Short story

The first sentence is a prompt from a friend.

“I met your doppelganger on a frozen March weekend, walking through a wet tunnel that ran beneath a dirty river.”

The grave stone made no response. They’re just corks in a bottle to make sure the dead stay still and cold in the hard ground.

“It was naked like yourself. I wanted to clothe it for your sake, but I had no clothes. I tossed it my jacket but it didn’t even try to touch it. It looked at me and wailed.”

My ears still ached from the echoing cries that hadn’t ended.

“I’ve never heard you cry. Did the doppelganger carry your sorrow in its heart and dash it across my soul?”

I knelt beside the stone and kissed the letters Beloved Daughter. We had only dug the grave that morning and the dirt was not yet frozen solid. I scooped it with my fingers and pushed it aside.

“I tried to wrap the coat around the doppelganger so that its bare toes wouldn’t turn black, but it wouldn’t have it. Crawled away, the umbilical cord –” I stopped and looked behind me. The baby girl was still there. Blue fingers, blue toes. The cord wasn’t wound around its neck anymore, but was draped around its shoulders, like a shawl. A terribly thin wrap that shouldn’t have kept out the bitter cold.

“It wouldn’t let me keep it warm,” I said, as I resumed my digging. “Why wouldn’t it let me keep it warm?” I put my hand on the gravestone. It was the color of her cheeks, and cold like her skin. “Can you hear me?”

The doppelganger crawled to the edge of the grave, pushed its hand against the earth.

It looked at me with its baby eyes.

“Do you carry some of her laughter?”

It blinked slowly at me.

“Let me hear her laughter, her baby giggle,” I said. “You shared with me her sorrow. Surely there was more than that inside of her.” Weren’t our hearts bigger than that?

The doppelganger closed its eyes and put a dirty thumb in its mouth.

I swallowed and dug some more.

Finally, my knuckles brushed against something more solid than cold earth, something hollow.

A knock, but nobody answered.

I scratched away at the sides until my hand fit between the coffer and the ground.

The doppelganger still watched me, sucking its thumb.

“I want to see if you’re still inside,” I said. “Because you can’t be in here and out here. You just can’t. Why wouldn’t you come back to me if you could be in two places at once? You’ll get dirt on your face from the river and there’s no one to clean it away. There’s no mother’s milk and warm fires and rocking cradles with angels singing lullabies under running rivers.”

My cold fingers fumbled with the wood.

But I had to know.

She was still covered with the blanket her grandmother had made. I can’t see her blue eyes because I closed them myself. She never did look like she was just sleeping.

The doppelganger cooed, and leaned forward. With one tiny finger, it touched my daughter’s forehead. Then it cried again, her mouth wide and wanting.

I picked it up. I made sure to support its neck with my arm, and said, “Shhh” but the wind stole my whispers. “Hush little baby don’t you cry.” The words trembled on my tongue, but I didn’t care. My daughter had never heard a lullaby. Perhaps, as the doppelganger had shown me her grief, maybe it had also loaned her its ears. “Within your dreams, you can touch the sky.”

The crying stopped. I looked down at the doppelganger. “With you in my arms I feel whole,” I sang. I saw my daughter wearing a living mask instead of the true face of death.

Then my arms were empty. In the coffin there was one tiny form that was grey and cold and voiceless as stone. “Because you are, my heart and soul.”

I closed the coffin.