Mirror Less Vigour

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. While my own eyes stared back at me in the silver layer nested behind the sheet of glass, the hollows which held them were darker and deeper than normal. Quite likely, it was the stress of organising a funeral which caused it; a lack of sleep and all. Stress. Grief. I prodded at the delicate purple skin beneath my eyes, poking the bones beneath, feeling reassured by the lack of pain. Not a black eye, after all.

My dinner plans tonight kept my heart palpitating and my brain pumping out enough chemicals to spin me into a panic attack. I didn’t have any emotional capacity left to worry over my looks right now. Gritting my teeth, I paced the length of the hallway to peer out the end window pane as the sound of a vehicle on the gravel made my stomach flip nervously.

Behind the tinted windows, the figure of my brother was hunched over the steering wheel a moment as if he was collecting himself. Nervous? Never. He was still grieving, of course. The funeral was only today. Heartless as he could be sometimes, he wasn’t quite stone-cold yet. He lost Dad, too. A small, desperate piece of me hoped he was hurting enough to not make things difficult tonight.

A sharp knock at the door snapped me to attention, and I scrambled through the kitchen to welcome my brother into my home. As the door swung open to reveal his broad figure, I felt my mouth dry up and my muscles lock into place. My words were trapped in my throat.

“You look like death,” he said dryly. “What a way to age ten years in a day, Kaz.”

If my heart could break twice in one day, it would have snapped clean in half. He brushed past me to take a seat at the table, refusing to meet my eyes.

“I - uh, do you like pasta?” I pointed at the vegetables on the kitchen bench. “I remember you used to like it when Mum made it -”

“It’ll do.”

The silence was almost worse than the crying earlier this afternoon. I couldn’t bear the weight of it. While he tapped his fingers on the tabletop, checking his phone, looking around the room, I chopped the vegetables for my pasta sauce. Moments turned into minutes, and almost fifteen of those passed until he spoke again.

“Today went well enough.”

“It did. Auntie Tamra was -”

“A bitch. That’s Tamra for you.”

“Well,” I emptied the tomato passata into the pot with a frown. “I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah. It was a nice service. Le Pine was really good, don’t you think?”

“Kaz, do you really think I want to talk about a fucking funeral as small talk?”

If looks could kill, I am sure I would have dropped right then and there.

“Sorry.”

But he was the one who started talking about today? Even after these many years, he was just as manipulative as he used to be. My hand shook as I stirred the simmering sauce. I couldn’t mention the funeral, or Dad, or his ex-wife, and I wouldn’t dare ask about his daughter. My cheeks felt like they were on fire.

“He looked so old.”

My brother’s voice was unusually soft and scared. A nervous look over my shoulder, and I saw him hunched over his folded hands on the table.

“Cancer does that to people.”

“Makes people in their fifties look like a fucking ghoul? Cancer is shit, I know, but I have never seen that,” his voice cracked. “Never seen Dad like that.”

Tears welled in my eyes, spilling over my cheeks. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about the funeral.”

“I’m not talking about the funeral, I am talking about Dad.” A flash of anger wiped away the brief vulnerability, and he struck me with an icy glare.

“Right.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, wiping at my tears as I put the spaghetti in boiling water.

“Seriously though, you look like hell. You sure nobody came in and clocked you with a fresh shiner?”

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t feeling well at all.

Dinner was uneventful in the end, and I was thankful. He even seemed to like my cooking, despite delivering a backhanded compliment. It was the closest thing to a thank you I’d ever gotten from him. A gracious host, I showed him through my garden as he kicked my path stones disinterestedly, gestured to the photos on the mantel he squinted at judgmentally, and led him down the hallway to his room for the night.

“Jesus, what the hell is this?” The disgust in his tone was blatant.

I turned to find him grimacing at the mirror with its ornate trimming.

“It was Dad’s. Someone came to drop it off this morning. It’s not that bad,” I said it more defensively than I intended.

“Dad had this? Doesn’t really seem like his taste, it is hideous.”

He leaned forward as if to touch noses with his reflection and pulled his lips back to inspect his teeth. I waited for the next snappy comment, but nothing happened. Instead, his brow pulled into a deep frown, his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth,and his neck strained as he turned his face from side to side.

