prompt: rose, title: by many other names in misc. flash fiction

One day, Rose awoke to discover she could suddenly be two places at once. Literally, two places at once. She could copy herself over to live out her lives twice at a time. She was never sure why and how it happened, maybe it was a blessing, maybe a curse, maybe just a thing she was meant to be naturally capable of once she reached adulthood, like in some X-Men comic book.

One morning, Rose arose from bed to discover herself, still down there in that same bed, another her, another Rose. Having read up on all sorts of spiritualist traditions, she first assumed she was either a specter floating over her own corpse or astrally-projecting above her deep-sleeping form.

She was disabused of both notions when, seeing if a hand would pass through the other’s flesh, she instead punched her double square in the nose, just as solid as her own. Somehow both just Rose, the same mind operating two bodies in unison. Once they got over that shock and figured out how to recombine and de-combine again, she discovered how easy this could make her life.

That is to say, how easy this could make her lives. Studying for a test while getting restful sleep. Out on a date while clocking into her second job. At two different films, premiering on the same evening. Sometimes in short spurts, to eat lunch while also on smoke break, occasionally longer, a week in Aruba while also in A Cubicle, toiling away at nothing of value to anyone anywhere.

And at first, she did this sparing, and at first she was afraid of overusing it, until she got so used to it she overused it almost on a reflex basis. After years though, she started to notice things, oh, a wrinkle at her eyeline there, an ache in the knee here. No one else in her entire family got gray hairs until they were thirty-five, but there she was with a couple silvered threads at both temples.

Rose realized that she was aging double when she split herself in two, one for work and one for play or one for one kind of play and one of another. A few days of harried mental math gave her the ballpark estimations she’d lost six years to her doubling. Twice as brightly, but half as long.

Difficult as it was for her to stop using the strange ability, if she didn’t quit, she’d end up dying very young and so she went cold turkey in her sheer fear of mortality. And other than a handful of situations, each lasting less than a minute, Rose never burned a significant portion of her life away again. Largely because, seven years later, she was hit by a bus she didn’t see coming and relinquished her gift for naught. Because that’s how those long-odds work in this life, they can mean either miracles or disasters. Both are true, both are real, both are to be strictly avoided.