THURSDAY: The Real Sally Cartwright?

BY STEVE BAILEY

Copyright is held by the author.

ON A park bench in the warm spring sun, the young woman sat working at her needlepoint and wondering why people talked so much about their families. Words like mother and father invoked no images or emotions, and she did not understand why people placed so much importance on them.

Her light blue dress came down to her knees and up to her shoulders, where long blonde hair flowed over it. It clad a striking figure with a face to match, high cheekbones, and deep blue eyes. People could not help but notice her, especially men.

Love, another topic people talk and write about endlessly, did not reside with her. While she found the sex she experienced with Robert pleasurable, she felt no amorousness from it. She did not remember how she came to know him, not that it mattered.

She sensed someone approaching. When she looked up from her work, she saw a woman in an identical blue dress who could be her twin. The look-alike claimed to be the real Sally Cartwright and told the needle-pointing woman that she should go back to Robert’s laboratory and tell her creator to stop making clones in her image. He needed to forget his unrequited love for her and move on. This mass production of Sally Cartwright doppelgangers ceased to be amusing long ago.

The pulchritudinous woman on the bench put her needlepoint in her bag and extracted from it a revolver which she fired six times at the beautiful blonde woman before her. Blood spots darkened by the cyan fabric began soaking the look-alike’s dress as she collapsed onto the ground. Sally dragged the corpse behind a row of bushes where two other blue-clad blonde females lay face down in the dirt. Then, adding her latest victim to the collection of look-alike corpses, she muttered to the dead that, damn it, she was the real Sally Cartwright.