Split

Part 1

Hi, I’m a baby fiction-writer. If you like this first chapter, please like, share, or comment. It will increase the chance of me writing additional chapters. Enjoy! <3

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Imagine you woke up and went about your day and hurt yourself, horrifically, in a perfectly mundane way. Maybe you sliced your wrist with a box cutter cause you are unfathomably clumsy, or you tripped and tumbled off the top of your surprisingly high stairs.

Whatever agony you are feeling, your mind is rejecting the reality of what just happened. It’s screaming itself inside out that this can’t be happening and you were fine just moments before but now you are dying.

Instead of calling 911 like any sane person would do, you just lay there in shock, your mind raging against the dying of your light. It’s seeping out of you where the blood gushes out of your wrist or the pressure in your skull crushes your brain.

You imagine instead your healthy body, the way it was before. Far more real than whatever this current horror is. Your normal body, without any additional apertures for blood to escape or dents crushing bone shards into your brain.

Till the pain fades away in a haze and you feel yourself splitting away from yourself. Is this what dying is like? you manage to wonder before you come to, on the floor, naked, someone hugging you from behind.

Nothing makes sense for a moment, and you wonder if you fell asleep, had a bad dream, took a strange drug? But then why are you lying on the floor here. And … who is that?

You turn around and see your own face. Merciful adrenalin snaps the entire world into crystalline focus, time freezing as your body is propelled backwards across the floor. Your real body that is, the one you just moved when you scrambled back. Not that doll, mannequin, monstrosity on the floor in front of you.

It’s bleeding from its wrists. Its skull is caved in.

You, though, you are fine. You are pushing your naked back against a rough wall. Staring, staring, and staring. No way to know how long before thoughts start surfacing again.

Who is that?

I must be high.

Oh, this must be what it’s like to be crazy.

You focus on your breathing. In and out. It does no good.

You move you fingers. Then your toes. That works at least.

You stretch your arms and then your legs, careful to not touch the pool of blood stagnant on the wooden floor.

You push yourself up against the wall, plowing painful rivulets into your bare back. The pain wakes you further.

What’s happening?

Your mind can’t make sense of it, but you are standing now at least. Breathing and moving worked. You are naked though. The other face is wearing your bathrobe shrouded in a pool of blood.

I guess that’s ruined now.

You get up and walk to the kitchen. You make yourself a cup of coffee, calmly. Sit at table and sip. Your dead body lying in the hallway.

I’m either crazy or something amazing just happened.

Crazy is more likely, but in that case the body isn’t really there. Well, either that or it’s someone you just murdered and there is another face on them.

Should I call the cops?

If there is nothing there, they’ll give you meds. If you killed someone they’ll lock you up. And if you did just cheat death by creating a new body then… then…

Ok, I’m crazy or I killed someone.

In that case, better to hide the body. If you are crazy, then you are just LARPing a nightmare for a night. And if you are a murderer, well … You can’t fathom why you’d kill anyone so there was probably a good reason or a bad accident. Either way, it’s better to have more time to figure that out than have police swarming in right this moment.

…

Your mind flinches away from the obvious conclusion. “Hiding bodies” was not part of your 2026 resolutions. Though you’ve seen enough TV shows about it to have some hunches on how to go about it.

So you get to work, pragmatically, methodically, and with clothes on now. It’s the middle of the night and you wheel out the body in a trash container, pull it into your minivan, and drive it over to your parents farm. There there is a small river that runs along the edge, and a small pier that runs into it, with small boats that don’t run at all. One sags half into the water, disappointed at never being used. Another lists precariously, doubtfully able to sustain the weight of twice yourself.

So you sit at the pier, legs dangling down above the water, the container with a body waiting patiently next to you, the light from your phone the only thing giving you away.

Funny how the world isn’t screaming.

Everything looks peaceful instead. A cat meows somewhere. An owl hoots. The stars shine down on either your insanity or your crime.

Sorry to confuse you though. This story isn’t about you. It is about me. It’s how there are two of me now and I don’t know what to do about that. One with a slit wrist and a dent in her head and one…

I look down at my wrist, unblemished, then feel along my skull. I remember the pain, the cut, the fall.

Not the stairs though.

I was at the bottom of the stairs, in the hallway, opening a box.

I…

Is my mind still damaged?

I keep feeling along my skull as the horror inside me mounts.

Do I have brain damage?

Panic rises in me like an electric fire shooting out from my stomach. I scramble back from the edge of the pier, not trusting myself so close to the water.

No, fuck, what happened?! Am I crazy? Do I have amnesia?

My nails are digging into my skull now, the pain only a ghost of the memory when I cracked it.

Memory?!

Then I freeze.

Denying the moment.

Denying the reality.

I am not crazy. I don’t have amnesia. I don’t have brain damage!

It’s impossible to accept so I resist instead, curling my body around a truth that doesn’t exist till agony explodes all across my body, just before everything fades away again. A … stroke?

And then I come to, wind hugging my face, someone’s arms hugging my waist.

Fuck.