Mirror, Mirror, Go Away

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own.

It wasn't the first time. It started in November 2021, when I wrote up this diary entry:

***

I’m standing in front of a mirror giving myself a pep talk, working up my confidence. With almost 25 years of teaching under my belt, I only have to do it occasionally, for important research presentations or teaching a class where a colleague will be sitting in for a peer evaluation.

“You’ll be all right,” I tell myself in the mirror. “You know this stuff. It’s yours. Just make it fun, give them a couple of exercises to do, and keep them engaged.”

I look neat and professional, wearing a black pant suit with a delicate pale blue cashmere sweater and a bright blue silk scarf I bought on a trip to Ireland. My complexion works well with the scarf now, but years ago, before my skin got bleached out by Vitiligo, it would have been a fail. “Never wear bright blue around your dark face skin,” my Mother used to say when I was young, “It throws shades and makes you look like a corpse.” Mom knows; she has been in the dress-making business her entire life and I value her style and fashion advice.

One last look in the mirror. “Breathe, you’ll be fine.” Partly because of my Vitiligo I never use makeup, so I put most of the attention to my hair. I stopped coloring it about eight months ago, so a lot of gray is coming out, but it’s still long so I usually twist it into a high bun. Like an ageing librarian, I think.

Suddenly, something imperceptibly subtle is changing in the mirror. It starts with the hair, that gradually goes to jet-black by itself, falls out of the bun to full length and becomes disheveled like a scarecrow’s. Then my shoulders become wider, the neck – thinner, and the head – smaller. My left eye becomes round and wide like I’m seeing a horror, while the right eye is closing and blinking. A big cut appears on my forehead, as if someone is slicing it with an invisible knife. Then my lips are sewn together with a thick thread. I don’t feel any pain but I’m horrified. “Oh my god, I’m becoming a female Frankenstein monster!” I think. I am afraid to touch my face to check if the change is happening to actual me, not just the image in the mirror.

And then my favorite scarf comes to life and starts to tighten around my neck like a noose. That I feel. I’m trying to unwrap the scarf and take it off but the more I try the tighter it becomes. I can’t breathe. I run to my mother humming in the next room. “Mom, help!” I scream on top of my lungs. “Mommy, please, I can’t breathe!”

Mom’s sitting at her sewing table, patching something up. She rarely throws away anything made of natural fabrics, always finds a way to patch the holes, stitch up and repair the thing. When she sews, she always hums or sings. Oh how I love that voice! I always tell her she should have been a singer.

“Mom, please help me!” I cry out, looking at her, “Please, take this thing off my neck, I can’t breathe!”

Mom doesn’t even raise her head. I cry again, louder, “Mommy, help! Mommy!”

No response. Has she gone deaf??

I bang on her sewing table and knock something off. She raises her head, startled, looks straight through me and asks, “Anyone there?”

I realize she can’t see or hear me. I don’t exist for her, like in those movies about ghosts.

“Mommy,” I cry out again, helpless. “Please help me, this scarf’s killing me!”

Her face, with her eyes still looking through me, starts to change. The wrinkles multiply and deepen, her expression becomes sinister, her eyes go dark and evil, and her lips stretch into one thin line. I see Death. I know it’s Death with all my heart. The realization makes my feet cold and my heart beats faster. I don’t feel the scarf-noose anymore.

“Oh my God!” I scream, “Am I dead?”

Death looks at me and gives me a sinister chuckle. Then shakes her head.

“Oh no!” I cry. “Are you here for M…?”

I wake up. My heart is pounding in my chest that feels like it’s under a ton of bricks. I can’t breathe. I force myself to take a deep breath on a slow count: 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Inhale, exhale again. Goosebumps and shivers. Breathe, it’s just a bad dream.

I reach out for my phone on the table next to my bed. My arm feels like it’s made of lead. It’s 2:02 am. Russia is seven hours ahead, so it’s 9 am there now.

I don’t want to freak anyone out, they know it’s deep night here. I drop a Skype chat note to my niece: “Hi, sorry I couldn’t call yesterday, no Internet at home. Is everything all right with you all?” My niece lives with my mother, so she’d know. The message is marked as sent at 2:04 am.

