The Impostor
Charlie starred at his tea apprehensively. He looked into the swirling brown liquid and wondered if seven sugar cubes had been too many. He was not used to drinking tea and truthfully he had not liked it the past few times Frank had prepared it for him. In fact, when Frank had called him that morning to invite him for tea and biscuits (at eight in the morning mind you, two hours before his earliest alarm) Charlie was heavily inclined to tell Frank to shove them both straight up his you know where. There was a long silence over the phone while Charlie debated the merits of this course of action. After some contemplation, some reflections on the many good times the two of them had shared, he decided that, all things considered, probably suffering through early morning tea was worth it for a friend like Frank.
Frank’s love for tea was a relatively recent development. In college, Charlie remembered, he had on several occasions voiced his opinion that tea was a “woman’s drink” and was not befitting a man like himself. Really the only reason the two of them were drinking tea at all was because of Vicky, Frank’s girlfriend, who the two of them had met at the party of a mutual friend a little over a year ago. She liked tea. It was one of the many things she liked which Charlie found offensively dull, and which Frank had found offensively dull before they started dating, but now found staggeringly interesting.
Charlie watched Frank sip his tea and nibble on his biscuit. He sat, back straight, in, he was quick to point out, a hand-painted wicker chair which they had purchased from a “charming little Amish couple”. It was at that moment, the precise instant that the words “charming little Amish couple” left Frank’s lips, that Charlie knew that something was wrong. The person sitting at the breakfast table, purchased because “it so brilliantly complemented the mauve paint we chose for the kitchen”, was an impostor. Physically it was Frank, sure, but mentally all that made Frank himself was gone. He had been brainwashed, rewritten from the ground up and turned into this bizarre abomination that enjoyed things like decorative candles and throw pillows. Vicky had a tyrant’s grip on his identity, on his very soul.
No, thought Charlie, no it couldn’t be. Frank was not so easily controlled. This had to be an act.
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