The parcel is wrapped like a gift, but I know better.

It sits on my doorstep, with my name on it, and I want to kick it.

White spots scatter across my vision, like snow in summer. I grab the doorframe with both hands and lock my knees in place. Easier said than done.

A parcel means only one thing these days.

The national postal service stopped delivering packages a long time ago. To avoid lawsuits, that is, from citizens who suffered heart attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder when they received parcels they’d forgotten they’d ordered.

“I’m sorry.” Maryam’s voice startles me. Her fingers brush my back. “I’m so sorry.”

I manage to wheeze, “Next in line, I guess.”

Maryam’s hand falls from my back. “Renee, I don’t. . .”

I finally let go of the doorframe. The distress in Maryam’s voice helps me focus. Turning to her, I drop my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You can be relieved it’s not you.”

She bites her lip, drawing my attention to her mouth despite the damning parcel by my feet, which is the effect she’s always had on me. “I don’t want to be relieved,” she says, shuffling beneath the weight of my hand on her shoulder. “It’ll happen to me eventually.”

I pat her shoulder once. “But not yet.” A wan smile. “You’re still in the clear.”

When I turn back to the parcel, I notice an elderly couple across the road. They’re walking their dog. Or they were, at least, before they stopped to watch me with my parcel.

I try not to cower. Instead, I hold my head high.

I knew this was coming. We all know. Maybe not that elderly couple and their dog, though. They look like they might be denying it all. All my luck to them.

Maryam pushes up beside me in the doorway until we’re both staring at the parcel, wrapped in shimmery foil that looks like it belongs on a catwalk rather than a USPS office. It belongs to neither place, really, and I’m just trying to distract myself from what comes next. The knowledge slithers along my spine, lying flat, pressing gently inwards.

“If they’re rounding you up. . .” Maryam trails off. She’s doing that a lot.

I shake my head. “Nobody says they’re going by age.”

Maryam sighs. “No, they go by social circle.”

I finally kneel by the parcel. The elderly couple with their dog are still staring, spectating, from across the road. I have the perverse urge to unveil the parcel here, out in the open, and give them a taste of what nobody in their right mind should want to witness until it’s their turn. But I remember having done the same before. I have been a spectator before. I am no better than them. We’re all preparing ourselves for our parcels, only in different ways.

“Social circle?” Craning my neck, I look up at Maryam, her face haloed by her curls against the winking sun. “That’s what you think they go by?”

She shrugs, biting her lip once again. “Acclimation and proximity seem the most natural selection process.” She jerks her chin forward, at the parcel. “What’s the deadline?”

The foil of my parcel shimmers like something unreal because it is something unreal.

Rubbing my clammy hand across my mouth, I say, “I need to open it to see the deadline, I think. There’s only my name on the outside. Look there.”

Maryam’s fingers thread through my hair where she stands behind me. I’m still kneeling on my own doorstep. “Open it,” she says. “Rip it off like a Band-Aid.”

We broke up months ago, back when the parcels first started showing up, and people began to understand. It could be worse. A lot of people divorced and got abortions, but we never got that far. Whole families jumped off bridges together, and the government legalized assisted suicide. Most people chose to simply wait for their parcel delivery, though.

I stand and nudge the parcel inside with my foot. “Let’s go inside. Mr. and Mrs. Smith have too good a view over there. They’ll keel over if I open it here. They know better.”

Popular movies always portray alien technology as something flinty and silver-black. Blue. Or a pulsating purple, like a discolored artery. They mimic the palette of the galaxy, the void of space. But alien technology isn’t like that. Not the kind that came here, anyway. That kind is organic. Soft. Malleable. It has to be. That’s another thing the movies get wrong; they always portray aliens as wanting the planet instead of the people.

Once inside, I put my pretty parcel on the kitchen table.

Then, pulling at the shimmery foil, I open it, unveiling the ugly stuffing.

“It looks like an overgrown pimple,” Maryam says, breaking the silence.

