A Case of Mistaken Identities.

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This archive short story is brought to you by the author of Maggie's Milkman and Extraordinary Rendition. 

The shopping centre was quiet as it often is, the shopping centre building boom of the mid noughties meant that some just wouldn't be able to attract the quality of shops to attract customers, and this one was a prime example of that. Not that Mitch minded, he was happy to be able to get in and get out quickly, avoiding the great unwashed.
He was just milling around in the sports shop when he saw his old boss, or at least someone who looked like him.

‘Shit’ he muttered under his breath. His old boss was a wanker and not someone Mitch particularly wanted to see.
He'd left that job not so much under a cloud as beneath a thunderstorm, so he didn't want to make pleasantries with the least pleasant man in the city. He should hide, get away before he was seen. But for some reason his brain had other ideas wanting to check if it really was Napoleon. He hid behind the inline skates hoping to get a better look without the old bastard seeing him. But the man he thought was his boss was also interested in the skating equipment and there was no avoiding him now. He had to say hello, or he would have had to if the man had been his ex-boss, but it was just someone who bore a striking resemblance to him. Mitch had seen enough, he headed to the supermarket. Just before he got there he saw a mop of red hair and a trademark blue handbag that told him he'd just walked passed Daisy! Daisy was the greatest love he'd never had. Daisy had broken his heart every day for a year before she'd got pregnant and left the company. Leaving Mitch to contemplate what might have been, not that it ever would have been. He turned back to catch up with Miss Unrequited but just as he was about to call out her name he realised it wasn't her, just someone who looked incredibly similar. Weird, he thought, 2 doppelgängers in 2 minutes. He looked around him and shuddered. The place was full of lookalikes, people from his past, people from and his present. There was almost his dentist, nearly his brother-in-law, practically his colleague and a carbon copy of an old teacher. Everywhere he looked were facsimile of people he knew. It was getting creepy. Was he being set up? Was this one of those secret camera prank type things? Had he just become a character in a horror movie? Whatever it was he had an uneasy feeling. He paid for his shopping handing his money over to a woman who looked uncannily like his mother before heading home for a lie down.
As he left the shopping centre he saw a figure that looked a little bit like an ex-girlfriend, no, not an ex-girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend. We all have them, the one where a small candle still burns somewhere in the back of the brain. But compared to the other near perfect clones he'd seen today, this was just a pale imitation. He walked on by desperate to get home.

 'Mitch, Mitch!' The man kept walking. The woman shrugged her shoulders. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him, his long lost twin or something. Shame it would have been nice to have seen him she thought, and continued on in to the shopping centre.

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