We knew the lighthouse as much as you could know anything concrete and solitary. It’s light blinked once fast and twice slow and once fast again and we knew we were.
My doppelganger gets seasick. I tell her to look into the light. She refuses.
I do not get seasick. I wonder if this is the difference that un-doppelgangers us.
My doppelganger wears the red Keds I wore last summer. There is a hole in the left toe. It is a small hole, but it grows every time she wears them.
My doppelganger dry heaves over the side of our boat. The wind whips around her face, leaving marks like a leather strap. The wind is unforgiving and relentless. It shakes the water that unstirs her stomach. I am of a slightly sturdier composition.
The wind will stop when we get closer, when we ride alongside land rising up from the ocean in jagged sheets of rock. My doppelganger will remember her sea-legs, her sea-stomach, and take up the red and yellow flags, spell out her message for the lighthouse dwellers. I do not remember that alphabet anymore.
She, my doppelganger, tried to teach me semaphore. I have no talent for languages, especially the silent ones. This, of course, means my doppelganger could betray me as I stand. I do not think my doppelganger has the capacity for cruelty.
My doppelganger’s chin is a lonely peninsula. Her hair is dishwater brown. In harsh light, her skin is plagued with craters. But here, where the only landscape is the white peaks of a black sea and the distant blinking of the lighthouse, she looks as smooth as the Circe statue we saw in France.
The cat died on our thirty-seventh day at sea. We thought we were lost. I told my doppelganger to follow the stars. My doppelganger rolled her eyes and consulted her compass.
Magnets can be treacherous, I said. My doppelganger did not believe me.
After the cat died on the thirty-seventh day, the rats became braver. On the thirty-ninth night, a rat crawled across my doppelganger’s face as she slept. She woke up with a start, but did not shriek like I might have. She picked the rat up with both of her hands and broke it’s neck. She tossed it’s carcass at me.
We have to eat these, she said, now that the cat is dead.
The rats had white worms wriggling inside of them. My stomach is stronger than my doppelganger’s, but my doppelganger is stronger than me.
I don’t remember where I found my doppelganger. She told me she lived on a house on a rock in the middle of the ocean. I made a joke about the commute.
My doppelganger does not joke.
On the forty-seventh night we saw the lighthouse light.
On the forty-eighth day we dropped anchor and rowed our dingy towards the shore. I wondered if my doppelganger would come back to sea with me.
AB
