Sublime

She could feel the whispers in her chest, could hear them in her mind. When she was a child, before the war, before the river, her parents spoke to each other in Yiddish, a language they didn’t share with her. This was how the river felt to her—a language that soothed her, a constant presence, but one she barely understood.

A standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a long-lost twin?

tenuous