“A prank mirror? Seems more like Dad, now.”

I didn’t understand what he meant until I approached him by the mirror, shocked to find his usually full head of hair receding in the reflection with each second that passed, his bright blue eyes accompanied by wrinkles and grey hair sprouting from his ears. Sun spots decorated his temples and his expression twisted into concern.

“I look like Dad used to. How the -”

I gasped, alarmed by the rasp in his throat, the depth of his voice. Goosebumps raised my skin as I recognised a voice like Dad’s. I tore my gaze away from the reflection, only to have my alarm replaced with horror as I stared at my brother, now balding, gaunt and weary-eyed. A panicky scream tore out of my chest, like all the stress of the day finally boiled over.

“What the fuck, Kaz?! Pipe down. What’s your problem?”

As he spoke, his eyes grew wider and his words slower as he listened to his unfamiliar voice. His bony fingers reached toward his face, prodding his cheeks almost like I did this morning, feeling the thin, fragile skin… like tissue paper.

In an instant he lurched forward and I cowered into the wall as if on instinct as he powered past me looking for a bathroom.

His guttural cry shook me to the core and my chest tightened with terror. Barely able to draw in a breath, I inched closer to the hallway mirror, preparing myself for the dreadful moment I would meet my reflection.

For only a split second, I saw myself as I was earlier, with shadows under my eyes and a few more grey hairs than usual. It was enough to release the pressure gripping my shoulders and allowed me a shaky inhale.

Then I blinked, and the setting of my mouth changed, turning down at the corners.

I swallowed, and my usually full cheeks deflated, skin hanging from my cheekbones.

I opened my mouth to cry out to my brother, and my hair thinned and greyed before my eyes.

A stranger stared back at me open-mouthed, with a look of distress plastered across her face.

“Kaz!” Anger. Fury.

Tearing my eyes away from my reflection, I met my brother’s gaze as his step faltered and he froze in shock, gaping at me, distraught.

“Your face…” he choked. “You - what have you done to us?”

“Wh-what?” My voice sounded weaker. “I didn’t do anything. My face?”

My heart twisted and my stomach dropped as if weighted with stones as I touched my face, feeling the skin move with my finger, like a layer of satin covering my true face. I grazed my finger nail across my cheekbone, feeling the rough scraping on my skin. Tears brimmed.

“I don’t understand what is happening.” I sounded pathetic.

“It’s this demon of a fucking mirror,” my brother snapped as he reached up to pull the mirror off its hook.

He stalked onward, gripping the edges of the metal framing with me in tow. By the time he reached the kitchen, his gait became staggered and his broad muscular frame narrowed and hunched until the mirror’s weight proved too much for his slender limbs. Ever since we were kids, my brother was hard work. The mirror could dominate his strength, but never his stubbornness. Dragging the thing behind him, he threw open the front door and pushed the mirror over the edge of my verandah.

It hit the ground with a thud, but it wasn’t as loud as the thud of my brother’s knees hitting the wooden decking. The silence which followed was sickening. He lay curled into a ball, with bony knees bleeding, chest missing the rise and fall of steady breath, veins protruding from his wrinkled skin, lips blue and taut.

“D-Danny?” I didn’t recognise my own voice. “Danny, are you okay?”

No response.

My heart stuttered behind my brittle chest. My hands shook, but no tears came. This property was always quiet, but a level of peace settled across the house that I’d never felt before. A certain calmness.

Soft creaks and snaps drew my attention away from Danny’s figure. A few metres from the decking, a blue gum sapling sprung upward, stretching its smooth limbs. For a few seconds, I could only watch in wonder as the tree sprouted, matured, rooted itself deep into the earth, and towered over my head before I could finish my breath.

With stiff shoulders, I tugged my cardigan from my arms and laid it across the mirror, blocking its reflective path to the now-ancient tree in my front yard. The tree’s growth halted and the spidery limbs swayed high above my head in the wind. My garden had never seen shade like this before, not out here where the sun blisters the skin. The sounds of the leaves rustling and the gumnuts tapping the brickwork as they fell erased the stress of the day.

Beside me, Danny was quiet. I had never seen him so exposed. His still, thin body reminded me of when we were children, before everything went wrong.