The Imposter
Winner of the 2025 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction contest.
~ by Katie Henken Robinson
According to my horoscope app, seven planets were in retrograde the day Quinn broke up with me. I suppose “broke up with” is probably too kind a way of putting it. It was more that I came home unexpectedly early and found her fucking another woman in our bed. She wasn’t especially keen to make apologies either. It went the usual way: I sobbed on the street and imagined myself the trampled protagonist of a movie at her low point. Quinn texted to say I could come back that evening to pack up my things; she would make sure to be out of the house.
I wandered the city aimlessly. It was snowing, which made it all feel something like magic, the slightest bit of hope that this could be a new leaf turning over rather than the utter destruction of my happiness and any form of stability I’d come to acquire. I tried to keep my mind away from the big questions, like who would keep the cats. I thought I might like to, but I didn’t have the financials to afford them both and doubted a request for cat-child support would be taken seriously. The small questions weren’t much better and mostly centered on whether we would sleep together one last time, a hot and angry goodbye fuck. Perhaps I’d allowed domesticity to lull me into becoming lackluster, and Quinn had gotten bored. Now that I was angry with her, I might get rough, exciting. It might do us some good to remind her that I was a solid lay. Plus, if my horoscope app was any true indication, things might right themselves as soon as the planets realigned. It was comforting to think my relationship’s catastrophic turn was being guided by some outside force beyond my own shortcomings.
I looped back through the dog park, where I stopped a moment to watch an agile Boxer leap at the snowflakes. There was a supermoon that night, glowing over the foggy tree line. I thought I might like to stay a while to avoid the inevitable, but my hair was damp, and the cold was starting to penetrate to the bone. I gave the Boxer’s owner a nod before continuing to the courtyard of what was once, but would soon be no longer, my apartment building. The complex was two identical structures, split through the middle by some greenery and a parking lot. I wandered dreamlike through the sliding doors, the same mauve couch to my right as always. I got into the elevator and went up to the fifth floor, checking my phone in hopes I would have some texts or missed calls from Quinn and unsurprisingly finding none.
Standing at the door to my apartment, I jiggled the key in the doorknob to no headway. I checked to make sure it was the right key. It was. I felt a momentary splutter of panic, wondering if Quinn had already changed the lock. I knew she had a vindictive streak—I’d seen it with her exes, a term I now realized applied to me. But ultimately, I decided a locksmith couldn’t have possibly arrived and done the job that fast anyway.
With my key still inside the lock, the door began to swing open from the other side. I leapt back, expecting to find Quinn standing there. Instead, I found myself staring at an oddly Quinn-like man. Same choppy, dirty blonde haircut; same sleepy eyes with dark circles beneath; same narrow, angular face, the skin almost too white and slightly translucent, showing through to the veins. I thought I must be so broken up over things that I was simply reading Quinn into everything, sticking her in places she didn’t belong. But this man even had the same expression of concern, with his lips turned inward and pressed together. He was smiling at me strangely, as though he likewise recognized my face, but couldn’t place where from.
I realized by now that I must have entered the wrong building, but I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that I was standing at my own door, finding someone else inside.
“Sorry,” the man said. “I think you have the wrong apartment.”
From behind him, two dogs appeared. They were the same colors as our cats: a rusty-coated Pomeranian mix and long-haired Dachshund with a speckled black-and-white coat. They flocked to me as though I was familiar to them and not some stranger mistakenly trying to break into their home. I knelt down to pet them. The Dachshund licked my face.
“Sweet dogs,” I said.
The man tilted his head, his lips pursed. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“Just from the building, probably. I live in the one across the street. This same apartment number, actually. Sorry I bothered you, I’m a bit out of sorts.”
I peered behind him to get a look into his apartment. The living room looked exactly like mine and Quinn’s, or almost. There was our same cheap kitchen table from Ikea, but up against the opposite wall. Our same suede couch, but in blue rather than beige and covered in dog hair instead of destroyed by cat claws. A rug stretched out between the couch and the television, consisting of the same crosshatch pattern, but inverted: the carpet blue and the stitching white rather than the carpet white and stitching blue. I blinked and held my eyes closed a second longer than usual, hoping it would wake me from a dream, were I in one.
“Bad day?” He leaned down and picked up the Pomeranian, who had started enthusiastically snapping its jaw at my hair. He stroked its neck, trying to hush it. The Dachshund had rolled over to reveal its speckled stomach for me to pet.
