To: condorboy
Date: Tuesday, February 21—4:27AM
Subject: doppelganger
Connor,
I have an evil twin. She looks just like me and goes around and does bad things and gets me in trouble. She gets mad and breaks my paintbrushes and calls me a failure. She climbs onto the roof carrying all of my disasters. She doesn’t care that it’s three in the morning. She doesn’t care that her hair is wild like Medusa’s, that she’s been wearing the same ratty pajama pants for two days. She doesn’t care that it has started to snow, that the little flakes are sticking to the frozen grass two stories beneath her. She’s in a tank top but she can’t feel cold. She spits at the snowflakes, at their legendary uniqueness, at their promise that no two are alike. FUCK YOU, she says to the snowflakes. FUCK YOU, she says to everything that’s supposed to be special and unique and one of a kind. She spits and her spit becomes just another snowflake, just another frozen wetness on the ground.
The girl has a lighter. I don’t know why she has a lighter. Maybe she smokes to spite me, because she knows it is something I would never do. Even with the sky full of big, goofy snowflakes, lighters make fire and fire reduces garbage to ash and at least ash can be useful. So the girl makes fire with the garbage, with the ripped canvas and the broken brushes still wet with paint. Who cares about what I intended? Who cares about what that garbage could have been if nimbler hands had touched it? This girl, my evil twin, she is the true artist. She can harness fire and make it do her bidding. What good is paint against something like that?
Did you know bad art burns hotter than anything? It is true. I felt it. I felt my face turn orange with the reflection, I felt my lips chap and my hands blister, I felt everything destruction feels like before the sirens tore the sky apart, before the spinning lights of danger unplugged all the electricity and left us with garbage again.
And that’s when she left, of course—my evil twin, that bitch. Just in time for trouble, she was gone, and there I was, on the roof with the lighter in my hand and the bathrobed neighbor pointing, the policeman saying something I couldn’t hear, my mom my dad everyone saying things I couldn’t hear. I could not tell them about the girl because I knew they would never believe me. So I came down like they told me. I handed over the lighter and the charred remains of something dead that I had wanted to be beautiful.
Love,
Iz