Short Fiction: “Versus Inversus”
“Her hair smells like candy,
her lips like licorice,
I know all her personal secrets:
how she eats fruit pods ground into a sand,
how she sleeps on acorns after drunken nights,
and how she eats apples at the bar
instead of drinking.
I don’t know why I know these things
She’s a bad one, menacing enough, double jointed, her face neither here nor there, changing at every angle, so no eye could fix on her exactly.
Inscrutable, she could avoid notice, out of sight, out of mind,
Where she came from wasn’t exactly clear to me for awhile.
She had tried to drown me. Asphyxiate me. She drove 100 miles an hour on long stretches of freeway, the lights flashing into one long beam. She fed me ground up paper and told me it was food. At parties, she brought people to talk to me, people heavy with recklessness. They crashed into space, and she took notes. I tried to leave out the back, but she insisted I stay. I could swear the whole thing works some other way, but she was good at spinning it all around, expert at changing size, folding up, breathing in the sound of conversation, so it fell silent in a room. She took my quill and burnt it. She buried my journal on a mountain. She kept a curse in my closet, and every time I tried to move it, she pushed me over or made a distraction. When I tried to escape, she possessed the cat, and he would howl and shake the door. I became distracted. To make up for it, she would give me an herbal tea made of complacency. Under the fiery heavens, stars dripping like uncontrollable tears, she stole kisses in the darkness, but there was nobody there. I hated her. I would talk to her incessantly. She rarely replied. She glowered instead. When she did talk, she was an echo. It was infuriating. You could say one thing, and she would repeat it. Then she would do the opposite. No one ever noticed. Mostly, it was silence.
She had stalked me. I knew her number. She would sharpen knives and watch murderously from the corners. She was sticky; she was slippery. She was a shadow from an indirect angle.
She kept other shadows around. The music was too loud or too low. She scowled at me at the bar. Her head filled with numbers, projections, predictions. It was a lot to deal with. I didn’t like her coming around. I didn’t like how she stirred up strife — apocalyptic, lachrymose, gloomy.
“Wait, who is she?” the girl at the bar asked.
“Her name is Inversus.”
I took a sip of my drink
“How do you even know someone like that?” the girl asked sharply, skeptically.
I looked back penetratingly. “How could anyone understand anything if they didn’t understand the infinite universe within?” I thought silently.
“She’s my doppelgänger”
“A doppelgänger? What’s that?” a hand reached over the polished oak of the bar to whisk away the glass “…Another Long Island” she yelped at the bartender.
The girl was interested now. I would kill all the time I needed to in this fashion. Waiting goes by faster when you have someone to talk to.
“Yeah, well, it’s a copy. It’s you, like an evil twin, or you from the future on too much drugs. It isn’t good”
“What the fuck!?” She sprayed some Long Island on to the bar.
“Okay, okay, I’ll explain. When I was 15, I used to clean people’s houses. My buddy set me up at this one house. The family was nice, but the older brother, well, he had a mental problem.”
“A mental problem” she parroted back.
“Yes, a mental problem. He had been in a severe car crash. He hit his head, was in a comma, and when he woke up he had a mental problem. It wasn’t that he was retarded. It was that he was violent. He had to take pills, so he wouldn’t kill anyone. He had a hard time concentrating. That kind of thing”
She looked up at me intently.
“So anyway, he paid me some money to help him clean his room. I was two days in. He had prepaid me. The room was huge. For some reason, he had the master bedroom. I think his parents were divorced. Everything was okay though…you know, at the house. I was talking with him and doing the cleaning. He sort of creeped me out just a little, but he seemed polite. He talked to me about his old punk rock days, so it was alright. I was game for some stories. There were hours of work to do. The issue was that he didn’t pay me enough. Once it was time to clean the closet, I was peeling up old moldy clothes from the closet floor. It was disgusting. It smelled so bad, and I started thinking of dead bodies. I started wheezing.”
“So then what happened?”
“I told him I was done for the day. I had the money. I went home. He kept calling me to come back to finish cleaning, but I didn’t want to be around him or his disgusting room. I blocked his phone number. I felt bad about it, but I felt like he wasn’t paying me enough. Plus I had a bad feeling.”
“Oh. But what does that have to do with your doppelgänger?”
“Apparently, the guy put a curse on me. I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what. I went to this art walk, and literally, walked right into him. It was 16 years later. I nearly busted my nose on his arm. There I was, tears in my eyes, clenching my throbbing nose, and then I just heard “You! It’s you.” I looked up at him, but I didn’t recognize him. He recognized me though. He asked me for his money back. He was real threatening. Said he knew everyone around there, and that he would tell everyone I stole money from a retarded guy if I didn’t pay him back, except he wasn’t retarded. It was blackmail”
“Well, did you give it to him?”
“No, no. I only had twenty bucks. I gave that to him and told him I would give back the other 50 later. That was when he said it. He said that he had cursed me all those years back and that the curse wouldn’t be lifted until I paid him back. Then all this bad stuff happened… for years. Meanwhile, that girl, the doppelgänger, I had seen her around before, but after I ran into him, she just was all over the place.”
The girl at the bar looked at me sidewise, her eyes squinting in alarm.
“Look, it’s okay. I’m going to beat her today”
“Beat her? What do you mean?”
“I’ve been studying what to do in this situation…for a while. All I need to do is beat her in a fight, and she’s gone. The curse is lifted. I’ve already done a bunch of spell work to reverse the curse.” I took a drag from my old fashioned. “That’s it. Just beat her fair and square at a fight.”
The girl bottomed up and slammed her cup on the bar. “Now that’s a story,” she slurred. She looked at me quizzically. A moment passed.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here.” She threw a five on the bar, spun up off the bar stool, and grabbed her purse.
