Father always had an unhealthy fascination with poisons. He told us that when he was still very young, he was playing in the family garden when his dog ate some pieces from his mother’s flowers. Within the hour, the pup was writhing upon the ground, foaming and whining as the spasms of death wracked its little body. Father, though appropriately horrified for a boy watching the death of a beloved living creature, was wholeheartedly fascinated. It was soon after that he realized the very hyacinth bulbs his mother nurtured and adored were the very ones that killed his pet. And it was then that he found the splendor that both disguised and surrounded poisons.
And so began his career into toxicology, a field that consumed his interests wholly and without fail. Father told us of his time at university in America, where he fought tooth and nail to be admitted into the course taught by Alexander Gettler himself, the hero who brought so many new methods of chemical isolation into the hands of chemists everywhere. Sometimes I would wander into Father’s laboratory late at night, only to find him gleefully enacting some of Gettler’s greatest breakthroughs. It was moments like those that I was reminded why Mother was so set against owning dogs.
But for all his joy over poisons and death, it was for that very reason that he married so late in life (If by “late” you meant 26, which his mother certainly did). Though handsome enough in his own right, what woman would ever consider a man so enraptured with death? Not that Father cared at the time; those with no interest in his craft held little interest to him. What use did he have for silly women named Gertrude or Prudence, he said, when he had such beauties as Belladonna and Strychnine to enrapture him? It was only for Jessamine that he ever looked up from his work, a vibrant young woman who wandered into Father’s lab one fateful day and unabashedly corrected his methodology for carbon monoxide detection.
“It was love at first pressure reduction,” Father said. Finally Father met a woman with pride and determination, whose captivation with toxins rivaled his own. A match made in heaven, her father said (Or hell, depending on how you looked at it). And after only a few years – though Grandfather claimed it took decades – and copious agreement on her part over how their children would be named, Mother and Father finally married.
Castor was the first of us to be born. Though Mother said they waited a bit to see what their children were like before they gave out names, she admitted that there was only so much thought they could give to the name of their sons. Poisons and the flowers from which they are purified, after all, were rarely considered masculine. But Father deemed it appropriate, given that he was born under the star of Gemini, though lamented that there was no poisonous entity named after Pollux to give to the next son. Castor never seemed to mind.
Ivy was next. Father said that, within a week of her birth, my eldest sister never wanted to be near the ground, always reaching towards the heavens as if she had already earned a right to be there. She cried when she was placed in her crib, and only after Mother designed a rig that kept the cradle airborne did Ivy finally give in to sleep. Her affinity towards heights only grew as she did, leading to an inevitable fascination with flight that filled my parents with both pride and horror, the latter usually reserved for Ivy’s early attempts at flinging herself off the roof with paper wings.
Sarin was the third of us. His was a tricky birth, and he was off schedule by nearly two months. As a result, his lungs were still very weak, and our parents feared that he would not last long enough to be named. But Sarin lived, albeit having to go through life with terrible asthma that would very likely stick with him through adulthood. His wracking cough kept our parents awake at night, and it was finally in a fit of sleep-deprived hysteria that Father named the colicky baby after the most potent of lung-paralyzing neurotoxins. At the time, Mother agreed that it was genius.
Daphne and Delphinium were born two years later, and Father was so excited at the prospect of naming the twins that the consideration for personality was thrown out the window.
“What is it about twins,” Daphne later asked.
“That makes us seem less important individually?” Delphi finished.
None of us ever dared answer. My sisters were inseparable, bound together by threads unseen by anyone but themselves. When one fell and scraped her knee, the other would howl in despair. When they were six, Father rushed Delphi to the hospital after she fell from a tree and broke her arm, only for Mother to have to follow soon after with Daphne screaming in agony. We could tell Father was exceedingly curious, but Mother always said she drew the line at human experimentation.
“Especially on our children,” she said, and looked at Father until he put away the hypodermic needles and retreated back to his personal laboratory.
Then it was my turn. Mother thought that she was past the age of having children when she suddenly realized one day that the growing bulge at her waist was not, in fact, the sudden onset of life’s newest stage.
“My heart skipped a beat,” she told me, “and I was suddenly leaping in ecstasy at having evaded one hormonal crisis for a much better one.”
My birth came on a quiet summer day in 1953, which was only quiet because everyone else in the neighborhood was sitting in front of someone’s television set, watching our newest queen being crowned. This, unfortunately, meant that the doctor was a little late in getting to the house for my delivery. Mother was certain that the doctor was so entranced by the broadcast that he’d forgotten about her, and that one of us, if not both, would surely end up dying.
“Cerberin!” she yelled at Father, pacing madly around the nursery in a futile effort to relieve the contraction pains. “I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, we’re naming it Cerberin!”
She couldn’t explain her reasons at the time, and Father was so distressed that he didn’t think to press the matter. Though for what sane reason would his wife want to name their child after a toxin produced by something known as the Suicide Tree? Even Mother admitted that her reasoning was not sound, though it seemed perfectly logical at the time.
“I was convinced,” she told me, rocking me to sleep one night, “that no matter the outcome, you were going to break someone’s heart. That’s what cerberin does.”
Though Mother and Father always seemed to carry a twinge of regret over my naming, I never felt the same way. It was unique, to say the least. The one thing Sarin and I never had to worry about was running into any other person on the Earth carrying our names in their pocket. And I thought nothing of the strangeness of my family’s intrigues. It wasn’t until I entered primary that I realized that no one else’s parents had such an in-depth knowledge of the world’s toxins and none of them knew how the garden’s flowers could kill them. No one else had a laboratory in their basement or a rack of physician’s tools in their library. It was the first time I ever heard the term “unusual” stuck upon my family’s name. And it certainly would not be the last.
Geeky, nerdy and proud 