Alter Ego, (Five Sentence Fiction)

The prompt for this week’s 5 Sentence Fiction challenge was ‘Coincidence’ http://lilliemcferrin.blogspot.co.uk/p/five-sentence-fiction.html

Alter Ego

 Her pale fingers hover over the keys of her laptop, and she gazes in shock at the website page displayed on the screen before her.

The story she has just read is one of her own, yet displayed for the entire world to see under a stranger’s name, and when she flicks through the site she sees more of her work, some of which has generated comment and discussions on its quality and originality.

Outrage at this blatant act of plagiarism rises like bile within her; what kind of a person would steal the ideas of others, and reproduce them verbatim under their own name without even attempting to disguise them as their own?

Once again, she feels that familiar yawning chasm of despair lurking only a few paces away, that spiralling bitterness at the way she’s always been someone’s victim, forever bearing the brunt of someone’s evil, vindictiveness and cruelty.

She slams the lid of the laptop down, staring at her reflection in the mirror opposite her desk, and as she drops her head in her hands, sobbing loudly, the woman in the mirror smiles, opens her laptop and resumes writing, staring contemptuously at the pathetic figure before her.