Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-3403351-20150409214803

You, only better.

My brother Fred was the star athlete of our small town, winning the most games, awards, and championships one could at his age. Fred was known all over town for having an undying will and ambition to achieve anything he wanted to in life, doing every and anything to get one step closer to being ‘the best as humanly possible’ as he put it.

A serious knee injury in his senior year however took him out of his final year of athletics, which he took disastrously. To cope with this lost to achieve, he turned to God, and when his prayers went unanswered, to booze.

He refused to speak to anyone who offered to, seeing help from others as a sign of weakness. Nightly, he would drunkenly yell at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, damning himself for not being strong enough to overcome his injury and failing to be the supposed best human.

During one of these more violent ‘sessions’, I decided to intervene before he hurt himself. I opened the door to the bathroom, and instead of Fred yelling at his reflection, the reflection was strangling him with a grim and daunting expression on it’s face.

“You are weak,” the reflection said hauntingly. “And you do nothing to fix it but complain to me?”

I was frozen in terror over this, my eyes fixated on the impossible event before me.

“Improve yourself, or exist no more.” The reflection said, releasing my brother form it’s grasp.

“Who-what are you?” my brother croaked out from his nearly crushed windpipe.

“I am you,” the reflection coldly replied slipping back in the mirror, “only better”. 