Hey, Carla

“Hey, Carla, I saw you at the grocery store and you completely ignored me. What’s the deal?” My best friend says as soon as I answer my phone.

“Excuse me?”

“You were buying 200 grams of honey baked ham at the deli counter. I guess you were embarrassed that I caught you buying meat. I knew the vegan lifestyle thing was bullshit.”

“What are you talking about? I'm still a vegan and I wasn’t -” But she’s already hung up on me.

Two days later, I get a text from my younger brother: Hey Carla my girl Clementine said she saw u up in the club dancin, since when do you go clubbin

Well your girl Clementine needs glasses ‘cause I wasn’t there, I text in response.

Ya, whatever sis my girl don’t lie.

The bizarre sightings continue. My aunt claims I shunned her when she saw me at an outlet mall; one of my co-workers sees me verbally abusing a sobbing teenage clerk at a drugstore, and my mother says I left a her a nasty voicemail. None of them believe me when I deny behaving so badly. It’s then when I decide to tell my husband about these strange events, but before I can do so, he confronts me, too.

“Carla, I know what you’ve been up to.” He shoves his smartphone in my face, scrolling through several pictures of me canoodling with a man I’ve never seen before. I try my best to explain that it isn’t me, referencing the odd occurrences of the past week, but it falls on deaf ears, and he moves out the same night.

The next morning, I discover my status on Facebook reads: Glad to be free of 185 pounds of asshole. Gentlemen, I’m back on the market! To make matters worse, my husband’s name has been tagged. Desperately, I try deleting the status but am met with an error message every time I do before getting locked out of my account entirely.

I stay holed up in my house. Calls go unanswered. My doorbell is ignored. I only get out of bed to pee. I begin to get used to the pungent scent of my own body odour and greasy hair. I lose weight at a freakishly rapid pace. I don’t bother calling into work, so I’m pretty sure I’m fired.

Then one day my phone sounds out an alert, which is unusual, since I let the battery die a long time ago. But that’s forgotten once I see the text from my husband: I’m sorry about the way we left things. Could you come over to my place and talk? The message includes his address.

A smile appears on my face for the first time in weeks. I take a hot shower, wash my hair thoroughly, and dress and groom myself with care. My husband doesn’t answer his apartment door when I knock on it, but since it’s ajar, I let myself in - and freeze in utter shock.

He’s lying on the floor with his throat slit from ear to ear. Crouched over him is a woman wearing the exact same outfit and the exact same hairstyle as me. She’s white knuckling the receiver of a cordless phone. I can hear my own voice say “I just killed my husband,” and then the me that’s not me rotates her head all the way around to reveal my face that’s not my face with a gruesomely wide smile crammed with sharp, pointed teeth. In a flash, she drops the phone and bolts past me and out the door, practically knocking me over on her way out.

“Hey!” I go to run after her, but the hallway is completely empty; she’s disappeared without a trace. Had I hallucinated her? But when I go back into the apartment with my husband’s dead body lying on the floor with a bloody knife next to him and the 911 operator’s voice calling “Hello, hello?” from the dropped phone, I know that it’s very real.

I kneel next to my husband’s body, sobbing and retching, calling his name, but I already know it’s too late for him. And as I hear the sound of police car sirens on the approach, I know it’s too late for me, too.