Doppelganger - By David Stahler Jr Page 0,2
in your place. And then, when we get bored or someone seems to be getting too close to the truth, we move on. Though, to be honest, we can only hold a form so long before we start to lose it. It takes a lot of strength to hang on to somebody’s life. After a while it even starts to hurt.
Of course, the letting go can be just as bad. Trust me, I know.
Does this sound awful? Are we evil creatures? Monsters? I’ve been asking myself the question since I was old enough to wonder, and I still haven’t figured it out. My mother would say no. In her view, our people have nothing to do with the concepts of good or evil. “Foolish human conventions,” she once called them. In her mind, we do what we do because that’s who we are.
“Are we bad?” I remember asking one afternoon as I watched her break the neck of a rooster for our supper. I was eight, I think, and had recently learned the truth about doppelganger ways. “Are we bad for killing?”
She looked at me in disgust. “You’ve been watching too much TV,” she said, tossing me the limp bird to pluck. “That’s a foolish question. The kind a human would ask.”
“Well, are we?” I pressed.
“Is the tiger evil when it kills the zebra? Is the shark malicious for biting the swimmer? Does the bee sting out of wickedness?” she said.
I took her meaning. She felt it was our nature to kill—nothing more, nothing less. And it’s true, it’s not like we doppelgangers want to take over the world or enslave the human race or anything like that. Far from it—we prefer to live quietly, below the radar. Still, it troubled me. Not because I didn’t believe her, but because I did. Because I believed a doppelganger was supposed to obey its nature. That’s what bothered me. For even back then, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to live by killing. Not like her.
Anyway, that’s about it. There’s only one other important thing to know about doppelgangers that I can think of. Since we keep to ourselves, we don’t run into each other very often, but when we do, we know it. Even in human form, we can tell. It’s like we can sniff each other out. If two doppelgangers of the same sex happen to meet, they’ll more than likely ignore each other and move on. But if a heganger and sheganger come together, they’re going to mate. It’s practically unavoidable—nature’s way of ensuring the continuation of the species, I guess. My mother told me all about it not long before she kicked me out.
“Even if you don’t want to—and you won’t—you’re going to couple,” she said, “and she will bear an offspring, just as I bore your miserable excuse of a being.”
“What was my father like?” I asked.
“Weak,” she said. “The males always are. But he was there, for that day of our coupling at least.”
“Did you have another child before me?” I asked her. I’d always wanted to know, and since she was in a rare talking mood, I figured I’d ask.
“Once. A long time ago,” she said.
“A boy or a girl?”
“I hardly remember.”
My mother wasn’t exactly the warm and snuggly type. I didn’t take it personally. I knew that’s just how she was. She told me we were all that way, and since I’d never met another one of us, I took her at her word.
I also knew, without her even having to tell me, that I was a hindrance. Putting aside the fact that—as she often put it—I was an embarrassment with no prospects, there was the simple matter that she’d been holed up with me in our cabin for the last sixteen years, rarely leaving except when the urges got too great to bear. Then she’d disappear for a day, maybe even two or three, and come back as someone else. It was enough to calm her, but not enough to truly satisfy. She wanted to be on the road again and alone, but she couldn’t leave me. For though her urge to kill was strong, equally strong was the urge to make sure her offspring survived. Nature is funny that way.
Still, she must have been convinced I could make it on my own because she eventually got rid of me. I remember the moment she called me out one night onto the porch as she was preparing to leave.
“I’m going,” she said,