The Other Me
‘The Long Hard Fall’ i. Allie was a girl who’d had a crush on me in Grade 6 (twenty-five years earlier) and chased me through high school. Then she married some guy and that was it – until she rang me unexpectedly and we swapped stories. She told me she’d had three kids and was unhappily married. I told her I was pretty much where I was when we’d last spoke over fifteen years earlier. As her marriage disintegrated and she separated, we became friends, and then later developed our own relationship – much to the disapproval of my parents. They saw danger: I wasn’t working; she had major financial…
The Other Me
‘The Fugue’ ii. One night, I lay on the couch reading – just as I’d done many other nights. Wolf was curled in the chair opposite me, just as she usually was. Then the thought popped in my head to kill her. I saw it clearly: I’d rip her head off. The thought was beyond reprehensible, beyond unconscionable, beyond anything I’d known before, and it terrified me to think that I could be capable of thinking it. I sat up, told myself there was no way I was going to do that, but the violence and aberration of the thought remained, washed over me in a way that I couldn’t…