Originally published in Morpheus Tales Magazine. Copyright © 2012

Clone

I touch the water and it hums. I can feel the wet when it trickles all around my body. I enter and the water envelops me. I am drenched.

Days. Weeks. Months pass. The doctor listens to my thoughts and feels the need to speak to me. I don’t want to hear him. I see his words; they float in the water. He wants me to complete the process. I’m taking too long, he says. I ignore him. The matter that consisted of me is not developed. It soon will be, but not yet. No amount of words will change that. Only I can say when it is ready. Until then, it will sit inside me and heat. I can hear my matter purring although the doctor tells me that’s impossible. My perceptions sharpen like tiny feline teeth.

I want to tell my story—a story that is mine and mine alone. I want to remember. But I fear I’m forgetting things. Things that are important, like how I got here and how I came to be. About the water and why it surrounds me and how I feel about it and what it makes me and what I am. I want to remember the sickness that brought me here… No, actually I do not. I cannot. I won’t. A wash is where my mind should be—an empty space filled with swishes of color and drips of rain.

The body was failing me. Disease weakened the flesh, eating muscle tissue and bone. A new body will hold my memories, my thoughts, my mind. A disease-free body with no soul, made out of matter that is essentially mine. It will be me and not me. A new me. The flesh strengthened by the water and the doctor’s words and my will to live.

The voices from outside the glass speak in muffled tones. It’s the doctor and some others. Then their words appear in the water. I do not read them. And, yes, that is glass. It’s not just water, it’s glass. It surrounds me. I replicate and now it surrounds us. We are encased in glass. Clear hard cold glass that holds us in and we are together, the water and I and I.

But is it only water? It seems to hum and it’s warm. At least it makes me warm. I look at the water and I see myself. I see myself outside myself. That is me. I don’t remember which one is me. But that is what I look like. That is me over there in the water. My eyes are closed and so is my mouth. We are together in the water, me and myself. We dangle in the water. I wish I knew why. I may have known once. It’s all drenched and wet where my mind should be. Nothing is there now. Only me and myself and the water.