Kathleen Rooney Doppelganger She’s put on your face like a plaster cast, a plastic prosthesis, a Nixon mask, but nobody asks if she’s really you. Still, she possesses a number of skills you lack: making smalltalk, singing, math— so at first, you think this isn’t so bad. Yet when she heads downtown, takes your job, attends a party, wows your friends, you wonder again how you alone can tell she’s only an impostor. Like you, yes, though not a dead ringer—she’s a version of you passed through a filter: your voice on a machine, your handwriting Xeroxed. When she comes back to your place and chats with the neighbors on her way upstairs, it’s like catching your own image on closed circuit TV. And when at last, she steals your man, it’s your eyes mirrored in the kinky headboard. She’s not identical—she’s actually better: sharper of wit and lighter of heart. You’re not the girl you used to be, Crab Orchard Review
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