The Mirror
It rained all night and the mirror spoke, reminding me of dreams I’d kept in the bottom drawer of the dresser, in the bedroom where nobody ever looked but me, and of the ash tree outside my window, beneath which I bury everything I ever destroy. Reflected, I could see its branches and leaves shuddering from the lashings of the tempest. The mirror said that there was passion in a storm.
She’d told me this too, once, but that I’d need to keep her warm from the cold to lure it out of us, so we could catch it in a jar and look at it. It was beautiful when we saw it, my memory of it danced to the sound of the rain on the rooftop, an extension of its organized chaos. But there’d been no jar, just my hands, and I was afraid of it, of how it moved between my palms, every painful flutter, and I squeezed tight, too tight, and it died.
The mirror showed me visions of the present. Blurred visions. Like looking through frosted camera lenses. The visions weren’t as clear as the future, which had been immobilized in frames of glass, on every wall, in every room, but I didn’t see faces anymore, I only saw open wounds and lust and dead beauty, all crushed beneath forceful fingers. Tomorrow was in there, somewhere, more tangible and more predictable than the past, because Time’s arrow will never turn back and choices made over minutes of a lifetime are forever.
I touched the mirror. It broke, cutting into the flesh of my hands and the shards scatted across the floor. I lost footing. I lost bearing. I was falling and when I hit, I hit water and those shards were gleaming at me, some sinking in, some floating at the surface, a hundred fractured faces staring up at me. “How selfish of you to think it was all more than you could handle,” the mirror said in its hundred voices, “like it was pain that could break you between dirty fingers, and throw you into the river to slowly sink and watch from the bottom as the current moved without you.”
I cried blood from my pierced hands. It mixed with the water and the glass and the faces. A consecration on the altar of the Gods of Broken Things. I let myself descend deeper and deeper into dark as the mirror whispered that it was my fault, everything, because I am weak. Because I am broken. I listened, consumed, and, outside, it rained all night.