A slice of blue sky and a breeze blew in as she walked out the door.
I spun around to face the bar and took another heavy, aromatic sip of my drink. It was just me and my old fashioned now. “At least, that’s a good energy” I thought to myself. I sat musing, “It’s crazy how we pick up magic. Here. There. It’s sent in boxes. It flows out of computers.” I sat staring at the ceiling, mind empty. There was this new thing; it was part of me: a smooth, iridescent pink aura, soothing yet stimulating.
“Want another drink?” my head snapped back front center to the bar keep.
“Yeah! Hook me up”
The bartender turned to make my drink.
And that’s when she came in. I had been waiting for her, expecting her.
“So what brings you in here?” I asked, avoiding the obvious, what I already knew.
“You. What are you doing in here? Do you think you belong here? It’s time to go.”
“I have things to do here.” I caught myself whispering. She was infectious. Her mood was absolutely contagious. My mood reflected hers. It was instant.
Her hand reached for me and grasped my arm. Her grip was ice cold. My heart started fluttering.
“No one wants you here in their light.”
I lifted my newly refreshed drink for a swig. She caught my eye through the bottom of the glass.
“I told you I have something to do.” I looked around nervously.
This was the part of the story I didn’t really explain to my new friend at the bar. The doppelgänger and I talked. We were friendemies sort of. I had eventually got used to her. I would work, and she would knit. As long as I always kept one eye on her, I didn’t have to worry about a spike in the heart. We would eat salt taffy or drink lip staining wine together. Sometimes she put poison in my wine. I just knew it, but I kept putting off the fight. She would give me some presents, and I would forgive her. It was a dysfunctional relationship. She scared me. I kept thinking she would break my nose if I fought her, and sometimes I couldn’t even see her even if I knew she was there cubed up in a Picasso replica or sitting in a puddle of plum jam. The whole thing was off and on. She’d be gone for weeks, and then she would catch me in the fog or in a puff of car exhaust. She’d creep up in the middle of the night and just turn the light on and stare.
“Get out. You go. I don’t need to go with you,” I snarled at her.
“No, no, you need to come with me. Now!”
My arm felt like it was going asleep in her grasp. I threw my free arm in an upward cut at her face, sending her back. My heels dug into the bar stool frame. She stumbled back. She was irate. Her eyes were black pools, but I could imagine the contours of rage in them. I took a deep breath. She advanced. I put my hands up in supplication. The bartender didn’t seem to be around, but he’d be back soon. I didn’t think it would go down like this. It was bad enough when she wasn’t angry. My mind was working fast, gears turning, assessing the geometry of the room. Afternoon light filtered in through the hazy stained glass, awash on the floor like a paint by number page.
I looked at her grimly, resolutely. “Maybe we should take this outside… Is that cliché enough?”
We stared at each other in deadlock. I was so fucking pissed. Inversus was always talking shit about my work. It was so hard to get my work done with that bullshit going on.
My hands were now like ice.
I looked around. The lights were dim. A man in a Puritan hat played pinball in the back corner. The flannel shirt at the other end of the bar took a drag of his cigarette, his eyes, rimmed in dark circles, trailed up to the T.V. screen.
“Fine,” she snarled back in rage. She didn’t even register that I actually initiated the fight.
We slinked out the back, but it was not the same place from which I had entered; regardless of whether it was the entrance or the exit, it wasn’t even the same town. We stepped out into gray haze, trees all around.
She was a black cloud, a black hole. She looked just like me but worse. Her clothes were ill fitting, her hair tangled.
She advanced.
I put my hands up. “Are you sure you want to do this,” I said with a rapid, hushed urgency.
“Yes!” my doppelgänger snapped back.
She took a swing. I dodged, swooshing up close enough to grab her with my left, throw her against a tree, and hook her with my right. Her head bounced against the tree. Angry, dark, blood seeped out of her nose.
“What’s that” she pointed to my left.
My head swung around, but nothing was there. All of a sudden, I felt a kick in the groin.
“What in the fuck?!” I yelled, eyes tearing up. “I don’t even have a dick.” I shrieked. “What in the actual fuck?”
I smashed my head into her face.
Suddenly, she kicked my leg out from under me. I fell hard on my knee, but I popped back up.
I dashed to the side. She was right behind me, arms splayed out to grab me. I dodged, spun around. I glanced around hurriedly. My heart, pounding in my chest, nearly blind with rage. I ran toward a rock. She jumped at my feet, bringing me down. I kicked out, aiming at her face as she clawed her way up my leg. I missed. I tried again. I kicked harder. I connected with her face, slowing her down and loosening her grip. I heaved my way out of her grasp on to the rock. She was on me again. Climbing up my leg. I smashed down, throwing my back into it, cracking her face open with the rock.
She slumped down, sickeningly.
I let out a howl and then another. I felt mad, looking up at the sky, averting my eyes from disaster, from dismay, from a broken doppelganger death. Black seeped out of her eyes, out her nose, it trailed down her face, like ink. It poured out of her ears, from the crack in her face. My eyes looking toward the heavens, I knew that the image would wake me up at night in years to come.
I blinked.
“Do you want another drink?”
I blinked again. The bartender was staring at me intently.
“Hey, are you alright. Do you want me to call you an uber or something?”
“No, no. I’m alright. Just lost in thought.”
He looked at my skeptically.
“I’m good on the drink.” I place a twenty on the bar. “Thank you.”
“Okay. You want some water?”
“No, really, I’m okay. I’m gonna call for a ride right now.”
“Just let me know if you need anything.”
I nod and get up. I look around, smooth my clothes. I glide toward the door. my pink aura trailing, tinged with blood.
