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Genevieve Valentine @glvalentine.bsky.social · 24/05/2024

A story about being so screwed that the veil wants nothing to do with you, and the power of (terrible) friendship - "Other Kelly" is up at @reactorsff.bsky.social: reactormag.com/other-kelly-...

Kyle was the one who got really obsessed, at first—not even when Other Kelly was there, just random moments where Marshall and I would be getting McDonald’s with Kyle at four a.m. and he’d look up from his fries like a meerkat and say “Fuck, I bet it’s killed Kelly already” and start typing so loud nobody could even talk until he was finished. He had a phone full of photos of people posing with their doubles.

“Those doubles are people, asshole,” said Marshall once, a warning to shut up about it, but if Kyle was smart enough to take a warning he’d have stopped being a musician already, and he said, “How would you know—they show up on camera, doesn’t mean they’re a person,” and kept typing until Kelly texted back.

(cont.)

Marshall rolled his eyes, but it was true. In the group photo at New Year’s, Other Kelly was there, in the same thing Kelly was wearing (it fit her better), looking right into the lens. She wasn’t smiling, but still she seemed perfectly normal until you saw Kelly with her arm outstretched to take the picture, dress pulling at her shoulders, grinning like her skull was about to make a run for it, and realized that one of them was very wrong.

(Eventually Kyle stopped texting Kelly. She was never dead. It was fine.)

*

Illustration by Mary Pelc: A young woman in a black bob is removing a night-sky-patterned mask from her face; beneath it, fire has consumed the woman's face. Pink smoke curls through the holes in the mask and billows out behind her.