Triptych
The First
Have I always looked like that? In this photo, I struggle to tell us apart. I don’t remember him looking like me when he was alive, and yet here he is: my double. I keep staring, trying to find those subtle differences that separate siblings: the divot in the nose, the curvature of the ears, the contents of the eyes. All identical. Is this wonder or fear?
The Second
You walk into the room, half expecting what you see. You are standing in the doorframe, while another you stares into a picture frame. You approach and lock eyes with yourself in the photograph. You want to reach out and touch the face in the frame, but the arm of the other you holds it beyond your reach. You want to tear that photo of yourself out of his hands and smash it against the wall.
The Third
The third you sits outside the window. He is cold and alone as he watches himself lurk in the doorway, stare at the picture, stand in the picture. If the others were to look over, they would see their own teeth bared in rage and hear their own throat scream in impotence. But they don’t look. They don’t see the third smash the window with his head. They don’t see the blood that is so like theirs pour from the jagged crown on his forehead.
I barely have time to react as the third me grasps my soft throat.
You are deaf to the scream of the first as the photograph is wrestled from his hands.
The third stares into his own eyes, windowed by the smashed glass of the frame, as he sightlessly chokes the life between his hands.