SJ. Townend

Content Warning

obsession, murder

Was it a purge, the sickness? Of sorts, I suppose — my body rejecting you calling time on our relationship, perhaps. 

A year has passed since you told me it was over, but oh, how my skin still yearns for your touch. My heart, caged prisoner that it is, struggles to admit you don’t love me anymore. 

“It’s for the best, Anna,” you said, not shedding a single tear as you got into your car. “Ending this will give us both freedom.” 

“But it hurts so badly,” I replied, my face a mess. 

“Sometimes, love does hurt.”

I am the first to admit it had become toxic. Me, crying myself to sleep each night, always wondering if you were with another woman. You, adding pass-codes to your mobile phone, your laptop, building barriers of privacy even though you told me time and time again the affairs were all in my head. Me, referred to occupational health at work, the lead endocrinologist hurling accusations that I’d handled cryogenic embryos with disrespect, had stolen stock for personal use. Me, decorating your home with bug-sized cameras —

Christ, was it really necessary, threatening to change your locks? I told you I’d return the spare key when I managed to find it. And I did. Always true to my word. Like how I said I’d be yours forever. Devotion, my middle name. 

I never wanted freedom from you.

#

Vomiting, the pamphlet tucked inside of the medication box tells me, is a common side effect of the egg-production stimulant Clomifene. It will be worth it though — the daily injections I gave myself shortly after you sent that formal email, insisting I stop lingering outside your ward. It’s hardly my fault your department is so close to the fertility treatment clinic where I work. It was mere chance our breaks coincided. 

You switched shifts. 

But I still watch you now, from afar, the cameras in your bedside clock, among the books on your top shelf, in the space between your kitchen cupboards, still undiscovered. You have not made yourself free at all. Shortly after you warned me to stay away, you brought another woman home and became entangled in her arms, wrapped between her legs. You appeared more caught up with her than you ever were with me. I wept into a Petri dish in my make-shift laboratory in the corner of my garage for weeks, until my project turned a corner. Now, I operate in anger, as dedicated to my current project as I had been to you. 

I’d failed to precipitate quality DNA from your cells, the genetic material in shed skin decays fast, so I have learned. Faster than your apparent adoration of me. A formaldehyde scale of all my various attempts to recreate you hang suspended, lifeless, pickled, in the glass tank between my lawnmower and half empty tubs of creosote. 

I grew resolute, after countless sleepless nights and failed genetic uptakes that I would never recreate you, and so my project took an unexpected bifurcation. I have focused instead, on myself. 

Harvesting and hollowing an egg had been the easy part. The hard part was extracting decent diploid DNA from root follicles, snipped from hairs entangled in my brush. 

#

This evening, I stare at you, alone in your apartment, on my laptop screen. Dining at the table where we first made passionate love, many years ago, a ready meal for one splattered on your plate as you flick through the pages of Auto Trader. Your new lady is not with you tonight. By midnight then, if all goes as it should, my plan will reach fruition, come full term. 

Perfect timing. I break my obsession with your image and instead, stare at me, this other version of me, lain out naked on the surgical table I repurposed from work: the same dark curls you’d loved to bury your nose in, the same blue eyes where you’d said you saw your future. Me, and this carbon-copy, supine version of me share the same features, the same DNA. My genetic code weaves through every cell of this wet body, a body an echo of my own. My body, you’d said, you’d worship for eternity.  

The old life-support machines I saved from the skip whir and beep, redundant now. The empty incubator in which second me grew, is long switched off. My project has been near-independent for twenty-two hours. The rate at which my project grew was astounding, as my genetics and knowledge of science rebuilt my perfect reflection. Last night, I disconnected the ventilator, my cloned lungs fully formed. Full reanimation can now commence. 

An injection of adrenalin through the thorax, a loud rush of wind into its lungs. My double rises from the table to a seated position, on its bony buttocks. Anna begins again. Anna2. I can carry the undernourished weight of my doppelganger for long enough, I am sure, to execute my plan. Holding the emptied needle in my hand, I too inhale, and the aromas of cyclohexamide and bleach fill my nostrils, the bitter-sweet stench of success now imminent.

At first, my intention was to create a replacement you, but I could not get close enough for a fresh genetic sample. Instead, I have created another me. This slim, wet beast, this soul-hollow me which sits on my steel table cannot speak, does not attempt to engage in conversation. I am unsure if it even has the brain capacity to make noise. It feeds and drinks and passes waste, but Anna2 is not truly alive in any spiritual sense. 

I dress this respiring replicate in my favourite lingerie, then drape its arm over my shoulder. She comes easily, readily, as if compliantly aware of my intentions. 

The journey to my car is short. We move, hidden by the darkness of a moonless midnight, this clone of me and of your door key, and a few clinical extras wrapped in a Tesco’s carrier bag. Together, we travel to your apartment. 

#

I arrive, leaving me in the passenger seat, and enter your home quietly. Tonight’s the night I return your key. The chloroformed cloth works its magic on you and gives me time to guide my other self in. I sit Anna2 on the sofa next to your slumped form.

She puts up no defence as I place my surgeon’s blade in your sleeping hand and with it, make one swift slice across her jugular. Her neck yawns red. Vermillion sprays, my DNA splattering your white shirt. With the blade still in your hand, I guide it, draw it up your left wrist, a red zipper opening there. This action, I replicate on your right wrist, too. You flinch and shudder,then fall still.

Side by side, I can’t help but think what a beautiful couple we should have been. Whoever finds us here, sleeping our eternal red sleep, will see how you took my life from me, or this version of me, and then took your own. 

An almost Shakespearean denouement of Romeo and Juliet proportions. Beautifully tragic. “Love hurts,” you said, the day you ended things, just prior to saying you wanted for me to have freedom. 

I toss my car keys onto the floor of your apartment and slip out into the night. I have that freedom now. Complete anonymity. It hardly hurt at all. 

SJ Townend has stories published with Vastarien, Ghost Orchid Press, Gravely Unusual Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, and Timber Ghost Press. Her first horror collection, Sick Girl Screams, is out Oct’ 2024 (Brigid’s Gate Press) and her second horror collection, Your Final Sunset, is coming in 2025 (Sley House Press). Twitter:@SJTownend