I inhale through my nose, but it has no smell. “I sure as fuck won’t be popping it.”

The flesh-colored sphere rests on its nest of foil, swaying gently to an unheard tune. If I stare at it for too long, I fear I’ll see eyes popping open between fleshy folds. My own eyes. It sets my heart racing and my neck prickling. The back of my tongue tastes bitter, spit pooling, and I swallow that bitterness alongside the equally bitter truth of this moment.

“The deadline is today,” I announce. “So. There is no deadline. Basically.”

Maryam glances at me. Her eyes are wide, her mouth ajar. “Where do you read that?”

I don’t read it. I don’t even see it. I feel it. A pinprick in my side like I’ve run for too long without a break. To her credit, Maryam doesn’t ask again when I stay silent. She wraps an arm around my waist and presses her nose against my shoulder.

I put my hand on top of hers where it rests on my hip. “You don’t have to stay. If they truly select based on proximity. . .” I pause, and then reroute entirely. “And you don’t have to see it happening. I don’t want you to see it happening. I don’t want—”

Maryam kisses me. It’s sweet and soft. And then it isn’t.

“One last time?” she breathes against my mouth, salty and feverish at the same time. I nod, my knee knocking against the chair. The motion jars the table where two eyes pop open between fleshy folds, one at a time. I don’t see it, but I feel it.

Pop. I curl myself tighter around Maryam. Pop.

⁂

By the second hour, it begins to look like me.

It’s no longer a pair of eyes on top of a kitchen table, but has morphed to the right height, the right weight, and even the way that I hunch over my phone when Maryam texts me immediately after she exits my house for the last time.

I go to the park, leaving my phone behind.

We sit on a bench, my doppelganger and me.

It has accurately copied my facial features, but they’re blurry around the edges. Like a memory gone stale. A painting left in a humid basement. I’m enough of a scientist to look at my doppelganger and appreciate the way it has even included the scar on my chin that I got from a drunken fallout with my sister before she got her parcel half a year ago.

A child runs up to me, pigtails bopping in her wake.

“Mommy says I give good hugs,” she whistles, folding her arms behind her back. She’s missing one of her front teeth. I smile faintly. That explains the whistle. “I can give you a good hug. Do you want a good hug?”

I’d take a bad one, honestly, but the child’s mother is approaching. Her face looks like it’s two seconds from caving in on itself. I take pity on her and shake my head at the child.

“Take care, kid,” I say just as the mother reaches us. She grabs the girl by the shoulders, her knuckles going white, a gold band wrapped around one finger, and then hauls the girl away. She doesn’t look at me. At us. Not even a flutter of her lashes. Looking might make it real, after all. It’s a different approach than the elderly couple with their dog. I smile wryly and look at my hands in my lap, open palms facing upwards.

“Children get special parcels,” my doppelganger says. “They’re simpler creatures.”

A shiver curls around my neck like a choker, a key turning in a lock with a quiet click.

“So,” I say, “that’s what my voice sounds like to others, is it?”

My doppelganger smiles at me. “We’re right on schedule.”

 Fear and fascination pull the skin on my scalp tight. “Fantastic.”

“Fantastic,” my doppelganger repeats, modulating the tone to match mine.

I level my voice before asking, “And what happens when the schedule ends?”

My doppelganger blinks at me and something slots into place on her face. A muscle. A joint. Sinew. A pair of teeth aligning, the angle of her jaw flattening out. I’m staring into a mirror, no blurry edges in sight, and I want that hug now. Good or bad. I almost stand up to walk down the path where the mother and child left, but my doppelganger stops me.

She pats the bench, head cocked. “Sit, please.”

I realize I’m standing. “I’d rather go home.”

She smiles. “Sure. Let’s go home.”

Anger takes root in me, but it doesn’t fully sprout until we return home. At that point, it has sprouted and curled along my spine, throbbing gently at the base of my neck. Months ago, my job gave us counseling on grief management. That was when people still thought the parcels would be a temporary thing. More localized, at least. Reality has caught up by now.

