Tag: doppelganger

Who’s Watching

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Frankie shifts the phone to her other hand. “Hey, can you actually hold on a second?” She rolls her neck and hears a satisfying crack. Her shoulder muscles feel significantly more relaxed as she turns the corner to her stairs. “I’m back, but hey? Can I actually tell you something a bit weird?” 

She turns around and looks back at her front door, just past the foot of the stairs. The fogged glass always makes her a bit uncomfortable, distorting the view to the porch, but she lets it slip past her mind and starts up the stairs.

Candice responds on the other side of the call. “Obvi, you can tell me anything. You should know that. I mean, as long as it’s not, like, anything gross.”

“It’s not gross.”

“Well, okay, you can tell me gross stuff too, but like, just…give me a warning?”

“No, oh my god, shut up. It’s nothing gross. It’s way more serious than that. Just listen.” 

Frankie gets to the top of the stairs, rounds the banister and leans against it. She looks at the door to her bedroom, just above the front door and looking over the street. She looks away and continues. “Okay, so you know my parents are still out of town right? And they have me looking over the place while they are gone, just me and the cat. Well, when I’m about to go to bed I always close the curtains, but, before I do I look out. It just feels nostalgic I guess, but the place across the street, I think the Madisons? On their roof, every night, there’s like a shape, I think. Its honestly too dark to tell for sure, but it looks like a person is sitting on their roof, like right at the edge, legs dangling and everything. And it just freaks me out.”

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Dragonfly: Static

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Jenny flipped the switch to start the rotation of her dragonfly’s habitat module. The spinning allowed the structure to simulate light gravity, which, even if it was nothing compared to Earth’s, was much better than nothing. She removed her hair tie, let her hair fall to her shoulders, skipped over to the fabricator and popped out a warm meal. 

“Too tired to cook today. I’m sure you understand, Fab Fab.” She patted the fabricator right above a crudely drawn face she made on the front, above the screen. The machine did not respond.

Jenny glided across the habitat and sat herself into her chair, ready to set up a call with Sammi, her sister, still back in the states. “Did that girl change her lock yet or not?” Jenny said to herself while popping a bit of the breading into her mouth. 

After pressing the call button, Jenny sat back and waited, expecting the call to take a minute before being accepted. Instead, the call was immediately accepted, shocking Jenny forward and forcing her to drop her meaty pastry.

“Shit! Hold on a second, let me get my food.” Jenny got off her chair and crawled under her desk, quickly finding the pastry before crawling back to her chair. “Stay there, I’m almost back.”

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Duplicitous

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I think it’s important that you hear this from my perspective. It… it might not make sense and I don’t completely understand what happened either. I just don’t know what she would say about this, and that terrifies me.

Earlier today, I returned home from a business trip. There…there was a conference out in Chicago, and with the snow, I just couldn’t get out of the city. So I was a day late. She knew that could happen. She had to have seen the weather reports, right? She was always the kind of person to fret over these kinds of things so I can’t imagine she didn’t spend most of yesterday checking the weather every hour.

I tried to call. I really did. I called home and no one answered. It didn’t even ring. I thought I had the wrong number. So I called again. I think I called about 10 times, but nothing changed.

When I got back home, I was worried, really worried. So I ran inside. I banged the door into the wall, I think. There was a dent in the wall where the handle would have been. I didn’t think I opened it that hard, but there was the dent, like on the wall. This startled her, I thought at least. She turned around speechless and just stared at me. She was wearing a light blue dress that went down to her knees, and over that a white apron. 

I said, “Oh thank god! I tried to reach you!” 

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