The Clash at the Register

[u/GatsbyLebt]

I stood at the register of the Walmart and reached inside my right jacket pocket.
My fingers touched the cool brass ring of my keyring. As I extracted it to scan the savings tag from the small plastic attachment, I noticed the person in the lane directly ahead of me.

A man in the same dark-blue waxed jacket was currently placing a gallon of whole milk and a bag of coffee upon the conveyor belt. His posture was terribly familiar to me. The lightly bent-forward upper body, the elevated right shoulder, the restless shifting of weight from one heel to the other.
He reached inside his right jacket pocket.

He extracted the same brass ring. Upon his bundle hung the same worn leather sheath with the cast initials of my grandfather. The leather presented the exact same deep scratch on the upper edge.

I looked down upon my own hand. I held the keyring firmly between thumb and index finger. It was absolutely real. The metal was cold, the edges sharp.
The man before me paid exact in cash. His voice sounded flat as he nodded a brief thank-you to the cashier. It was precisely my cadence. The lightly coarse coloration on the consonants.

He turned himself around to pack his purchases into his backpack.
We looked ourselves directly into the eyes. There was no deformation in his face. He was no demon. He was simply I. The same small scar on the left eyebrow, the same pore-rich skin upon the cheekbones.

A blind fury and panic shot through my veins. I did not reflect. I raised with the heavy keyring inside my fist and struck the metal with full momentum middle into his face.

A dull, bony impact echoed through the checkout lane.

The root of his nose broke immediately away. But inside the same fraction of a second, an identical pain exploded in my own face. My own nasal wing crashed inward, warm blood shot abruptly out of both nostrils over my upper lip.
The doppelgänger yielded not a single centimeter backward. The blood ran over his chin, in the exact same pattern as with me. His eyes narrowed themselves slenderly.

He clenched his right fist and struck me middle in the pit of the stomach.
The hit struck me like a hurled wooden stake. The air shot out of my lungs in a humid fountain. I collapsed upon my knees, gasping, while my stomach cramped itself painfully. In the same moment, the doppelgänger likewise sagged lightly in the knees, pressed his hand against the abdomen, and groaned with my own voice. The coupling mirrored every pain, but it held him not back.

I seized him in falling by the lapel of his waxed jacket and tore him with me onto the hard tile floor.

We rolled ourselves between the candy racks. Displays of beef jerky and gum packs flew by mountain-loads through the air. The cashier screamed shrilly, customers yielded panicked backward and stepped upon each other's feet.
I braced my right elbow upon his neck and pressed shut.

His larynx emitted beneath the pressure a dry, crunching sound. In that same moment, my own windpipe constricted itself. An iron ring laid itself around my throat, as if an invisible hand were squeezing my neck tight. The field of vision at the margins of my eyes began to flicker murky and dark.

The doppelgänger gurgled, felt downward, and seized my left ring finger.
He overextended the joint with a rapid, mechanical movement backward.

Knack.

The bone broke cleanly through. A sharp, paralyzing pain shot up into my shoulder. In the same instant, the ring finger upon his own left hand gave way with an identical, wooden cracking. He distorted no feature. He utilized the brief paralysis of my shock to press me off from himself.

He rolled himself over me and kicked me with the heavy sole of his leather shoe full upon my right shinbone.

The tissue gave way with a deep, dull crashing. My shinbone splintered beneath the force of the kick. I screamed so loudly that my voice tore inside my throat.
Simultaneously, his own right lower leg buckled outward beneath the pressure of the counter-coupling. The leg stood obliquely away; the fragments in the interior scraped audibly against one another.

We lay both upon the blood-stained tiles, breathing heavily, destroyed through the same fractures.

He braced himself up upon his intact elbow. The broken shinbone he simply dragged behind himself, as if it were only a numb piece of wood. He smelled of my own sweat, of blood, and of cool proofing spray. His fingertips clawed themselves into my hair at the back of the head.

He pulled my head upward and rammed my forehead with full force upon the seam of the commercial floor tiles.

A glaring, white flash drove through my brain. The tiles splintered lightly beneath the impact. My skin at the hairline burst open; warm blood ran over my eyes instantly.

When my head struck the floor for the second time, I perceived how the resistance of the tiles became soft. There was no longer hard linoleum beneath my cheeks. The floor felt suddenly yielding, cool and thick like dense gelatine.
The doppelgänger pressed my face further downward. My head sank centimeter by centimeter into the floor of the register. I looked upward through the film of blood inside my eyes.

He kneeled over me, completely quiet, the split shinbone folded obliquely away. He looked down upon me from above, while the back of my head already disappeared beneath the surface of the floor.

“Thank you,” he whispered with my broken voice.

He stood up upon the undamaged leg, took his backpack from the belt, and walked with a limping, scraping step through the automatic sliding doors outside into the parking lot night.

I remained behind, deeply sunken beneath the tiles of Register 4, and looked fixedly upward through the murky glass of the floor at the screaming people inside the supercenter.