Replaced

Originally published in Atlantis (2016). Republished at Wordhaus (2016), now closed.

***

The memory of my parents is blurry. I remember the smell of lavender soap when Mama hugged me, straight out of the shower, her skin still damp beneath her thin nightgown. I remember Daddy shooting hoops with me in the driveway freshman year and telling me the other boys would stop picking on me soon.

“It won’t last long,” he said. “It never does.”

I wish it had.

Now there are two strangers in my house. They look like my mom and dad. They sound like them. They move like them. But they’re not them. They don’t know I know, that I can see through the masks they wear.

“Hello, son,” he says to me when I walk through the door. The newspaper crackles like cereal as he folds it closed and sets it on the kitchen table. My clothes smell like cafeteria pizza, and I drop my backpack in the entryway. The bag lands with a whisper, only the zippers clinking against the hardwood, no books to weigh it down.

“Now, honey, pick that up and put it where it belongs.” She scolds me from her place over the sink, wagging a sudsy finger at me. “Take it to your room, okay?”

I stare at her, the woman who looks like my mother. She has the same black hair, the same pear-shaped body, but her eyes are flat. She never gives me that keen look, a little haughty, a little sarcastic—that I’ll still give you a whoopin’ when you’re thirty look. My gaze is hard. Her face is frozen like a mannequin’s. Thawing slowly, her lips sink from their fake-looking smile.

I curl my fingers around the handle of my backpack and carry it into the living room, flinging it onto the coffee table like a year-old magazine in a waiting room. The couch is hard as a bench beneath me.

The remote is on the end table. I reach for it, stretching over an empty Coke can. Then I hold the remote in my lap and stare at the black television screen.

“Hey, bud. Think we can talk?”

The man who looks like my father walks into the living room. He’s shaved his head—to keep me from realizing he couldn’t style the thick red hair and beard the way my dad did. He starts to sit on the couch next to me, but instead he eases into the armchair across the room. I keep my eyes on the black screen.

“Your mother and I have been talking.”

They think I don’t know. They think I’m stupid. They think I can’t tell the difference between the man and woman who raised me—who loved me—and these imposters.

“We’re just a little concerned…”

The black of the television screen is moving in circles, but I can’t tell because it’s all the same color. It’s sort of like how I can’t really tell a difference between the way the man’s voice sounds and the way my dad’s voice sounded. I just know. He even calls me bud, the way my dad used to.

My fingers stiffen. I think about shooting basketball in the driveway. Good shot, bud.

“Your principal called again today.”

I can’t be sure exactly when they made the switch. I was seven or eight, still at the age when days seemed like weeks except in the summer, and the people around me were more of moving, talking shapes than actual beings. So I didn’t notice at first. Then again, maybe they did it a little at a time. Maybe they took a few pieces of my parents and replaced them with something different—not completely different, just a little off. Maybe they did that until everything I knew of my mom and dad was gone. It might have taken years to get every piece, every thought and mannerism, switched over. Then what was left? Two people who looked and sounded a lot like the ones I used to love. But they weren’t them. It was sort of like replacing a dead goldfish. A two-year-old might not tell the difference, but the damn thing just isn’t the same. And the first goldfish is still dead.

“We’re going to have to make some changes.”

I swivel my head slowly. I wish it could spin all the way around, like the girl’s head in that horror movie. Maybe that would scare him. I look at the man like I’d been looking at the television screen, watching the pigments in his skin swirl in circles on his cheeks. Amazing that he can’t feel it. Maybe he can’t feel anything.

Maybe underneath his skin, he’s made of cobwebs, stretched over rusty metal bones.

I stare at the man, cock my head to the side, and wonder if I could kill him. What would happen? I’d been over the possibilities so many times in my head, the options. What am I supposed to do? No one would believe me if I told them the truth—I can’t even say it out loud. If I run, they’ll find me. It’s either kill them or kill myself.

I don’t even know if they can die.

“Really, sometimes it feels like you’re not even listening.”

He’s going for that snarky lilt my dad always played up when he was angry about something. He‘s close, really, but the timing is a little off, the final syllables a little forced. I know the difference.

I miss my dad.

I get up and walk into the bathroom, leaving the man sitting alone. Did he keep talking after I left? I don’t know. I close the bathroom door and turn the lock.

The mirror is dirty with streaks and dust and toothpaste splatter. I put my hands on the cold porcelain sink and lean toward the metal, looking into my own eyes as if they belong to someone else.

They’re gray, my eyes. Anna always said that was the damnedest thing, said they were like storm clouds ready to open up. Said she could watch my emotions streak across them like lightning.

A piece of sandy hair falls across my forehead. I feel her hands in my hair, her nails painted red. They’d trail along my neck and down my back, over my side and underneath my shirt. I think I loved her hands even more than her lips.

I think I loved her.

I fucking miss her.

