WP Daily Prompt: Describe your life in an alternate universe.

A dust storm looms behind a car in the Texas Panhandle, March 1936.
Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons

There isn’t a veil that separates one reality from another that you can move aside on Halloween.  You can’t hop from state of existence to the next with the help of a computer and you can’t travel from one world to another by slathering yourself in herbs and oils and singing to a Goddess when  Mercury starts to spin backwards.

However.

There’s a door at the  abandoned Greenwood Mercantile on Highway 164 two  miles from where I live, and if you walk through it at 11:05- AM or PM every single day of the week you will end up somewhere else.

Each world you end up in will be your world and sometimes the changes in you are little ones- you might have green eyes when your eyes used to be brown. You might be left handed instead of right handed. You might be able to sing and in your last world you couldn’t even hum a tune.

Some people never realize what’s happened, sometimes they think they’ve gone a little mad, or had a stroke and some people I think, know they’ve gone somewhere else and they just don’t care that their old life is gone.

Sometimes you will run into yourself and here is the funny thing- you won’t recognize your own face. You’ll just hear that voice and you will know-

that’s me.

Don’t get to comfortable with that idea of ‘me’.

After my last trip through the door at Greenwood, I ran into a woman standing inside the shop. She was standing next to dusty marble marble counter top where people used to sit on stools and drink milk shakes.

She stepped right in front of me.

” Who are you? ” her voice was shaking. ” What are you.? Why are you here? ”

I stepped around her. I pushed up the screen door  and walked  outside towards my car.

She followed me.

”  Why are you always here? ”

That got my attention.

I walked back to her.  The sky overhead was dark and the clouds gathering above us looked like bruises. I put my face close to  hers. I looked into her with our different colored but nonetheless identical eyes.

” I am a sad pale copy of you. I am a shade. I’m just a dream of what might have been ” I said trying to comfort her. I rested my hand lightly on her forearm.  ” I’m just passing through. I will only be here for a little while longer, just like you.”

She stepped back and as she did  I reached into my jacket. I pulled out my knife. I pulled her hair back and then I tore her throat open.

She fell at my feet and died like all of the other versions of me have done- the brighter versions. The versions that had families, that had friends, lovers, homes. They went to college and got their hair done. They had children and grandchildren and cats and dogs.

But none of them. Not a single one- is a killer like me.

In my own humble way, in an one Universe after another, I am one of a kind-

and so  is my victim.