Two Identical Strangers

by Rosetta Young | Sep 3, 2020 | flash fiction

These days, when I pull up the old photographs, most people still attribute the resemblance between Lydia Lissing and me to the uniforms. My husband, who has always refused to see it, has never gotten past this first reluctance.   

“You all look like the same girl,” he said on our third date, years ago, when I first showed him the line of girls in blue tartan kilts, knee socks, white sweaters, half-smiles. He laughed at the photo, asked if I still had my school skirt, if I would wear it for him. 

A few, though, when I show the second image of just Lydia and me, will say: “Oh, now I see it.”

Snapped by my best friend Amelia, it downgrades our likeness from uncanny to strong. The light is wrong, distorting the planes of our faces. Lydia stands in the sun and, over my shoulder, you can see the branches of a weeping willow. I wear my school sweater, but Lydia has on the white polo. She frowns into the camera and I smile in the shadow.

When I was younger, around the time I was dating my husband, I would use Lydia as a conversation starter.

“Have you ever met your doppelganger?” I would ask. “I went to boarding school with mine.”

You would be surprised by how many people want to believe in the uniqueness of faces. Like my husband, some simply treat the resemblance as a matter of opinion, and others insist there must be a secret family connection. Only a few are willing to admit that given the limited amount of face-types, complexions, features, ethnicities, genetic material, that such freak resemblances are perhaps inevitable.

“But,” they always say, “It’s not like you couldn’t tell the two of you apart.”

I tend to shrug. “Yes and no.”

Lydia came in the tenth grade, one year after me. When she was introduced in the assembly, I had the sense of seeing myself walk in front of the entire school, the terrible immodesty of it, as if I were being forced to watch myself on videotape.

We both had dark brown hair that grazed our shoulders, red mouths, short black eyelashes, pale blue eyes, flat little noses, slightly heavy cheeks. But, of course, it was more than just a collection of colors and features. It was the cumulative effect.

That first day, I heard Michael Anderson, the best-looking guy in our grade, say, “Creepy,” as Lydia and I walked by each other in the dining hall. I kept catching my classmates staring and pointing back and forth between the two of us. No one would quite look me in the eye. Finally, Amelia said,

“She looks like you.”

Sometimes, when I was in class, I would just stare at her. Whenever we spoke, though, I couldn’t concentrate. Something kept slipping away. We’d both get distracted. It was the bed-sheet that wouldn’t stay put on the far corner, that one French conjugation you always forget—that feeling when you can’t remember your PIN for no reason at all.

By junior year, though, everyone began to forget we looked the same, and instead, they thought we looked alike, and then, by senior year, no one ever called either of us by the wrong name anymore.

That last Halloween we tried to dress it up—I think it was Amelia’s idea—and we went to a party as Twins. We wore identical red dresses and did our hair in Heidi plaits. Everyone thought it was hilarious and, by the end of the night, Lydia was in the master bedroom with Michael Anderson and I was chain-smoking on the unfamiliar suburban lawn with someone’s older brother.

After graduation, we ended up at the kind of party where sentiment and nostalgia morph into bacchanalia and delinquency. The boys kept promising to execute stunts more and more daring, and, then, a few of the girls started kissing one another.

Michael Anderson, seeing an opportunity, shouted, “Wait.”

Amelia and a girl from our AP English class unpeeled themselves from one another at the sound of his voice. And then, with everyone looking at him, he pointed at Lydia and then me.

“You two.”

I am not sure why he wanted to see us in particular—it could have been that he liked Lydia or because we were both considered pretty or because it was a particular fantasy of his or because he was articulating something that everyone wanted to see but hadn’t known until that moment. And I am also not sure why Lydia and I laughed and started gliding towards each other in our tank tops and cut-off shorts. Under the bluish, dimmed lights of the party, we looked identical.

Everyone was cheering, and Lydia was laughing, but then, when she looked right at me, her eyes got serious.

What can I say about the kiss itself? Have you ever felt yourself doubled, like your body was a shape cut simultaneously into two sheets of paper and then unfolded to create one unified silhouette? That to be human is not to be a unique thing but just a copy made over hundreds and hundreds of times? 

Me and Eddie on the Boulevard

by Francine Witte | Aug 28, 2020 | flash fiction

waiting to cross.  My heart tick, ticking like a stupid clock.  Eddie and his dark hair forest, his blue eye ocean.  Eddie, who is only 15.

But to me, he is a man.  In five years, I will catch up.  By then, I will be beautiful.  My hair will be a riverflow.

Eddie walks me home from school for extra money.  Mama trusts him cause of when she broke her leg.  He was sweeping our sidewalk, and she fell from the garden ladder. Our beautiful Mimosa tree.  Eddie carried Mama 20 blocks to the hospital.  Past Mr. Steinberg with the snaggly dog, past Susie, the rose girl always on the corner, past the lawn chair ladies who look at Eddie – why don’t you carry me?

Your ambulance is too slow.  Eddie tells the hospital nurse.  Mama thanks him, here’s ten dollars.  He won’t take it, and I think maybe Mama starts to like him a little herself.

Every day, before Eddie comes, I tie my hair in a sparkly ribbon.  I borrow apple burst lip gloss from Becky, my best friend.  Outside, Eddie, by the gate.  The older girls look as we pass them by.  We are married, I want to say, so stop looking already!

And that’s how it’s been.  Me, Eddie’s wife in secret.  Together on the boulevard in silent love.

Until this moment.  Waiting for the light.  Cars swim by like metal whales.  Eddie looking over their tops and across the street.  Looking for something on that whale horizon.  And then, there it is.                                                                                         

Across the street, the candy store girl.  Arranging the newspapers outside. Thin, with midnight hair.  She is the beautiful I want to be.  I look at Eddie and the way he loves her.  The tornado starting in his eyes.

