A Year of Stories

A You Named Sue

Your bell rings.

You stand.

You aren't expecting anyone – it's a Tuesday afternoon, real people are at work or school, not sitting at home watching Netflix – mentally writing a scathing review of the new season of the New Big Show.

You walk towards the door.

The floor creaks and it scares you, a lot more than anything should scare you at 2PM. You don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe in aliens – the little grey kind with the big heads and silvery eyes. You remind yourself that aliens don't sound like loose floorboards, at least you don't think they do.

You yawn.

You can't imagine why you're tired. You sleep for about ten hours a day, and even when you're awake you barely leave your house. Once you realized that Amazon would deliver toilet paper right to your door, you barely leave your couch.

It's not your house by the way.

It's your parent's house.

Well, it's the house your parents bought you when they finally realized that for the last twenty-two years they'd been raising an, "aspiring artist."

You hope to one day remove the word "aspiring" from your title, but that might require leaving the house.

You stretch.

Your doctor says that you should stretch more, it helps with the circulation. Yoga, he suggests, maybe more emphatically than is strictly professional. You worry that he's being paid off by the Yoga Lobbyists. You told him that you'd think about it. You did think about it, for all of one afternoon, and decided against it. Too much hassle, and anyway, you read something once that said that Yoga might not be as good for you as people think it is.

Or maybe that was amphetamines, you can't really remember.

Still, you need to figure out some way to lose the extra pounds.

Maybe amphetamines...

You open the door.

Standing in the doorway is a person.

"Who are you?" You ask, in your voice.

"Call me Sue." They respond, in your voice.

You realize that this person is wearing your face.

Well, not exactly your face.

Sue is more handsome or pretty or whatever gendered descriptor you feel is most appropriate.