“The worst. I found my girlfriend cheating on me, actually. I was only coming back to pack my things and go.” I was surprised to find myself blurting the intimate details of my life to a man I’d only just met. I wasn’t usually the type to overshare with a stranger. Distress will do that to a person, I supposed.
“Funny you should say that,” he said. “I mean, not funny. I’m sorry to hear it. But funny because I kicked my boyfriend out today.”
I glanced again at the apartment behind him and wondered if, short of a boyfriend, he might be in need of a roommate instead. “Rough day for us both, then. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He didn’t cheat. He was just unbearably dull and on top of that, he could be pretty selfish.”
I knelt down on the carpeted hall rug. The Dachshund rolled back over and wiggled toward me, burying its head in my lap. I stroked its ears. “I worry that’s what my girlfriend is saying about me right now. More the unbearably dull part. But also kind of both.”
“You don’t strike me as dull. I can’t say I know you well enough to speak to the selfish part, but so far so good.”
“Stick around. It creeps up on you.”
He tilted his head as if trying to discern whether or not I was joking, then seemed to decide I was. “Do you want to come in? The neighbors don’t love when I let the dogs wander the hall.”
I considered leaving. It seemed like the more logical thing to do, given that I didn’t know this man. But something tugged me toward this place that was and wasn’t my apartment and this man who was and wasn’t Quinn. Besides, I had nothing to do except sulk and begin the unadvisable work of picking out a mildly slutty outfit for whenever I would see Quinn next. And, I supposed, pack my things, but I already knew I’d put that off as long as possible anyway.
I pressed myself up off the floor and followed the man who looked like Quinn inside.
*
The man who looked like Quinn turned out to also be named Quin, but with only one N. The further coincidence: his boyfriend’s name was Jack and mine Jackie. I told him about how the dogs looked like my cats, and how the furniture was largely the same. Quin pulled my favorite bourbon, apparently also Jack’s favorite, down from his liquor cabinet. He poured us each a glass, and the glasses were the small version of the set we had, the eight-ounce kind to our twelve.
“This is all beginning to feel a little spooky,” Quin said. He came over and handed me the glass of whiskey.
“I was going to say fated.” I took a sip. “Kismet.”
“Kismet. It might be.”
I stood at the living room window, peering out at the building across the street. I was searching for a definitive indication that I was, without a doubt, not somehow in my own apartment. Sure enough, the big white letters on the opposite awning declared it 101, my own building number. And there was my living room window. Inside, the lights were off and the blue curtains half-drawn. Satisfied, I followed Quin to the couch and sat, shifting to face him. He had his right leg crossed over his left and bopped his foot around as though to an unheard beat. A Quinn mannerism, I thought.
“Let’s do a quickfire round,” I said. “To see how like each other’s exes we actually are.”
“Good call. Shoot.”
I quickly catalogued all of Quinn’s favorite things and was surprised by how much I could recall. I knew enough about her preferences that if you’d asked me to draw a police sketch of the kind of woman Quinn might leave me for, it would’ve been a near dead replica of the bone-thin woman with the fake black hair and greasy bangs I’d found naked in my bed a few hours ago.
I decided to start off with something highly specific, the sort of question that might get to the heart of who they are, something essential at the core of their being. “What’s the worst thing that happened to you as a kid?”
“Damn, really diving right in.” He rested his whiskey glass against his lower lip and stared thoughtfully out the window. “When I was twelve, I found my babysitter dead in an armchair. She was super old. She choked on a lozenge.”
“Wow, shit.” I had the urge to ask how an adult woman chokes to death on a lozenge, but worried he might find it insensitive. “That’s horrible.”
He shrugged it off. “Does that line up with your Quinn? Did she ever see a dead body?”
I thought for a moment. “No dead bodies that I’m aware of, but she did go through a phase of finding dead birds everywhere. They kept smacking straight into the windows of her childhood bedroom and dropping dead on the front lawn. At the time, she thought it was God smiting her for having uncouth thoughts about girls. Which was weird, because her family wasn’t remotely religious.”
“Not quite a dead babysitter, but it captures a similar sense of the morose. For a little while, I did kind of think my babysitter died because of me. Like it had to do with me being smote or something.”
“Okay, so shared sense of religious wrongdoing. Probably not incredibly rare, but still, it’s not nothing. How about formative crush?”
He thought for a moment. “Probably my elementary school music teacher, Mr. Broderick. He was the handsome, greasy type. Long hair, always wearing black. A little brooding and bookish.” He let out a wistful huff of air.
