The sparse language in the opening paragraphs of the story was very effective in setting a mood and tone, but continuing in that voice throughout rendered the resulting prose almost impossible to follow with any sort of ease. In particular, during the flashback scene, we do not know which brother speaks first, which makes their conversation frustrating to parse. The use of passive-voice sentence fragments ("Words served as swords.", "The screaming began.") makes the next sequence confusing. I could not follow the action during that scene at all. I did like the use of twins as a physical and philosophical exploration of the reflection theme; that was well done.