pages Doppelganger

by Mark Crimmins

Published in Issue No. 220 ~ September, 2015

People keep telling you you look exactly like this other person. You realize you must be pretty similar when strangers start walking up to you and continuing conversations you’ve never had. I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day. A girl you’ve never seen before marches up to you while you’re in line at a coffee shop and asks you what the hell happened to you on Friday. An office door opens and a dude you don’t know looks right at you and says: “There you are!” Then a woman with a security guard rushes over to you and angrily announces that you hacked into their computers and downloaded all this sensitive data. The guard wants to know—if the woman is mistaken—what you are so angry about. Next time somebody misrecognizes you, you confront them and ask them your name and when they tell you you look up your doppelganger and find an address. You decide you’ll find out just how fucking similar this double of yours is. People are always saying people look exactly like people that they look nothing at all like. You imagine how absurd it will be when your double opens the door and asks you what you want. You make sure to go in broad daylight so there’s no element of shade. No obstacle to clarity. You ring the bell. You hear somebody coming. A voice. The door starts to open. And there you are. Talking to yourself.

Artwork by Wedad Alnasser (Jordan)

Artwork by Wedad Alnasser (Jordan)

 

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Mark Crimmins's short stories have been published in Confrontation, Cha, Trainless Magazine, Apalachee Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Kyoto Journal, Del Sol Review, Eclectica, Penmen Review, Split Rock Review, Prick of the Spindle, Columbia, Tampa Review, Cortland Review, Queen's Quarterly, Ellipsis, Del Sol Review, Microliterature, ad Pif Magazine. His flash fictions have been published in Eunoia Review, Happy, White Rabbit, Spelk, Dogzplot, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Atticus Review, Gravel, Restless Magazine, and Flash: the International Short Short Story Magazine. He teaches English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.