Quinn’s earliest crush was her elementary school art teacher, who she described as “a greasy hippy” with “artsy, depressed vibes.” When I told Quin as much, he looked simultaneously delighted and frightened, like the face of a child playing with a Ouija board. We continued our quickfire this way for nearly half an hour. Quin and Quinn’s favorite food, color, and prestige TV show were all similar but not exact—pasta vs. pizza, blue vs. black, The Sopranos vs. The Wire. At first, we were both exhilarated by how their answers were almost but not quite the same, but as we continued on, Quin began to waver. I got the sense that he was growing displeased and uneasy. Where I saw similarities, he would find inconsistencies instead. He kept spinning the ice around in his glass, clinking it anxiously against the sides.
“Should we stop?” he said, after we’d just discovered that Quin and Quinn’s mothers were named Jean and Jeanine, respectively. “Maybe we should stop.”
“Why? We’re starting to get somewhere.”
“I don’t know. Isn’t this freaking you out?”
“It’s all just for fun,” I said, putting on my best soothing smile. “Why don’t we do me now? Maybe Jack and I are nothing alike.”
This seemed to ease his mind a bit, and he nodded, smiling thoughtfully. He stopped spinning the ice cube. I readied myself for the big questions, trying to remember my worst childhood moment, which wasn’t immediately clear to me. I wondered if not being able to identify one right away meant I didn’t have one at all. Or that I had too many.
“Favorite movie?” he asked.
I felt the slightest disappointment that he was starting light and not digging into the meat of things. I answered with ease, “The Handmaiden.”
“Hm. Obscure.”
“Do you know it?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
It was obvious he hadn’t from the way he was squinting and nodding as if trying to recall, but I had no interest in calling him on it. This was a Quinn move as well, being utterly unable to admit when you don’t know something, especially in art.
“What was Jack’s favorite movie?”
He pressed his lips together. “You know what?”
I leaned toward him conspiratorially. “What?”
“I have absolutely no fucking idea. I’m realizing I’m not sure I know a single favorite thing of his at all.”
We burst out laughing. I felt the whiskey beginning to work in my system.
“Do you think Quinn would know your favorite movie?”
I thought for a moment, trying to recall if I’d ever made her watch it with me. Quinn was the third in a string of successive relationships I’d been in, each lasting barely over a year, and sometimes the three of them blurred together. Each one had felt unique in its intensity, like its own universe entirely, but then I’d find myself unable to remember which of them I’d watched what movie with, or mixing up which inside joke had belonged to whom. What I knew for certain was that Quinn had never been all that interested in my particulars.
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Maybe she and I are alike after all, then.” He took the whiskey glass out of my hand and got up to refill our drinks. When he sat back down he said, “This is nice. I wish we’d run into each other sooner.”
“It feels like college. When you learn everything about a person over the course of a day, and suddenly you’re best friends.”
“It is sort of like that.”
I sipped my drink and reclined back on the couch, testing the limits of our newfound closeness by stretching my legs across Quin’s lap. He responded by draping his arm over my calves, his hand resting on the patch of bare skin where my pants had shimmied up. It felt familiar, as though we did this every day. His inability to remember anything specific about Jack seemed to have calmed him down, almost like he’d forgotten the context for why I was there at all. I closed my eyes.
“You know,” I said, “the more we talk about it, the more sure I feel that Quinn never really liked me much at all.”
He patted my leg gently. “Well, fuck her. I’ll be your Quin now.”
“I’m probably still going to try and win her back. I’m thinking about hunger striking and using super dark eyeliner so I’ll look simultaneously sad, hot, and a little unhealthy the next time she sees me. She’s always liked her women waifish and at least a little depressed.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Yeah, well, the things we do for love,” I said. My flippancy didn’t seem to assuage him.
“Why do you even want her back?”
I shifted my legs off his lap and sat up to look at him. “In most couples, there is one exciting half, and one boring half. I’m the boring half. I’m lesser without her.”
“What is it about Quinn that makes you so sure she’s the more interesting half?”
“What is it about Jack that makes you so sure you are?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m the better half. We just weren’t the right fit. Stop evading the question.”
I thought about how to best explain it, but I kept thinking about my own shortcomings, rather than Quinn’s accolades. Like, I was the messier half and less socially attuned. I was always telling non-sequitur stories that no one found funny but me. And I felt I was someone whose likability was parabolic: initially quite charming, then a long dip into tedium, until eventually rising back again as a faithful friend. Most people dropped off the ride at the low point. But this wasn’t about my mediocrity.
