Stranglers

Strangling your double in public can be avoided by failing to recognize him in the first place, as he’s markedly older, with those chin lines you only get in bad lighting, and the belly you only have in photos, and he smiles with an eagerness you wouldn’t allow yourself, and he’s your boss at Applebee’s, and has apparently decided you really need the money, refusing to fire you for being in the bathroom whenever it’s time to sing happy birthday to a humiliated twelve-year-old, or for leaving horny love poems in your order pad, which he takes you aside to praise, at surprising length, and insists on going to the bar with you afterward, and driving you home, tucking you in, giving you a hot shave, and getting you back to work, every day, until you can afford the leather jacket with which to bribe him to go and lose himself among rumbling mustaches at the Sturgis motorcycle rally, and in the great, glowing heart of a motorized artichoke at Burning Man, and in the graffiti-etched corner of a non-chain cafe, where you promise to immortalize him in one hundred “micro-novels” if he’ll just quit, in every spare, private moment, avidly, tenderly strangling you. You’d think a double of yours would have sense enough to see the flaw in this approach.