The Night I Met Myself

I found it in my back garden whilst investigating a strange noise at night. I felt it was looking right at me, but it didn't have eyes. At least not at first.

Have you ever seen Terminator? The second one. The one with the T-1000. It looked a bit like that. Tall, lanky, made of liquid metal -- or something rather like.

But instead of turning into Robert Patrick, it turned into me. I'm not taking the piss here. The eyes came first, and they were even more dead than my resting bitch face could ever hope to be.

Thing is, I didn't know it was me at first. Not simply by the eyes. But I had this feeling in my gut. By the time its bare pink toes started popping out, my knees were close to giving way. What in the hell was going on?

I should take a moment here to pause and explain that I don't do drugs, don't drink... all that noise. You know the spiel whenever someone finds something crazy and tries to convince you that they haven't gone completely mad.

Well, I wasn't mad. I'll refrain from the other cliché about actually being mad. And no, I don't think I'm particularly smart for doing so.

But back to this... creature, if you can call it that. This alien from another world, which I'm sure it was.

As soon as the last pinkie toe put in its godawful appearance, I gasped and sort of recoiled a bit. Well, it was more like a leaning backwards, actually. But then I actually did stumble properly back when the alien gasped as well. And when it leaned just the same as me.

I won't spare you this one cliché, because nothing else will do the sensation justice: it was like being punched in the stomach. Truly. All the air was knocked out of me, and I felt paralysed, numb and set on fire all at once.

And the alien took that same faltering step back as well. Just like me. As soon as I did that, it did the same. It had mimicked my every move perfectly up till that point, and the truly frightening bit? It had no intention of stopping.

I could feel that in my gut as well.

But somehow, for whatever stupid reason, some small part of me felt... excited.

Hadn't I always wanted a brush with the unknown? You don't know me, so I'll just answer for you: the answer is yes. Yes, I did.

I lifted my right arm, and the alien lifted hers. It was a silent night, otherwise, and smelled crisply of the English suburb in which I lived. I lowered my right arm. The alien lowered hers. I raised my right foot. I hopped on my left. The alien raised her right foot. It hopped on her left.

Feeling started to return to me by that point. I wasn't as scared anymore. Still a bit unnerved, for sure. But the excitement was gradually taking over. I smiled, and the alien smiled back. Okay, that was a bit creepy, actually. I stopped smiling. The alien returned my frown. That was better.

I took a step towards the alien -- my doppelgänger. It stepped towards me. Something took hold of me in that moment: an invisible force, tugging my heart till it ached and squeezing my stomach till it became queasy, and which kept my feet moving one in front of the other. Breeze from the cool spring night rustled my hair. My light shoulder-length brown locks flowed outwards on the head of my doppelgänger. Her freckles caught the light of the moon.

Seeing myself like this, up close and not in a mirror, was one hell of a thing. No mirror could ever hope to match this level of quality. The best IMAX camera in the world would pale in comparison. I slowed to a halt. She did, too. My very own doppelgänger. I smiled again, and this time it was just slightly less creepy when she smiled back. Just a bit. I chalked that one up to a work in progress as we frowned once more at each other instead.

But that didn't diminish how I felt just then in that moment. That one oh-so special moment.

Oh. I should probably give you some idea of the setting. We stood barefoot on a square platform of paving stones bordered at the back by grass and a wooden fence, bushes and a shed to the left and an outdoor sofa, a table, some chairs and a small barbeque to the right. The fence stretched the length of the back garden, ending at stainless steel railings and white stone steps that led down from the porch door.

I had hurried into the back garden from my bedroom upstairs, tiptoeing past my big sister's room. Our parents were away on business. Only as I was living these things did I stop to question how my doppelgänger had even got into the garden. The fence behind it wasn't broken. Had it got over the top of it somehow? It had showed from behind the shed. Had it been in there? To be honest, it didn't matter much to me. In fact, it was rather hard to think of anything but the eyes that bore into me just a hand's span away.

Perhaps I should pause here a moment and fill you in on exactly what was going through my head as we stared into each other's eyes.

But I know you wouldn't believe me, so I won't. All I'll say is that through the window right above and behind me, there stood a desk. And on that desk was my laptop -- a tab opened to a certain site my sister would be mortified to discover should she ever go snooping in my room for whatever reason. And beside the laptop was a small cylindrical object that was, shall we say, slightly wet at the top. I'll leave it to you to guess why.

You know, I loved going around barefoot, and it wasn't just because it felt nice and freed my toes, made them happy. That's why I hadn't bothered putting on shoes. That's why I was over the weirdness of seeing my toes pop out, and instead saw the thankfully non-crooked non-stubby femininity of them.

I also loved something else, although it wasn't anywhere near as pedestrian as a foot fetish was. You'll want to strap yourself in for this next bit. And swear you won't kink shame.

Raising my fist with knuckles pointed straight ahead, my doppelgänger did likewise and without objection. My throat as dry as a desert and with heavy invisible weights stacked atop my shoulders, I lifted up my shirt. My doppelgänger did as well. I stared at the expanse of flesh that was her midriff as my heart thudded in my chest, and as she drunk in mine. I flexed my abs hard. Marvellous architecture came to life in that expanse before my very eyes. Blood pounded in my ears just then. Oh, my lord. It was like seeing the finish line during the last lap of one of my school races and hearing only distant footfalls behind me. Euphoria. Oh, the euphoria. Unrivalled till now...

My fist snapped forwards, a gust of warm breath tickling the top of my skin. Her fist drove into me, so hard that I actually felt my abs bend round the knuckles. Fireworks exploded in my mind, and I groaned without even thinking, shuffling backwards but hunched up. She copied me exactly: sound for sound, movement for movement, glorious reaction for glorious reaction.

Ravenous hunger seized me between the legs, igniting my privates in a blinding inferno. Nothing existed in all of time and the universe but that hunger. All I needed to know was that if I didn't satisfy it, I would surely die. My whole existence came down to this. If I wanted this madness to end -- this feeling of being consumed from the inside out -- I would need to feast. I stared at my doppelgänger, whose eyes were wild, hair dishevelled, and that only excited me even more. She hadn't thought me weird for what I had made us do. Didn't think me mad. I had always wanted, always fantasised, but never-- and now...

I threw myself at her, and she me.

With the one single unfried neuron in our brains still firing, we managed to stumble drunkenly into the shed, closing the door behind us and locking it. I giggled madly as she tried locking it at the same time as me. Her giggle made my heart flutter. I turned to her and smiled, and it was no longer weird at all.

We took each other on the dusty, dirty floor of the shed, surrounded by tools and a workbench. Actually, we started on the workbench. I lost track of how many times she finished me off, and I her, in turn. We punched each other's tight stomachs and kissed each other's feet whenever we fell down. We mounted each other schoolgirl style and exploited earlobes, collarbones and private parts with softly cruel abandon. But we never seemed to be fully satisfied. That was okay, however. We didn't exactly want it to end.

No longer was I a virgin. Having turned 21 only recently, it felt surreal.

Finally sated several hours later, I awoke to find the business end of a shovel directed at my face in the darkness, as I lay in a pool of my own sweat -- and other bodily fluids, I'm sure.

Turning to you, I sigh. 'And that's the story of how I died. Bit embarrassing, really. But that's life, I suppose.'

You smile at me sympathetically, and we turn to peer down from our fluffy white cloud in heaven to gaze at the world of men far below -- where more and more people were meeting the same grisly end in what was fast becoming humanity's greatest event of death and debauchery.

Doesn't matter, had sex.