The clerk did not even look up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s a one-way door,\u201d he said. And I had walked through it in a wedding dress, with a smile on my face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the ache has started in the long bones we hold in common. It comes for us both. The great irony of it is, they will execute a murderer, but they will also execute the woman who loved her, and the mechanism cannot tell the difference. Neither does it care to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is what they did not plan for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have stopped saying \u00b0her\u00b0 mistake, and equally, I have stopped saying \u00b0mine\u00b0. She murdered a man who was killing her by inches, and I married a woman whose past I did not know. At the time, it seemed like certainty. Compounding this, the state made a body it now intends to waste. Three mistakes, and only one of them ours, and I will not spend our last weeks apportioning blame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b0Rennick,\u00b0 I said into the dark. \u00b0When it comes, we go together. The same breath and the same name.\u00b0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I felt her turn toward me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b0Together,\u00b0 she said. \u00b0This was not, after all, a mistake.\u00b0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pain ate away our body, but it never took our souls, and together, as one, we went into the great darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We did not dispute the killing because she freely admitted it. But there was the small administrative problem of me. One body and only one sentence available: death by cancer infection. The cancer they seed into the condemned does not ask which of us signed for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10158782359051062_103813597863211":"","twitter_1225722811282530305_1225722811282530305":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[{"account":"facebook_10158782359051062_103813597863211","service":"facebook","timestamp":1784042080,"status":"success"},{"account":"twitter_1225722811282530305_1225722811282530305","service":"twitter","timestamp":1784042080,"status":"error"}],"rop_publish_now_status":"done","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1792,1904],"tags":[851,192,1006,7,1906,1595,126,9,14,118,672,11,746,301,172],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1792","category-sept-2026-mistakes","tag-body","tag-came","tag-did","tag-her","tag-hers","tag-name","tag-new","tag-said","tag-she","tag-they","tag-us","tag-was","tag-wasn","tag-way","tag-when"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbrNJE-I4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2734,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions\/2734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}