Please Take Your Doppelganger Home
A lost-and-found clerk must return seven abandoned doubles to the people who ordered them. Each story asks what a replacement does when it no longer wants the job.
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How it begins
The first doppelganger arrived with a claim ticket pinned to his coat.
Cora read it twice.
Item: husband, temporary.
Condition: lightly used.
Reason for return: asks questions.
The man stood beside the umbrella bin.
"Do I wait here?"
"For whom?"
"That's what I've been asking."
Cora put the ticket on her desk.
The municipal lost-and-found office handled keys, bicycles, musical instruments and the occasional artificial limb. People were a different department.
She called that department.
They asked whether he had a return address.
He did.
They asked whether he wanted to go there.
He did not.
The line went quiet.
By lunch, six more had arrived.
One had been ordered to attend a wedding. One had spent nine months answering emails for a woman who now claimed she could not afford him. Two looked identical and refused to say whether either was the original.
Cora opened a new ledger.
Name.
Preferred name.
Destination requested.
The first man watched her write.
"Can I choose that?"
"Which part?"
"The name."
She turned the ledger toward him.
He considered the blank space.
Outside, a customer was arguing about a suitcase.
Inside, seven people waited to discover whether being unwanted meant they had to be returned.
"Eli," he said at last.
Cora wrote it down.
The phone rang.
A woman asked whether a man matching her husband's description had been handed in.
"Possibly."
"I need him back before Friday."
Cora looked at Eli.
He shook his head.
"What is he for?" she asked.
The woman sounded irritated.
"A family lunch."
Cora thought of the claim ticket.
Asks questions.
She opened the return policy on her screen and found that it contained no useful category for a person who had begun to answer them differently.
For the first time in nineteen years, she closed the policy before finishing it.
"He's not an item," she said.
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Outline and characters
Develop this idea
A doppelganger anthology needs more than repeated identity confusion. Use each story to test a different expectation placed on a replacement: labor, affection, performance or obedience. Cora's office provides a shared frame without making her the solution to every life. Give the doubles the right to disagree with one another. Your version could use a different return system, ending with independent choices rather than a single rule declaring which person is the real one.
- Cora receives seven abandoned adult doppelgangers
- The first story follows a double made to attend a family lunch
- A performer wants to keep the replacement who surpassed him
- A care worker's double refuses unpaid emotional labor
- A comic story concerns two originals each claiming to be the duplicate
- Eli asks for a destination other than the home that ordered him
- Cora discovers the return policy treats people as reusable goods
- The doubles disagree about whether to confront their originals
- Cora helps establish separate identities rather than force reunions
- The final story follows a double choosing an ordinary job of his own
Characters
- Cora Venn, 43. Lost-and-found clerk returning abandoned adult doubles
- Eli, 43. Doppelganger who declines the job he was made to replace
Series possibilities
- A companion collection follows the original customers after their doubles stop being available.