I slam my fist against the sink. I feel my little finger snap under the force of the others. I hold the hand to my face. The skin is already darkening, the joints swollen. It looks like it did the day I punched the lockers at school, the day I realized Anna wasn’t Anna anymore.

I remember that she spoke quietly. My Anna wouldn’t have done that. She would have yelled. She would have hurt.

“We’re over,” she said.

I told her no. I told her we were meant to be together. I loved her. What was she thinking? What had changed?

I remember her shaking her head, softly, slowly. Holding her hands in front of her, showing her palms. I remember fear in her suddenly-dull eyes.

“Is this because of that?” I said. “Because it was a mistake. It was a mistake. There’s nothing wrong with me. The doctors said so. I just got angry. I just got so angry when he called me a loser. I was just tired of it. But he’s fine. He’s fine and I’m fine and there’s no reason for you to leave.”

I remember her backing away. I remember her walking sideways down the hall, away from me, and then I knew.

They took my parents slowly, but they took Anna all at once. She was just gone. Her hair was still dark chestnut brown, and her eyes were still pale blue, and her lips were still as perfect as the day I met her. But her hands, they were different. And she never painted her nails red again.

A drop of liquid rolls down the side of my face. I can’t tell if it’s sweat or a tear. I can’t remember the last time I cried. There’s nothing to cry about anymore. The days pass like a montage on a movie screen, one after the other, falling away like calendar pages.

The mirror is steady on the wall, but as I look into my eyes, they are steadier. There is no doubt, no indecision. There is nothing.

When I realize what’s happened, I am afraid for the shortest of moments. Then it’s gone. My heartbeat remains heavy in my chest for another few seconds, reminding me what I have seen.

They’ve taken me, taken nearly every piece of me, and I didn’t even notice. I look down at my hands, one swollen and bruised, and flip them over to see my palms. Every line is just as I remember. I lean closer into the mirror, inspecting my skin, my teeth, my lashes. Everything is the same.

But there is no lightning in my eyes.

There is no hint of the emotions normally so close to the surface, ready to bubble through—the part of me that Anna loved best.

How did I not notice? How did I not feel it? There is so little of me left. When I truly look I can see that there is only a fraction of my spirit left in my bones. The rest is charred wood, crumbling inside me so that I am nothing but a shell.

I can’t let that happen.

I still have a little of myself left, a small spark—not enough to catch ablaze, but it will last a moment more—a moment to do something so that I don’t disappear completely, so that I don’t become like my mother and father and Anna, the ones I loved most in my life. So that I don’t become something else altogether, fooling everyone around me into believing that I still exist. How many people walk the earth that way? Unaware. Dead in every sense except the only one that would free them.

That will not happen to me.

I unhook my belt, sliding it slowly through the loops of my jeans until it hangs from  my fingers like a dead snake. The black leather is soft from wear—it twists easily into a loop, and I stand on the side of the bathtub to knot the other end over the shower rod. I move faster, my tennis shoes squeaking against the bathtub wall. There is no way to know how much time I have left, or how much time I’ve spent away from myself, replaced by something else.

The soft leather feels rough against my neck as I pull the loop over my head. My heart feels as though it’s stopped in my chest, and my lungs are no longer pumping oxygen through my body. It’s getting closer. They’re going to take me.

My foot lifts from the tub. I hesitate, bodily weakness stealing over me, the desire to live overpowering the knowledge of what is to come. I think of Anna, her red nails. I think of the way she used to touch me. I think of everything that we could have had, and I know that I can’t let them win. I can’t let them take me.

I step off.

For the briefest of moments I think I might be wrong. I might be crazy. But that’s only the fear worming its way into my mind—or maybe it’s them. I laugh through the pain as the belt pulls against my windpipe, cutting off oxygen from my body, suffocating the infiltrators.

They thought they had won. I almost smile, but the turn of my lips pulls taut the skin of my neck. My face is frozen in a terrible frown.

That’s how they will find me, the ones who look like my parents. If I had any doubt, now I am sure. My real mom and dad would be banging on the door, crying, tearing the walls down.

The room is fading like an old television screen. Lines of static run through my vision. What was that? Standing in front of me. It looked like…

“Anna?” The word doesn’t pass my tongue. It’s caught somewhere in the back of my throat. She’s standing in front of me, bare feet on the tile, her hands on her hips. She’s looking like she used to in the summer, her hair lightened on the top and her skin baked olive-brown.

The world fades, and she disappears. I kick my feet, searching for the side of the tub—can’t find it. I grip the belt overhead and try to bear my weight, but I’m already too weak.

I see her again. Anna, Anna, save me! She takes a step forward, cups her cheek in her hand. Her nails are painted red.

I’m going to her. I’m going to meet her. The thought subdues me, and I relax into the noose, into the pain that is subsiding into numbness.

She takes a step closer, looks deep into my closing eyes, and shakes her head from side to side.

The last thing I hear is a pounding on the door.