by Angela Townsend

Rumor has it that, if you meet your doppelgänger, one of you will die. I have come close enough to dispel this. The rumor vendors do not want you to know what really happens when you see your own face outdoors.

My doppelgänger and I both live alone with animals in Summit Ridge now. I begin my day disinfecting “Pill Poppers” for a sick cat. Outside, my lookalike nudges the dawn with a dachshund of considerable size. We were both children when Backstreet Boys made it safe to dabble in longing. They made clean cuts in our latency with their matching white t-shirts and ironed jeans. They could hardly keep a straight face when they sang, “Am I sexual?” There was no harm in listening, since the answer was, “Not particularly.”

Some mastermind engineered our condos to look like a fortress, the Alhambra of the suburbs. Our neighbors average age eighty-five, so we are both famous. If we had the kinds of children one does not medicate with Pill Poppers, we would be in townhouses, or maybe even houses. If we had husbands, we wouldn’t be hauling our own Glad bags over our shoulders like suburban she-Santas.

“You are the most stylish woman on the Ridge,” my upstairs neighbor once observed. I was wearing leggings with a t-shirt that read “Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright.”

“Every time I see you, I almost say, ‘Hey, Lila!’” Patti P. says, every time she sees me. Patti P. is our unelected official, keeper of the annals. She does not forget dogs’ names. She has confiscated four shopping trolleys from the Giant Food across the street, so her citizenry can transport cabbages and Fig Newtons in convenience. She lives across the hall from my doppelgänger, and she is not worried about either of us.

“You gals are fine,” Patti P. insists.

When he was still here, the man who used to carry my trash disagreed with Patti P. “There is a woman who looks exactly like you,” he once reported. “She’s critically underweight. Body like a child. Wears bright colors like she wants to be seen. Like you. The only difference is, her hair is short, and she has a dog.”

He asked me if I ever considered wearing my hair shorter, and why my eyebrows were so high. I declined to provide a PowerPoint presentation. Back inside our apartment, I medicated the cat and flattened myself like a SEAL under the window. I saw my own face out there, in another woman’s magenta parka, with hair an inch long.

I wondered what would happen if we met by the dumpster. I was ready to ask her what she had outlasted. I would open the conversation by asking if she also worried about quicksand when we were children. Every cartoon warned us about cavalier expeditions. Ducks without pants and mice in white gloves were swallowed by the ground beneath their feet. Someone always threw a rope, just in time. My childless doppelgänger and I have no way to know if shows today still offer these lessons. My cat and her dog do not watch Saturday morning television.

On the day the U-Haul took my husband’s artifacts away, Patti P. brought me a silk flower with a confectioner’s sprinkling of dust. I pictured her rummaging through her 700 square feet for the right shade of pink. I wondered how long this hibiscus had lived with her. Now it was mine. “You will be fine. You get to stay. We won.” Then she said other things I will not repeat.

Someone once doodled a rule that you cannot see your own face outside and live. But I watch goodness and mercy chaperone a woman who never uses a cart. The day will come when we run into each other and run the rumors off the premises. I’m not worried.

Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness.