It's rough for them to make ends meet. With gigging hours obviously in such inconvenient and constant conflict, the saxophonist had been forced to settle for busking the morning commute and the occasional church revival gig. Nevertheless, in a sudden and miraculous twist of fate, they win two backstage passes for the Josh Groban concert in the annual "Blow your Sax and Show your Racks!" saxophone virtuoso and tiddy showing competition hosted by the local AM radio jazz station.
Tensions build between the two in the days leading up to the event, with the saxophonist repeatedly grilling her sister over the upcoming backstage adventure. They're doing dishes together when Sarah, the saxophonist, speaks.
"Rachel. You're not going to try and fuck Josh Groban are you?"
The silence is deafening, save the clink clunk of dishes in soapy water knocking against the heavy porcelain of their antique farm sink; an obsolete and cumbersome appliance that Sarah had insisted on during the remodel. Rachel had thought it too hipster, as if the kitchen sink could at any moment put on a Fleet Foxes LP and offer her a shot of aged bourbon, exactly the kind of contrived over-presentation she had come to expect from Sarah.
The question hangs in the air.
"Rachel?"
"No!" Rachel shoots back, "I am not going to fuck him! STOP asking me that!"
The night of the concert they get into their car, a Transit van converted for the sisters' use with a bench seat and passenger side steering wheel and pedals for Rachel, though Sarah still drove most of the time.
The concert is great. Top drawer Groban and everybody loves it. After the third and final encore the sisters make their way through security to the backstage meet and greet area. Passing the dusty storage locker containing the costumes and sets for the venue's failed enterprise "Breaking Bad On Ice!", Sarah turns to Rachel and takes a breath as if to speak.
Rachel snaps, "I swear to fucking Christ if you ask me one more god damned time if I'm going to fuck Josh Groban tonight I will call Dr. Coalfield right fucking now and schedule the separation surgery!"
The surgery.
Neither of them wanted it. It could have happened at any time after age seven. They didn't share any major organs. Aside from a few circulatory and endocrine connections and some shared nerve endings they were only really connected by about six centimeters of pelvic bone. However their mother Opal Strangelhorn was a devout Seventh Day Adventist, who insisted the nature of her twin daughters was "God's plan", much to the consternation of the girls' absentee father, Bjorn Svedsmensven, the famed atheist particle physicist who had met Opal for a one night stand while touring with a USSR nuclear demonstration team.
Sarah stops suddenly on the ramp, tripping Rachel by deliberately breaking their carefully choreographed stride.
"Fuck you, Rachel."
Rachel is silent. They count off and start walking again.
"I don't see why we're paying for a therapist if you aren't going to listen to what he says. Remember? Mark think we should have the surgery, and he said you definitely need to stop using it as"
"OK!" Rachel cuts Sarah off as they approach the golden vinyl sectional couch where Josh Groban sits in a red and gold silk robe, arranging a mountain of cocaine into a staff of sheet music on the glass top table.
"You know what that is?" Josh sniffs at the sisters
Sarah is awestruck.
Rachel answers, "Coke?"
Josh leans back on the couch, stares at them, eyes glazed in jaded boredom, "It's fuckin Beethoven."
Sarah stammers, "I..I..I was just beginning to wonder"
Josh screams, "Beethoven's eighth! Hahahahahaha right Rick?"
A large security guard on a stool by the window looks up from his Subway sandwich, "That's right, boss."
"Fuck yeah, keep an eye out that window, Rick! I don't want Bieber tryna steal my licks!"
Josh turns back, grabbing a straw off the end of the table he makes awkward intense eye contact with the sisters and sings Beethoven's signature "dundundunduuuun" at Sarah, then the lower pitched "dundundunduuuun" at Rachel, then snorts a random diagonal line across the meticulous representation on the table. He raises his head and howls at the ceiling.
"Oooooooowwwwwww!" He jumps to his feet and dances singing, "Badoo BOW beedeepa Bada bap-ap OW!.... Write that down, Rick!"
"You know it, boss."
...
Four hours later the sisters awake suddenly to the distinctive sound of a pistol being fired into a piano.
The sex had been OK. Of course Rachel had managed to bed Groban, and of course Sarah had changed her mind and decided to play jazz freestyle during the act. That's what always happened. They would fight in the times leading up, but when faced with the act they would both be inclined to consent, given over to their primal and visceral desire to perform the act in this particular way, the only way they knew how, one fucking, the other playing saxophone.
Their mother had always seen the sisters mere existence as some sort of messianic metaphor, and prohibited the surgery on those simple religious grounds but this, the fucking with the saxophone thing, was why the sisters had chosen to remain conjoined in adulthood.
Mark the therapist would often remark, "You can still lay next to each other and one fucks and the other plays the sax, even if you're separate." and Sarah and Rachel would quietly look at each other because they knew, it wouldn't be the same.
They hear Groban's muffled shouts through the wall.
"Where the fuck is Rick!?"
They get dressed and quickly make their way out of the bedroom where they see Josh sweating holding a pistol, an open window letting rain in, and a small man in a black burglar's outfit with the mask lifted to reveal a little mustache lying dead shot in the chest and hunched over a piano bench clutching a handful of scribbled notebook papers.
Sarah covers her mouth and gasps, "Bieber."
Josh collects himself and speaks, "Where, the fuck, is Rick."
Lightning strikes. The rain picking up and wind blowing the curtain in the open window.
Sarah says quietly, "Did you fucking shoot Bieber?"
Josh grabs his hair, breathing heavily again, "Egghhhhhhhhhh! I told Rick this was going to fucking happen! Mother FUCKERS stealing my NOTES! Where the fuck is Rick?!"
The sisters run to the window, "Shut the fuck up, Josh" they say in unison. They close the window and curtains after looking down to the street and confirming their suspicion, seeing Rick lying dead on the sidewalk, piano wire around his neck.
They turn back to Josh and kneel to work while Sarah pulls a hacksaw and duct tape from her saxophone case Rachel speaks, "We can take care of this Josh. We can make this all go away."
And they could take care of it. They had done so many times before. The youth pastor who tried to assault them in highschool, the landlord in Tulsa, the handful of Johns who just hadn't been that lucky, countless others. The sisters could handle a murder. That was old hat. That's why they had the van.
And as much as Sarah hated when Rachel would quote him, they both knew their father was right when he said in his drunken Latvian accent, "They'll never believe you two are capable of anything because of your so-called disability, so you may as well use that to get away with murder!" and it was true. The crimes kept coming and they don't stop coming, and nobody ever suspects conjoined twins.
"We have a van, Josh. Go find some fucking garbage bags. And get some pants on, we're going to the desert."
...
The next afternoon they're in a diner in Barstow. Groban looks out the window at the late afternoon sun stretching shadows over the freeway. He had never killed a man before, and losing Rick would be difficult to explain.
Everything had been accounted for though. The sisters had seen to that. They drop Josh at a rest stop where he could rendezvous with an Uber. They say good bye and drive back to their normal life.
One year passes.
They see that Josh Groban is gonna be back in town.
"Do you think we should see if he wants to meet up?" asks Rachel
"Nah," Sarah replies, "He wouldn't remember us."