Waiting for the response, I quickly dictate a sequence of words for Siri to take a note lest I forget: “mirror confidence jet-black hair favorite scarf female Frankenstein monster noose Mom sewing not looking face change.”

I start a deep sleep sound sequence on my meditation app and set the phone on the table next to me. Before it goes dark, I notice it’s 2:07 am. Trying to go back to sleep, I visualize myself sitting at my work desk, writing.

I write this story in my head.

I write this story.

I write.

I…

don’t even have a pale blue cashmere sweater.

***

About a week later, I was walking past the only mirror in my apartment and caught a glimpse of myself wearing a pale blue sweater and the scarf from my nightmare. Scared, I looked at myself to confirm that I was still wearing a teal cashmere sweater and a pink scarf. I shook the illusion off and went into my bedroom to change out of my nice clothes. I have two full drawers of cashmere sweaters that I carefully fold and store between dry cleanings. Putting the teal sweater in, I ran my fingers through all the other cashmere sweaters and saw one that was... pale blue!

I counted all the other sweaters and they were still all there: teal, pale and rich purple, brown, pink, mustard, gray, and green. I had never before owned a pale blue cashmere sweater, so I immediately connected it with my nightmare and dropped it on the floor, frightened. Then I picked it up, carefully folded it and put it into the dresser in my spare room. There was nothing else in that dresser as I didn't need a second bedroom after my son moved out for college and I kept the room as a guest room. I hardly ever go in there...

That one mirror in my apartment is hanging on the door of the guest room. I picked it up about a year ago in a thrift store. I liked it for its ancient wooden frame and the length: It can show me full height when I am five feet away. I don't like looking at myself in the mirror but this one is handy for me to check if I'm all put together when I leave for work.

Several days passed before I caught a glimpse of that horror image of myself again. Just like the time before, I went to check on my cashmere sweaters and found an extra one, in pale blue, on top of the others. I took it out again and put it into the guestroom dresser again. I also took the mirror off the door and looked at its back for the signs of anything irregular or the indicators of where and when it came from. Nothing, just clean cardboard paper stapled to the frame.

It happened again and again, and became almost a routine in my life: I'd catch a glimpse of my horror image wearing a blue pale cashmere sweater and a blue scarf that had nearly choked me to death in my dream, come up to the mirror to make sure it was there and find nothing. Just a true image of myself. And then I'd go to my bedroom dresser, find an extra pale blue sweater and transfer it to the guestroom dresser.

Before I put the 13th sweater into the lowest third drawer of the guestroom dresser (the other two were already filled with two stacks of three sweaters each), I noticed that something was slowly dripping into it. I touched it and realized it was blood. Freaking out, I withdrew the drawer on top of it and saw that all the sweaters in it were soaked in blood dripping from what looked like a bullet hole in the place where the wearer's heart would be. The blood spatter around the hole was identical on all sweaters.

I brought a big black trash bag and put all the sweaters into it, frantically thinking about what to do with them. Simply throw them out? So much cashmere, some of it still could be rescued for knitting, I thought. You are thinking like a psychopath, I stopped myself. Take them to police! And say what? I have all these sweaters manifested by a mirror and I think it may be predicting the way I die? C'mon, I interrupted myself, you dying of a bullet here, in this small rural town in the middle of nowhere? Who would want to kill you with a gun?

Something made me go to the mirror again. I took it down and carefully looked in the back. Only then I noticed that the cardboard backing was not original to it: it looked newer and the staples were thick, like ones from a modern furniture stapler that couldn't have existed when the mirror was made. I got pliers from my tool box and took the staples out. When I finally took the backing off, slowly, trying to prepare myself for what I could find there, I saw the same bullet hole and blood pattern on the original backing inside the mirror. I also saw "Help me! - JDB" written in blood underneath the pattern. Was it the name of someone who got killed and whose spirit got trapped in the mirror?

I was not about to find out. I hammered the new backing onto the mirror with four of its 16 staples that survived my taking them out, and took both the mirror and the trash bag with pale blue sweaters to the dumpster...