“Quinn—I don’t know,” I said. “She’s orbital. When we met, I was immediately drawn to her. We were at this house-party-slash-art-show in Bushwick. I’d seen her floating around, and we talked briefly, but there was so much energy even in that small exchange. I felt something deep in my gut when she talked to me, like I’d do anything to keep her there. But I didn’t want to get my hopes up, because it was clear she was like that with everyone. That woman could have sexual chemistry with a fucking sock. But then I went outside to get some fresh air, and I found her leaning against the building. It was spitting rain, and a streetlamp was casting this milky glow over her that made her look a little sickly, but when she brought the cigarette to her lips, I was fucking done for, and I knew it. Even with her hair rain-frizzed as she tried and failed to light a cigarette, I felt this buzzing all over me, this electric feeling of watching someone you know you need to know. She felt so real to me. She was talking to someone else, but she kept looking at me over the other woman’s shoulder. She whispered something to the woman, who glanced back at me before going inside. I walked over to her, about to ask for a cigarette, and she kissed me, and it was like, complete melt, you know? I could have died right there.”
Quin was watching me intently, a slight frown on his face. “So she was hot and a good conversationalist?”
I was left with the feeling I hadn’t described it adequately, that I was incapable of getting to the heart of things, or maybe didn’t understand where the heart even was.
“It’s more than that,” I said. “She was confident. So fucking confident. Like, her art is actually kind of shit, but she’s so self-assured that I thought I was the one in the wrong. She makes you believe in her talent. I thought that was badass, maybe even more so than if she made good art.”
“See, this is exactly what I’m afraid of though.” Quin stared blankly past my shoulder. “It’s exactly that. Like, you’re obsessed with this woman. You remember everything about her. She cheated on you, and you still want her back. But the ultimate reason you loved her didn’t go much deeper than the fact that she put on a good show. That’s me. I’m nothing but a good show.”
‘That’s not true,” I said. But we both knew I didn’t know for sure.
“What do you think drew her to you?”
“How much I liked her. I think she liked the version of her that I refracted back.”
“It sounds more like the other way around.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you liked the version of you that she refracted back. You liked that she liked you. Her art sucked ass, and she treated you like shit, but she was cool and she liked you and that was enough.”
I chewed my lip. He had hit on it, on something I hadn’t pinpointed but knew he would find eventually. I already knew I was dull, but here was the part that made me selfish. I wanted someone not because of who they were, but because of what they could do for me. I felt my cheeks burning.
“So I guess I am like Jack,” I said. “The less interesting one, and the selfish one.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t know. I just think you’re not seeing yourself right.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking I was seeing myself perfectly.
“Either way, you’re better off without her.”
“Maybe,” I said again. “You’re probably the better Quin of the two anyway.”
“Good to know. In case your building and mine ever have to fight to the death.”
We fell into silence after that. At first it felt easy, but as the quiet stretched on, I began to panic that Quin would grow bored of me. Quin enjoying my company had lessened the blow of the implicit connection between myself and his unremarkable ex. It petrified me to imagine I was the genuine proxy for Jack, equally as forgettable. That I was not memorable or interesting or kind or fun. That I was not the kind of person you met by fate and remembered forever. I was the one who held the memories of others, who months from now would remember how Quinn loved pizza and Quin crushed on his greasy music teacher, while the details of my existence would get lost in the wash. My deepest fear was that somewhere, Quinn was sitting around, talking about how unexceptional I was. What did you like about her? her new fuck would ask. And she would say, You know, I don’t remember very much about her at all.
“Do you think,” I said, desperate to reinstate our banter but unsure of where my sentence was going, “that if our apartments are alternate universe versions of one another, the others are too? Like everyone living in the same apartment but opposite buildings is a mirror-image?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about it, to be honest. It makes my brain hurt. Like, what would it mean if our buildings were alternate realities? Are you actually existing in the Mandela Effect version of my existence?”
“No way,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t help myself, “We all know Nelson Mandela died in prison.”
“Oh my god.” He looked at me wide-eyed and panicked. His glass began slipping from his hand and he caught it on the bottom with his pinky.
“I’m just fucking with you.”
“You nearly gave me a heart attack.” He pressed his hand to his heart for dramatic effect. “Not funny.” But he was laughing, and I relaxed a bit, having successfully steered us back on track.
