Trembling With Fear 1/1/2023

Pod Goals, by Eve Morton

I’d tracked my clone to the beach by the time she turned around. There was a party at the beach, everyone on towels and smelling like sunscreen and seaweed. I was not dressed for the festivities, but it didn’t matter. 

She was. 

A navel, clear as day, emerged between her two-piece brightly colored bathing suit. It was even pierced with a dolphin pendant, as if it was jumping out of the universal scar that connects everyone to life. 

I stood in disbelief with sand between my toes for a long time. A navel. The portal to all human life was present. So she’s not a clone. I swallowed hard as dread lodged in my stomach. Then what is she? 

She stared directly at me now. 

I shut my mouth. 

I planted my foot in the hot sand next to me. Another lift, another step. Sand and shock rooted me in place. Impossible to run. The lines I’d been fed since I’d heard of the cloning program in fifth grade washed over me like the noonday tide. 

You will know your clone by the shiver down your back when you see them eye to eye. They will look like you, yes, but they are not you. Our DNA is unpredictable. It will cast the same cells in the same order, but once life is breathed, all of those cells grow through and into other lives. We build ourselves up like sandcastles. We can make ornate structures. We can be kings and queens. But one tide, one experience of the outside world, and we are nothing but paupers and paragons of barbarity. 

“So be careful,” I repeated, as I crashed through the sand. “Because you are your most likely enemy as well as your best friend. Because you–“

A child cried out. 

Tide licked at my heels. 

I knocked down another sandcastle fortress. Another cry from a child, another lick of the tides. Another being from benign ruler to tyrant. My own wonder of medicine and science turn barbaric and evil. 

I ran.

All the while, I held my own navel. I stuck my finger inside. Pinched and pressed. Real. Born of woman, not medicine or machine.

“So who the fuck was she?”

I ran faster. 

Over the hot sand and into the hot cement, careful to miss broken glass and other sharp detritus from the shoreline, I soon found a bathroom. I slammed the door. In the cracked mirror, I looked at me. Only me. 

I touched my face, then I blinked.

She was there. Her dolphin pendant sparkled, even in the low light. It was easier to see and speak with her as a reflection. 

We both opened our mouths at the same time. “You–”

I spoke louder. “Is it fake?”

“The dolphin? The navel? Both?” 

I nodded.

She shook her head. 

I cursed.

She put a hand on my shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about, sister.”

On a bench by the beach, we spoke in hushed tones. Matched birthdays, confirmed details like our detached lobes and our ability to roll our tongues; even if the human cloned had these traits, the cloned result never received them. There had been an obscure academic paper, she informed through whispers, reporting that clones could not match their human counterparts in certain genetic traits and so, it was a way to discover natural twins or triplets. Even in a world filled with doppelgangers and con-men.

“I know you’re real,” she confirmed. “We’re true sisters. Like the other woman I found.” 

“Other woman?”

She shushed me and went on. “Clones will always be inferior. Even if grown from us, they cannot always have the dominant genes. So it’s something to look for, even if the belly button has been artificially made.”

“Is that why you got the dolphin?” I asked. “So you can have an excuse to compare belly buttons while looking elsewhere?” 

The pendant seemed to move, as if swimming in the rolls of her skin when she leaned over. I was so enchanted with the metal, the shimmering flesh that was wet from her swim in the ocean, that I didn’t notice her silence. I reached out to touch the dolphin just as it shrieked in its high pitched language. 

We both slammed our hands over our ears. 

The noise was at once melodic and discordant; appealing and nauseating. I wanted to be deaf. I wanted to run. 

So did my twin, my stranger sister. 

As did a woman with a long dress over her body, and her hands on her ears. She met our gaze, so similar and yet so different from our own, and with a pained smile, she nodded hello. 

The rest of the people on the beach went on their way. They ate and laughed and played. They didn’t hear the screech of the dolphin like we did. They did not have the same blood or bones making their system. 

“We’ll tell you everything soon enough,” my new sister, a triplet, explained. “But now we have to leave. After the dolphin’s cry, the ocean gets angry.”

The blue tides turned grey. Slick with surface tension, bubbles begged to burst through. Dolphins under the waves remained, as if kept in amber. My jaw was slack, until my triplet closed it. 

“We’re a rare beast,” she said. “Natural triplets.”

“Maybe even quads,” my other sibling said. “Who knows? But we must keep looking using the dolphin’s call. They were the first to be cloned. Now, their language is the only frequency that the clones can’t hear. It’s our new code and–”

“I understand,” I said. “Tell me the rest later.”

We ran from the beach before the dolphin clones burst through, and swallowed the others whole. 

That night, I was pierced with my own dolphin pendant. It hurt–some part of me would always hurt–but it was a price I was willing to pay.

“Looking good, sis,” my first discovery said. “Welcome home.”