When she looks our way, he waves, but she doesn’t wave back.  She doesn’t even see him.  If she did, she would love him, too.

That’s when I know how hard I love Eddie, and how I have to let him go.  A boy/man like that with all the girls looking and him wanting the one who doesn’t.

 I tell him right there on the boulevard, it’s okay, I’m a big girl and I can walk home with just Becky.  I can’t tell if the sadness in his eyes is from me or the girl who is still not looking back.

The light turns green, and Eddie takes my hand.  We pass the cars standing still.  Their metal fronts.  Big frozen smiles. They are waiting, just waiting while me and Eddie cross the boulevard on the way to the next thing that is going to break our hearts.

The Tornado

by Rebekah Bergman | Aug 17, 2020 | flash fiction

It was a bright, gray day with no breeze, and she had just finished digging a grave. She’d woken that morning and her turtle had not. How should she feel on this first day without Tulip? Or on all the days without Tulip to come? Sad, probably. But sometimes being with someone only makes you feel more alone. She thought of a chair in the corner of an empty room and how it makes the room look even emptier. As she put the shovel down, the sky turned a raw-yolk yellow. She looked up and felt dizzy, so she leaned against a sapling, closing her eyes.

“Hi,” a voice said above her.

He was only a mini-tornado. Room-sized, not house-sized. He had vague shadows for his eyes and mouth, like the face people see in the moon. 

“Hi,” she said, tentative. 

“What’s that?” he nodded at the shoebox.

“Tulip,” she said, and she told him about pets, about death.  

Suddenly, she realized she needed a eulogy. What to say about Tulip? Sebastian had brought him home in a shoebox like the one that would serve as his casket. He’d had an ugly frown and an ancient face 

“Tulip,” she tried, “you were slow and steady and dissatisfied about everything.”

The tornado darkened. “But you’ll miss him?” 

She shrugged.

“Ashes to ashes.” She dropped some dirt onto the lid.  

“Please,” the tornado said, “let me.” He lifted a small mound and funneled it through him.  

So, she thought, he’s a gentle tornado. She invited the tornado inside.

She gave him a quick tour. The living room was empty, save for one chair in a dim corner. In the kitchen, he touched the ceiling fan by accident, and it spun like a propeller and crashed to the floor.  

There was the bedroom, the bathroom. In front of the last room, she paused.  

“If it’s messy, I’ll clean it,” he offered. He did a graceful pirouette, and a layer of dust floated up from the carpet. The door blew open. She followed him in.

Everything was just as Sebastian had left it. The rubber ash from his old erasers, his favorite pencils, his half-used chapstick, his dirty tissues, his coffee mug. She opened a window to let it air out.  

The tornado gathered a stack of loose papers. “What should I do with these?” he asked, helpfully.

She pushed them, in one motion, right out the window. They scattered like gulls and disappeared. 

For dinner, she made pancakes and the tornado whipped up dollops of cream. They ate and he continued cleaning. He cleared a clogged drain and dusted the shelves. He whistled as he whirled through the hall. 

“Who’s that with you?” he called at the base of the stairs. He’d just straightened a crooked photograph and polished the glass. She saw herself in it—not in the photo, but as a reflection, the dark shadows of her eyes staring back.

“Sebastian,” she said. Her voice sounded like distant thunder. She didn’t tell him anything else.

That evening, the tornado used himself as a corkscrew on a wine bottle so masterfully she asked if he’d done it before.

He couldn’t remember. His past was hazy. “It doesn’t matter where I’ve been,” he told her. “I can never go back. No place is the same once I’m gone.”

If that was a warning, it was already too late. Here he was drinking wine with her, not taking up space, just moving the air.

The next morning, she couldn’t find a few small belongings: a sock, the back of an earring, a silver bracelet. The tornado looked bigger. 

“Let’s go outside?” she offered.

In the yard, he spun wildly. “Did you love Tulip?” he asked as he passed the fresh grave.

“A little,” she said. “Enough.”

She used to tell Sebastian that you should only love someone to a certain extent. “You should know you’d be complete without them,” she’d say.  

Sebastian hadn’t shared her philosophy.

She was standing next to the sapling again. Sebastian had planted it. Why was it still growing when Sebastian was gone? She reached, grabbed hold of a branch and pulled it free. She kept going, grabbing and tearing, spinning around it until no branches remained. She thrust her weight into the thin trunk, but it wouldn’t budge. She found the shovel and dug it up from below.  

The tornado had slowed down to watch her. He was almost entirely still.

The tornado slept in the backyard that night. He stopped growing and his winds calmed. He seemed tired or ill. She thought she saw something within him sparkle, but she said nothing about it. 

Sebastian had given her that silver bracelet for an anniversary. It looked like a handcuff and never fit right. A month after he bought it, he asked where it was and she couldn’t tell him. He held it out inside his own fist.

“Here,” he said. “I’ve had it this whole time. And you didn’t even know it was gone.”

She slept outside with the tornado. “When I’m gone,” he said in the morning, “you can miss me. But I won’t even know who you are.”

He had it wrong, she thought. “That makes you lucky,” she said. But he couldn’t hear her. Inside him, there was lightning and rain.

“Tell me about Sebastian,” he called out. And since she knew he’d be gone soon, she did.

The last time she saw him, everything was bright and gray as if there were no such thing as weather at all.

“Are you still there?” she whispered. He was still there.

She reached for him and the sky turned yellow. He said nothing. She said nothing. They knew. And then—in an instant—there was no sound, no light, no air, only that violent kind of emptiness that you carry inside you, around and around and around.