False Reflection

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. But then again, mirrors are never to be trusted, are they? After all, they only ever show us what we trust to be our own reflection, but how can we ever really know?

So every time I walked past the mirror, I shrugged. So what if it wasn't my reflection? It was like living out an existential truism; "Your reflection in a mirror is not you."

It turned into a little game. As I walked by the mirror, I would turn my head suddenly and stick out my tongue. Or I would roll my eyes theatrically and say "Not me!" in an obnoxiously sing-songy voice.

And all along I assumed it was just a trick of the glass, the shortcomings of an old mirror.

But one day when I walked past the mirror, the reflection wasn't walking--she was standing still, staring out. I almost didn't notice. I almost walked right past. But I stopped. I turned my head. I froze.

And she stared at me.

And for the first time I realized that it was not a trick of the light, not a distortion of quicksilver, and not an existential riddle about who I am, or what is the nature of the self.

The person in the mirror wasn't my reflection.

She looked kind of like me, sure. At least, she looked enough like what I'd grown accustomed to seeing in mirrors. But she was more like what I'd look like if someone else had tried to make a copy of me. And badly.

Her features were asymmetrical, the eyes slightly off-balance and slightly too large. Her skin was pale, and she was too thin; I mean, I was thin, but she was alarmingly skinny. And her mouth was too large--at least, the teeth were too large, and her lips could not close over them. Instead, they curled back in a sort of grimace.

The point is: she wasn't me. And when she stared at me, it made me shiver all over involuntarily. But as freaked out as I was, for some reason I couldn't look away, couldn't move away and leave her there.

My eyes left hers for moment and looked into the room behind her, and I saw that the room was different, too. Maybe it hadn't always been, but now it was darker, drearier, with deep shadows in the far corners and what looked like cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, and from the railing of the stairs.

Without even thinking, I turned around to look at the room I was in. But it was just as I remembered; light and airy and full of streaming sunlight. I turned back to the mirror.

The other woman was gone.

I gave a startled jump, and again I looked around the room I was in, half expecting to see her somewhere in the room with me. But there was no one else there. Just the sunlight and the familiar warmth and comfort of my home.

What was going on?

I turned my attention back to the mirror. Instead of a mismatched relfection, now there was just a view of an empty room, a room that was a dark, abandoned version of the one I was in.

My eye was drawn to the mirror itself. There didn't seem to be anything special about it. It was roughly oval-shaped with a figured wooden frame; nothing elaborate. Where had I gotten it? I tried to remember. I'd had it for such a long time, and had carefully packed and unpacked it from one apartment to the next over so many years, I had trouble remembering a time when I hadn't had it with me.

Then I remembered--it had come from my grandmother's house. My mother's mother, a woman I didn't remember and that we never visited because my mother despised her. And yet, when she died, and the time came to clean out the dead woman's house to prepare it for sale, my mother had rolled up her sleeves and done her part.

The mirror had come out with everything else, and since I had been furnishing my first apartment at the time, it had been given to me, along with an assortment of mismatched windsor chairs, a scarred side table, and a wingback easy chair, upholstered in a gold and red floral pattern.

In fact, I could see the table and chair in the mirror, behind where my reflection should have been.

I tried to remember if my mother had told me anything in particular about any of the things that came from her mother's house. As I thought about it, I moved closer, looking at the mirror itself but also more closely at the room reflected in it. I shifted my angle to one side, trying to see farther into it.

The rooms reflected in the mirror continued, just like mine, but with the same dark and twilit appearance, the same air of disuse and neglect.

A shadow moved quickly across the windows of the far room inside the mirror, the room that was behind me. Again, I spun around to look, but again the room showed no sign of the movement I'd seen.

My heart was pounding, my breath coming fast. Why was I doing this to myself? It was just a mirror, after all. Not a house, not even a piece of real furniture. I could just get rid of it. I would just throw it out the window, or down the front steps outside. Seven years bad luck would be worth to end this madness.

I reached for the wooden frame, and as my hands closed on it and began to lift it off the wall, a pair of pale hands appeared from inside the frame and grabbed my wrists. The grip was iron-hard and ice cold. I tried to pull away, but they held me fast.

I wrenched and pulled with all my strength. The cold hands held tight. I put my foot against the edge of the hall table that stood below the mirror and pushed, trying to lever my arms free. Still the pale hands held me, and their grip seemed to tighten.

I bent my whole body to it, lowered my head and pulled with my shoulders, pushing with my legs, straining every muscle to free myself from that relentless grip.

Slowly, a face rose into view from within the frame of the mirror. It was the woman I'd seen earlier, and she fixed me with a horrible stare. Her thin lips, still pulled back from her oversized teeth, curled into a mocking smile.

I felt panic welling up inside me; I panted and grunted and I tried to twist, pull--anything to release my hands from the iron grip of those cold, pale hands.

Suddenly arms shot out from the surface of the mirror, grabbing my hair, my shirt, my arms.

I stared in horror at the woman in the mirror, my false double. She just smiled at me, her eyes unblinking.

The arms pulled. My feet skidded on the floor of my hall, my home, my safe and comfortable space. I felt a sharp pain as my knee found the edge of the table.

I expected at any moment to feel my face collide with the cold glass of the mirror, but it wasn't there. There was cold, yes, but a different cold--the cold of dank; a disused room, abandoned and without warmth.

My face was down, and I saw a dusty table, dirty floorboards. I heard the distant shuffling of feet, the familiar creak of the springs in my wingback chair.

There was a breath in my ear, and a whispering voice said, "Come on, Sandra. Grandma wants to see you."

I felt the dull sensation of my feet catching briefly on the edge of the mirror's frame as I was pulled through.