My human packed a second self into a bag today. I watched the great head come out of the box, a face bigger than my human's real one, eyes that never blink and never look at me, a tongue that lolls without ever having tasted a single thing.
I sniffed it thoroughly. It smells of foam and a hundred other rooms. No prey in it. No blood. A skin with no animal inside, which is the saddest thing I have ever inspected, and I have inspected the vacuum.
Then my human put it on.
For a moment I believed my human had finally become something worth respecting, a creature of size and stillness and menace. But it moved wrong. It waved. It made a sound of delight I have only ever heard directed at me, and pointed it at a mirror, where the second self stared back, hollow, unbothered, refusing to be a coward the way the mirror-cat always is.
My human is going to a warm crowded room to stand among other humans who have also grown wrong heads, and there they will all touch one another gently and take pictures, which is a thing they do instead of eating.
I do not understand why my human needs a bigger, softer, fur-covered face when it already lives with the definitive expert on all three qualities. I am insulted by the redundancy.
So I climbed into the empty box the head came out of. I fit it exactly. I fill it better than that hollow thing ever could, and I intend to be discovered here, radiant and unbudgeable, at precisely the moment my human reaches for its keys.
Let it choose.
I already know which of us is real.