I was on the way home from work, stopping by at the local bakery to surprise my wife with her favourite cupcakes. It was our 7th anniversary last week and I totally missed it. My wife didn’t even mention it or act disappointed, but I was feeling guilty nontheless and thought I could apologize with at least a small gift.

As I was running through the rainstorm to get to the front door, I realized I had forgotten the house keys. After a minute of heavy knocking and ringing the bell I was starting to think she maybe fell asleep. But as I listened closely through the door, I could hear faint screams coming from the living room.

“Help! The killer is escaping!”. “Ah” I thought, “She’s probably binging American horror story for the 20th time already”. Realizing i had no chance of getting her attention from the front door, I jogged around to the back of the house to knock on the living room window.

I stood on top of the garden chair to get a better view and almost fell off when I looked inside. I saw… myself. Sitting on the couch with her, carressing her hair and whispering something in her ear, to which she chuckled.

I started pounding on the window, screaming “That’s not me, Diana! Go away from him!”. But the TV was just too loud to hear anything over it. Then this… thing turned its head to the window, staring at me. It had my eyes, my facial features and everything but something about this face was just indescribably foreign and lifeless. This was nothing but a shell of my own body with no character and no human soul inside.

It looked like it was about to stand up but before I could make out what its next intention was I quickly jumped down from the chair and began sprinting to the garden shack. Pickaxe, shovel, a fucking rake, just something to bash in the window with and save my wife from this creature. As I opened the door I blindly searched for anything I could use to defend her and myself from this thing, not turning on the lights as to not let it know where I was. I grabbed something I believed was a handle, but it was soft and limp. Freaked out, I turned on the lights to see what it was.

It was… my wife. And by the looks of her body she must have been laying here for at least a week.