“You’re really spooked by this whole thing, huh?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not too fond of my reality being flipped on its head.”
“I don’t think it’s so big as all that,” I said, thinking it was, in fact, as big as all that.
“I’d prefer to believe I like you because we’re having a nice time, and not because we’re crossing paths in some cosmic, predetermined sense, or because you’re the better, alternate reality version of someone I’ve liked before.”
I glowed at the idea that I was the “better version” of anyone’s anything. I felt as though I’d somehow found myself on the flip side of things. The better reality.
“Well,” I said. “Why don’t we check?”
“Check how?”
“Check the other apartments. To see if they’re really flip versions of one another or not. For instance, do you know who lives in apartment 515 over here?”
“No. I tend to keep to myself.”
I slid my legs off his lap and stood up. “Come on then. Let’s find out.”
He looked reluctant, but I put out a hand and pulled him up with me. When we went to the door, the dogs came over, looking up hopefully.
“Not right now, sweeties,” he said. “But we’ll go in a bit, I promise.”
I reached down to give them each a pat on the head. “Hey, wait. I forgot to ask you their names.”
“Trinket and Gizzard. Trinket is the Pomeranian. Gizzard is the Dachshund.”
As I’d suspected, the names were another slightly distorted mirror. Our cats were Gadget and Gobbler.
“Huh,” I said. “I was just curious if they were the same as our cats’ names, considering.”
“And are they?”
“No. Not even close. Ours are Judy and Mr. Whiskers.”
We stepped out into the hall, and I watched him trying to make sense of the discrepancy.
“You know,” he said, “that strangely makes me feel a lot better.”
“Same here. It’s weirdly a relief.”
He seemed lighter when we reached the door of 515, as though the cat names had revived his old sense of reality, and he could now face whatever was on the other side of the apartment across the hall.
On my side of the building, 515 was a divorced white lady in her early forties with a blonde pixie cut. She always wore an ear piece like a business exec from the early aughts. I knew this because she occasionally knocked on our door and told us we were being too loud even when we most certainly were not. She claimed to have “sensitive ears” and didn’t like when we played music or watched a movie at normal volume. She had an eleven-year-old daughter who was always wearing princess attire and losing beauty pageants and screaming at her mom.
Quin knocked on the door. He appeared to be holding his breath. I thought this was a bit much, given that he didn’t have any idea who 515 was on my side of the building. Whoever opened the door would, at this stage, mean nothing to him.
The door swung open to reveal an androgynous child of roughly the same age as the girl in my 515. They had the same general features as the beauty pageant child, but slightly less sharp. They seemed generally more at ease with themselves. I felt a surge of love in my heart for this version of the child in 515, sure before they even opened their mouth that they, too, were the better one.
“Hi there,” Quin said. “Are your parents home?”
“My dad is working,” they said. “Let me get him.”
The child disappeared down the hall, and when they returned, sure enough, a white man who appeared to be in his early forties appeared from down the hall. He was wearing a spotless business suit and had headphones in his ears.
“Rick, hey, hold on a sec, someone’s at the door. At my door, yeah, talking to my kid. I gotta go. I’ll call you back.” He pulled out his headphones and gave us an uncertain smile. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “We live down the hall. We were actually only stopping by to ask if you have the code to the laundry room? We moved in a few weeks ago and forgot it already.” I smacked my head theatrically, hoping it wasn’t overkill.
“Oh. Sure.” He gave the number, and I pretended to type it into my phone.
“Amazing,” I said. “Thanks so much. Sorry again to bother you.”
As we turned to head back, the man called after us, “Hey, are you the apartment who’s always playing music?”
“Oh, um,” Quin said. “I do usually play music during the workday. I didn’t realize anyone could hear. I’m sorry if it—”
“Please, no, don’t worry about it.” The man flapped his hand as though waving the apology away. “I was just going to say you have good taste. I’ve managed to Shazam a few good songs from your playlists.”
“Oh!” Quin said. “Thanks so much.”
The man shut the door, and we turned to head back down the hall. I was practically levitating with excitement.
“Nice guy,” I said. We stepped back into Quin’s apartment.
“Was that anything like your 515?”
We sat back down on the couch, and I scratched my head. “It’s the weirdest thing. I was getting kind of excited hoping it would be, but no. My 515 is some old guy with an air tank.”
“See?” Quin said. “Nothing bigger going on after all.”
“I guess so. It’s just weird how alike our apartments happen to be.”
“You seem more sad than relieved.”
