Ronnie, you look just like your dad. You know? It’s a little unsettling. Mom said as I was standing in our small apartments doorway waiting for Reggie to come down the stairwell. Reggie has been my best friend since mom and I moved up here to Maine. Camden is a very small town. All of the people here seem to know each other so well, it’s like they have all been here for years beyond comprehension.
Everyone in Camden is very pleasant, but something about the way they move in my peripheral, the way they walk like something trying to mimic human movement, and the strange way words just seem to garble up from their vocal chords like Bambi taking his first steps, is deeply disturbing. Reggie has been living here a couple years longer than me, and he has a name for these creatures mocking human nature.
“Similars”. When mom and I moved here, our life was completely shattered like stained glass after a town riot. I met Reggie on the third day in our new apartment, he showed me the strange ways similars would behave, and gave me my first cigarette. Soon we were drinking during schools lunch period, and eventually, we stopped going most days.
yesterday, I was standing in my doorway like usual. 10 minutes goes by, Reggie is just running a little late. 20 more minutes goes by of just stagnant waiting, and my mom started to yell that I better get on to school. I walked up the two staircases to get to apartment 667, and I knocked for Reggie. His father answered the door with a completely blank 1000 yard stare. Before I was able to get anything out, Mr.Brown gave me a strangely large smile, and said “I know your mother must be in such great pain. I am a widower, son, I understand her anguish.”
Still smiling, a single tear rolled down his pale stubbly cheek. Something about this show of human emotion seemed manufactured , but regardless, I asked him if he was okay, and if Reggie was home. He just continued staring through me, and his smile grew to even more unnerving size. He just started to weep openly with the smile still plastered across his face. I felt dread in my stomach. After about 15 seconds of this, I ran down the stairs and out of the building as fast as I could.
Reggie and I planned to ditch today, so I met him down under the docks on the rocky beach where all of the delinquents were when they were supposed to be in getting that wholesome, neat, public education. Reggie was seated alone on an outcropping of a giant boulder that had been lodged in the sands over many tides.
Reggie told me his father had been acting very strange, and feeling a little embarrassed for the conversation I had earlier that morning, I feigned confusion and asked him, how?
He told me of three events over the past 24 hours. “Last night at dinner, I had to teach my father how to use a fork. Last night at around 1:30, I saw my father watching me sleep through a crack in the door. This morning, my father was smiling so large, and sitting so still, it looked like rigamortis had set in hours ago. I just wish I could see my mom again man, you’re so lucky. My dads been acting strange these past weeks, he won’t sleep.” He finished his monologue with a seemingly involuntary shudder.
All of the sudden, he flung himself into the rocky ocean below the place where we made, and forgot so many memories. I caught a single glimpse of his face as he was falling. Locked into that same smile his father wore. I screamed out into the fog of the morning, but it felt as someone ripped my vocal chords from my throat.
My best friend is gone. Thrown into the everlasting ocean fog just as my father was. For some reason, I could only think of my sweet mother’s face as I was running through the small Camden alleyways frantically towards our quaint apartment building. I was hearing murmurs of my father bills Suicide, and hearing the similars laughing and mocking my father’s alcoholism and depression leading him to “eat a bullet for breakfast” and I felt myself going out again.
I hadn’t had an episode in almost a whole year, but today felt so dark, I couldn’t help but fall into a manic state. As I breathlessly approached our stairwell, unease blossomed from my gut. It grew larger and larger as I approached our doorway, apartment 447. The silence was as loud as hells choir of constant agony. I turned the knob, slowly, and walked in to the heavy, dark air of the apartment where my beautiful mother worked so hard to keep us afloat.
She was sitting in the den, not in her home office like she usually would be on weekdays. No words can describe the feeling I got when I looked at my mothers face. She had been watching television static when I walked in, and muttering in tongues while I approached her.
The smell of liquor was immediately noticeable when I walked into the den with my mother, and I felt a little piece of myself break. It had been 3 years since my mother had a drop. today, that all changed. A bottle of empty, cheap vodka sat next to my bleeding mother. She was clawing at the corners of her mouth, and her face had been nearly completely torn apart. She had both sides of her cheeks almost in complete shreds, and a grotesque smile dripping blood and viscera was plastered on my dear mother’s face.
this all leads us to now. I’m locked in our bathroom with this bottle of lithium, that has my name on the label. My “mother” is trying to convince me to come out of the bathroom and come to the hospital with her, but her wounds were much to grievous for a human to still be alive. I know this is not my mother. This is another similar, trying to destroy my life again. But I won’t let it happen. Not again. I started to run a bath with the hottest water I could get. As I lay in the bath, blood draining from my wrists into the water, I couldn’t help but smile. As I fade into the sweet sounds echoing in the dark, I’m writing this to let everyone know, you should smile for once.