When we return home, my doppelganger enters the house first.

I stay outside, just for a moment, to watch a blackbird flop about in the bushes. Birds don’t receive parcels. No animal does. Some people inject themselves with animal blood to put off their parcel delivery, but I’m more the type to face my problems than avoid them.

That’s why I nearly lose my shit when I walk inside the house.

Maryam is perched on the kitchen table, my doppelganger standing in between her spread legs. Maryam rips away from their kiss. At first, she’s startled by my appearance. Then her face shifts to shock. The temperature in the room has dropped below freezing. Or maybe that’s my anger talking; it’s no longer a dull ache at my neck, but a full-blown fire-hot rash across all of my body, from toe to scalp.

My doppelganger steps away from Maryam and beams at me.

Maryam stumbles off the table. “I thought—fuck—I thought it was you.”

I say nothing. She wasn’t supposed to come back here. And if she did, she could at least have used her shits for brains. My anger coalesces in the tips of my fingers.

They itch.

Smiling tightly, I stride past both of them to grab the oyster knife I’ve never used before now. I hate oysters. I hate all shellfish. The knife is lodged deep in one of the bottom drawers. By the time that I finally get it jostled free, my smile is rigor mortis on my face. The knife is a solid weight in my palm, and it will land a solid blow.

I will pry myself open like a clam.

Maryam is there, halo of hair blocking my view. “Stop. Renee. Don’t forget Loulie.”

I wave the knife at her. “Don’t fucking pretend you don’t want me to do this. You want it just as much as I do. Be lucky I’m the first one of us.”

Her mouth snaps shut. She steps aside and curls in on herself. The truth hurts.

My doppelganger awaits me. She doesn’t move away when I approach. She doesn’t even raise her arms. Her smile stays on her face even when the first slash of the oyster knife splits her cheek in two. Slash. Then her chin. Slash. Then her throat.

The ripest of red mists, sweet and tannic, swoosh.

It shimmers in the air, caught by the lamplight, and then it lands flat on the carpet.

My doppelganger stares back at me, one eye filmy. A gutted fish. She crumples by my feet in a soft squirt, a heap of meat no different than what was once in a parcel labeled with my name. I let my anger lift me up, knowing I’ll fall deep otherwise. 

Maryam’s hands are gentle when they wrestle the oyster knife free from my grip. Those same hands are cool as they encircle my face. She stares at me. I stare back at her. When she releases me and steps back, her chin trembling, I know she’s seen her future self reflected on my own face. The future of us all. She’ll have to cope with that.

There’s blood on my forehead. Cooling. Like glue.

I’m about to wipe it off, but then the doorbell rings.

I make it to the door without my legs giving away beneath me. The ground doesn’t swallow me up, but I think maybe it should. Maryam follows me, but it’s not as if she has a choice. None of us has a choice. I can deal with that. I know as much now.

I open the door.

The parcel is wrapped like a gift.

I clear the gravel from my throat, asking, “How many times did Loulie do it?”

Maryam isn’t threading her fingers through my hair this time, but stands far away from me. Her voice is small when she answers, and I know it has nothing to do with the literal distance between us. I find that I don’t care. Maybe I will later. When the shock is gone. That is, if I am ever allowed to feel any shock. If this is the speed I’ll have to work at, I wager the shock will simply never come, but stay buried, and perhaps that’s good.

“Ten times,” Maryam answers. “Loulie did it ten times before she couldn’t do it anymore. It gets worse, Ree. They become more and more like you. And then they start to fight you. Properly.” She drops the oyster knife to the floor. “It learns from you.”

I clench my hands into fists by my sides. “Then I’ll keep learning, too.”

I can kill myself over and over again; that’s fine. Pop, pop. Slash, slash. Swoosh. Anything so I won’t die. Anything to outlast this. A pretty parcel for a pretty price.

I grab my gift and bring it inside.