It is our pleasure to present the second installment of Brilliant Disguise: the story “Carbon,” as written by none other than Ryan Werner.

We looked fairly similar. That was my first thought. Our hair was identical in both color and cut. We were the same height, our fingers the same length. It was as if one of us had been photocopied directly from the other. When my wife, Mary, came home I was fixing drinks in the kitchen, and after a brief glance toward Rick on the couch, she asked him how his day had been. When I walked back into the living room, she did a double-take, like a cartoon.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Ryan claims to hate Bruce Springsteen, but that’s physically impossible, so he’s probably lying. In any event, he took a stab at some lyrics from “Adam Raised a Cain” and came up with a pretty spectacular story. And like Ryan said himself, “it has some marital woes and a girl named Mary, so that’s Springsteen enough, right?” And he says he’s not a fan.

Be sure to check out Ryan’s Our Band Could Be Your Lit, where he does this kind of thing on a weekly basis. And feel free to send us your own attempt at spinning fiction out of Springsteen lyrics for future Brilliant Disguise installments.