THE GRAVESTONE READ MY OWN NAME, BIRTHDATE, AND TODAY’S DATE.
I stumbled back, clutching my chest, the damp cemetery air suddenly thick. I’d come to visit my grandmother’s grave, but now…now I was staring at my own pre-carved end.
My phone buzzed – a text from Mom. “Honey, can you pick up your twin sister from the airport? Her flight landed early.” I don’t have a twin sister.
⬇️
My breath hitched. A twin sister? Impossible. I was an only child, a fact hammered home since childhood. The chilling inscription on the headstone pulsed in my vision, a morbid counterpoint to the mundane request on my phone. Panic, cold and clammy, gripped me.
Ignoring my mother’s text, I raced home, the cemetery’s oppressive silence replaced by the jarring blare of city traffic. My reflection in a shop window showed a stranger – gaunt, eyes wild. This couldn’t be real. It was some elaborate, cruel joke, a hallucination brought on by stress. I’d been pushing myself too hard.
Reaching my apartment, I found it ransacked. Drawers lay open, their contents spilled across the floor. A single photograph, tucked beneath a discarded scarf, caught my eye. It was me, but younger, beaming, arm in arm with…another me. The resemblance was uncanny, yet a subtle difference lingered – a mole above her left eyebrow that I lacked.
The phone buzzed again, this time a call from my mother. “Where are you, dear? Your sister, Elara, is here. She’s…different.” Her voice trembled, a stark contrast to her usual cheerful tone.
I rushed to the airport, a frantic knot tightening in my stomach. Elara stood by the baggage carousel, her eyes mirroring my own terror, yet with an unnerving calmness. She was identical to me, except for that elusive mole.
“You’re not…you’re supposed to be dead,” I whispered, my voice barely audible above the airport’s hum.
She smiled, a chillingly serene smile. “Dead? No, dear brother. I was…absent. For a very long time.”
The truth, when it finally unfurled, felt like a betrayal of reality itself. Elara wasn’t just my twin; she was me, from an alternate timeline where a childhood accident had claimed my life, leaving her to inherit my existence. She had subtly manipulated events, orchestrated my “death” to reclaim her life – or perhaps to escape a different, more sinister fate. The headstone? A warning, a reminder of the precarious balance between our realities.
The conflict wasn’t merely between twins, but between two versions of the same soul, each fighting for survival, for identity, for the very fabric of their existence. My mother, oblivious to the true nature of her daughters, became a pawn in this terrifying game of cosmic tug-of-war.
The ending wasn’t a neat resolution, but a precipice. Elara, with her calm detachment, hinted at a far greater threat looming beyond their shared consciousness – a force that had orchestrated their lives, their deaths, and their impossible reunion. She looked at me, not with malice, but with a chilling understanding. “We need to work together, brother. Or we both vanish.” The unspoken question hung heavy in the air: which version of us, which reality, would ultimately survive? The airport, once a symbol of arrival, now felt like a gateway to a terrifying unknown. The future stretched before us, a bewildering expanse of uncertainty, where the lines between life and death, reality and illusion, blurred and dissolved into a terrifying embrace.