Free Short-short

*I posted this years ago in my livejournal, and have been unable to post it or put it up anywhere since, because I didn’t keep a copy and couldn’t find it on livejournal.  Now I’ve found it.  It is notable for being the shortest full story I ever wrote.  It was written as an exercise for Critical Evolutions, the writers group I used to belong to. (well… I probably still do, it’s just we’ve not been really active.)*

Doppelganger

Sarah A. Hoyt

No, he’s not me. He spies on me from my mirror. Sometimes I wake in
the night and look at the mirror behind my door and see him there,
watching me.

There is absolutely no point to telling me that I’m imagining it. I’m
not. Yes, he has my features and the same color eyes and hair. But he
is not me.

He watches me with hunger bordering on despair. As if I’m doing
something he wishes he could do. And that’s the scariest of all
because, you know, I’m not doing anything. I’m just going to college.
I go to class. I come back to the dorm. I don’t even have a
girlfriend.

And that’s the other thing because sometimes there’s this woman with
him in the mirror. She’s sleek and dark and beautiful, like a model.
And she will just stand there, beside him, and watch me also.

The thing is, I remember the woman. It’s a face I know. No, not as if
I imagined it. More like I saw it, you know, a long time ago.

I think she was that woman who tried to convince me to go drinking
with her after the freshman orientation, three years ago. I was
tempted, don’t get me wrong. I mean, beautiful women don’t come onto
me every day. But there was something… Something about her eyes,
something like the look in my double’s eyes as he looks at me out of
the mirror. And I refused.

I haven’t seen her again since, which is kind of funny, since I
thought she was another student.

Anyway, that was my only contact with her, so I don’t know why – if
this is all an illusion – she should be there, beside him, in the
mirror.

#

Alexandra comes over sometimes, to look in my mirror. Her own has
stopped displaying anything centuries ago. It now shows a murky
bottomlessness, a nothing, like the limpid surface of a lake. You
think it would go on forever, you think under there, somewhere, there
must be something, but there never is.

“I wonder if it’s there, somewhere?” Alexandra says sometimes. “I
wonder if there is something that shows, there.”

I shrug. What else can I do? I don’t know more about this than she does.

All I know is that when I look in my mirror, I see myself. Mostly
sleeping, of course, since I’m only aware at night, when that other me
sleeps.

But even asleep there is around him a remnant of the daylight world.
The book bag he takes to class. A t-shirt tossed on the chair. A pair
of shorts flung on the floor. Flip flops. Sun screen. It seems so long
ago. It was only three years. I meant to study law.

The other day when I looked out of the mirror, he was at the computer
and there was an email from my mom. I would have cried if I still knew
how.

And then Alexandra said, “Come on. He’s just reading email. Come on.
Let’s go hunt.”

She flung out of the room, and I followed. Alexandra was fun to hunt
with. She attracted people. She intoxicated them. She made it easy to
lure them to a secret alley and drink their blood.

It is true a vampire doesn’t see his reflection in a mirror. He sees
the reflection of who he would be. If he hadn’t allowed himself to be
seduced by the shadows and the dark. If he’d stayed in the daylight
world.