She looked up at Sylvie then, watched her wipe the sponge down
the inside of her thigh. Her face shone wetly in the dim light. “Sometimes
I wish that there was a clone for you, too. I know I’m like this Sylvie. But
you—you have to stop feeling guilty for wanting something different.”
Sylvie dropped the sponge into the bucket. Without meeting
Patricia’s gaze, she kissed the top of her head, breathing in deep her smell
of sweat and talcum powder.
Had Edith stopped before nicking her clone’s neck and slicing
clean through it? Had she wavered a moment, knife in hand, and
wondered what would happen if she didn’t commit? Sylvie watched the
alien’s chest rise and fall, watched its eyelids flutter in fitful dreams. The
cheeks were high and rounded like her own, the lips pale and small.
Sylvie knew if she parted them, she would see a tell-tale gap between its
front teeth; it made her feel like crying.
The night closed in. Soon Ben would come to the stables to
collect her for supper. It was now or never. It was kill the thing that
looked like her, or let it take over. Sylvie stepped forward and grabbed the
alien by its long, single braid. Its eyes flashed open instantly, as if it had
been waiting for precisely this moment.
For a second, they stared at each other. Sylvie had the peculiar
sensation of looking down a deep well and seeing her reflection ripple
back to her in the murky water below. Familiar, like looking in a mirror,
but also not—something essential obscured.
The alien smiled slowly, sticking its tongue between the gap in its
front teeth.
Sylvie jerked its head back and sliced below the jut of its chin. On
the other side of the stable, Star leaned her sleek head over the edge of her
stall. The blood glimmered in her eye like dark water.
“Fucking bitch,” Sylvie breathed as the alien’s blood gushed warm
over her hands and up her arms. “Fucking bitch,” she kept repeating as
it gurgled beneath her, its neck still snapped back, its mouth still curled
upward. “Fucking useless piece of shit.”
Sylvie turned into the dirt lane that led to her family’s ranch,
swinging the huge tractor-trailer wide. She had left in a manic fit, calling
from the road to tell her father urgent business forced her to start
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