“I guess I liked the idea of there being a flip universe. For the past few hours, I’ve felt like I was given a gift of hitting the restart button. Like, if you’re the better Quinn, and we get along, then maybe I’m the better Jack. Maybe, in your version of the world, I’m the kind of person who leaves someone, instead of the kind who gets left.”
Quin’s face softened. He put a comforting hand on my knee. “Listen, what if it doesn’t have to be an alternate universe for you to have that? What if we forget all the Freaky Friday shit and whatever else. Call it coincidence. And we say fuck Quinn-with-two-Ns, and fuck Jack. There’s just me Quin and you Jackie and that’s it. We start fresh. We can use my office as a bedroom, and you can pack your shit and come crash here with me.”
“Are you for real?” I hoped I seemed thrilled by the invite rather than thrilled by my own ingenuity. This, in itself, was proof that I had found my proper reality. In my old world, I botched every situation I found myself in. Here, I had stumbled into something extraordinary. And I had played it to my benefit. I wondered, briefly, if the false reality was actually the one I had been in before, and now I had finally managed to stumble my way into the right one.
“Yes. I’m for real. I need a roommate, and you need an apartment, and at this point we know each other better than anyone we’d meet on roomatefinder or Craigslist or whatever. Besides, this apartment is basically your old one anyway. Should be an easy adjustment.”
“Okay,” I said. “All right, then. Let’s do it.”
Quin seemed both excited and finally at ease. I wondered if at any point I would tell him the truth about the cats’ names and apartment 515. But ultimately, I decided it was better, for his sake more than anything, to keep the secret to myself.
*
I left Quin’s apartment to head back to mine and pack my things. On my way out of the building, I got in the elevator with an old Hispanic woman carrying a basket of clothes to the laundry room on the second floor. She was wearing a pink bathrobe over some lounge clothes. She stepped off the elevator before me. I wished her a good night, and she turned to me before the doors closed.
“You have a lovely smile,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, pleased but taken by surprised. “Thank you.”
Outside, it had stopped snowing. It was darker than it had been earlier. I looked up to the sky and couldn’t find the moon, which just a few hours ago had been bright enough to light my way. I paused and searched around for it, but couldn’t locate it anywhere in the sky. I felt a slight panic in my chest, struck with the sense that something wasn’t quite right. As I walked across the parking lot, I wondered for a strange and frantic moment if crossing between buildings had changed me somehow. I patted my face and hair, relieved to discover my bangs in their usual place, my eyelashes still hardened with mascara.
The doors to my old building slid open, and I walked inside, thinking of how the last time I’d entered these doors, I was moments away from finding my girlfriend in bed with someone else. I told myself it didn’t have to mean anything anymore. I’d crossed over into a different side of things and was on my way to return there once again. When I was in the other building, Quinn and her new partner didn’t exist, and I had a Quin of my own once again. A Quin who also wasn’t interested in fucking me, sure, but that was all the easier. Getting laid wasn’t the trouble. Love was. In my old reality, I was always finding love in people who didn’t seem to find it in me. Maybe in the mirror version of my life, someone would return it back.
On my way up to my old apartment, the elevator stopped on the second floor. An old Hispanic man got in, carrying an empty basket of laundry, going up to floor six. He was wearing a green bathrobe. When I stepped off onto the fifth floor, I found I couldn’t bring myself to wish him goodnight.
“You know,” he called after me, “you really ought to smile more.”
I turned to reply, but he disappeared behind the elevator doors as they slid closed. I stood there for a moment, staring. In the metal, my bleary reflection rippled back at me, unrecognizable to my own eye.
Katie Henken Robinson
Katie Henken Robinson is a Boston-based writer and the Associate Editor of Nonfiction at Electric Literature. Her writing has appeared in Grist, Hooligan Mag, Prism Review, Autofocus, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was named a finalist in fiction for the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize and the American Literary Review Awards. She is a graduate of Boston University’s fiction MFA program and is currently at work on a novel and collection of short stories. You can find her at katiehenkenrobinson.com.
Note from the judge, Chin-Sun Lee
This story has the disorienting, pleasurable effect of a fun-house mirror, using the concept of a parallel reality to examine questions about identity, projection, and manipulation. Just when you think it might turn gimmicky, it shifts gears and provokes unexpected moments of tension, amplified by an unreliable narrator whose personality (or fantasy) likewise keeps shifting as the story progresses. I was hooked from the beginning all the way to its unsettling, cliffhanger ending.