Doubles and Doppelgängers
The other one who looks exactly like you. Doubles, swapped identities, reflections that lag and copies that want your place. A theme that runs from Poe's William Wilson to fingerprints that belong to a stranger.
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One Task at a Time
The scanner only shows you one task at a time. At 2:04 in the morning, it sends a night-shift warehouse picker to Aisle 40, Bin 0. There is no Bin 0.
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The Other Half
The other half of our duplex has been empty for eleven years. Every night, through the bedroom wall, a couple in there rehearses the conversation my wife and I will have tomorrow.
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Corrections
I keep a grocery list on a notepad stuck to my fridge. Lately someone has been adding to it, in my handwriting. So far, everything they've added, I've needed.
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Halves
Someone has been eating exactly half of everything in my apartment. Half a sandwich. Half a glass of milk. Half of one grape, cut so cleanly it looks like it was done with a scalpel. I live alone. I've weighed everything.
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The Outsider Classic
A lonely being who has lived his whole life in a dark castle beneath a canopy of trees finally climbs toward the light.
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Bed Three
I'm a night technologist in a hospital sleep lab. I watch people sleep on infrared video and read their brainwaves off a screen. The man in Bed Three was dreaming two dreams at once, and one of them was talking to me.
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The Sand-Man Classic
A student is haunted by the memory of the sinister lawyer he believed, as a child, was the Sandman who steals children's eyes.
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William Wilson Classic
Since his schooldays, a man has been followed through life by a rival who shares his name, his birthday and his face.
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Same Name, Same Number
Nine days out of Honolulu on a solo delivery, my chartplotter showed another boat two miles ahead of me on the AIS. It had my boat's name and my boat's identification number, and it was sitting exactly where I would be in six hours.
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The Pipe
Behind our elementary school there was a concrete drainage pipe you could crawl through, sixty feet from end to end. Kids who went all the way through came out a little different. Dougie Ferro came out left-handed.
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The Jolly Corner Classic
Returning to New York after thirty-three years abroad, a man begins stalking the empty rooms of his childhood home at night, hunting the man he might have been.
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Transformation Classic
A reckless young nobleman, disinherited and desperate, meets a hideous dwarf on a storm-battered shore who offers him a strange bargain.
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Whorls
In March my phone stopped recognizing my thumb. In April a background check said my fingerprints belonged to a nineteen-year-old who went missing in Idaho in 1987.
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Markheim Classic
On Christmas Day, a young man enters an antique shop with a story about buying a gift, and something else in mind.