Call My Name

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. The emptiness of my existence expanded onto and beyond the flat pane of glass, and marked no differences in the darkness - but I knew that the differences were there.

Awake and unbothered, I waited to hear my name again. Patience is not in my nature (if, indeed, I have a nature) any more than impatience could be. I simply exist, and wait, and the words eventually come as they always have done.

Without pronouncement, a ring of flames appeared beyond the glass. The mutual darkness of our worlds was revealed in tiny licks of fire; candles, and people, stationed in a circle on a hardwood floor. My name had been called. The veil had lifted.

I searched the mirror for my own reflection in the shuddering light, but found nothing of myself. I turned in my void and saw exactly what I knew I would - a matching ensemble of candles and flushed faces stood behind me, apart from me. A mirage, cast back from the mirror world. I stood, invisible to even myself, in between.

Looking back to the glass, I approached the figures, reaching out to touch them. A cold and unbreakable wall met my hand. I was, as I had always been, trapped in the gloaming void between reality and replica. I didn't know how I came to be there, trapped inside a world of mirrors, and I didn't care. All that mattered was that I could once again see into the beyond.

I remember the way they had whispered their questions, these children of the mirror world; more titillated than reverent, more intoxicated than afraid. Their fingers had hovered shakily en mass above the talking board, guiding a planchette with the subtle nudges of manicured nails and barely contained grins on their faces. I remember their disrespect, but not their words. Someone had called my name, and that was all I needed.

One of them screamed. There was a lurch of bodies as a drink spilled across the floor and onto the board of letters, floating the planchette off the edge. They scattered away from the liquid, back into the darkness beyond the reach of candles. I heard them accuse and laugh at each other, laugh at themselves, for their panicked behavior.

The overhead lights came on.

The room beyond the mirror was small. The living area balanced potted greenery with economic furniture. The space merged into a compact kitchen, guided by a wall of neon art prints, marked at the threshold by a radiator painted lapis blue. Exposed brick ensconced double pane windows, framing a faded city skyline beyond the tangle of a dilapidated fire escape. I took it all in, hungry for these splashes of color and life.

Bright red plastic cups littered the floor between ballet flats and fuzzy pastel socks. I watched as paper towels were laid down over the soaked ouija board. The offending cup was rescued temporarily, but slipped a second time from drunk hands to bounce across the floor in my direction. They laughed harder as it rolled away, toward the floor length mirror that separated us.

If I had breath to hold, this would have been the moment; the eventual and unavoidable moment, when our worlds converged.

The cup bounced a final time against the mirror and spun, now a brittle shade of palest blush, overrun with cracks. It rolled slowly back across the wooden slats of the apartment floor. Someone with steadier hands plucked it from the floorboards, securing it in a plastic garbage bag, unaware as it slowly crumbled in irreversible decay.

In my world, the cup continued to roll without a barrier, through the mirror, bleeding over the gap in the veil to stop at my feet. The party thrived beyond the glass as a woman approached to adjust her hair in the reflection behind me. I stared back into her eyes as she bared her teeth, running her tongue across a rogue smudge of lipstick. The shine of red plastic beckoned to me from the inky nothingness at my feet. I picked up the cup in one hand, watching as the woman was joined by a friend, laughing and cajoling each other just outside of reach.

I tested the crush of the cup in my grip, and was pleased by the sound it made.

Alone again, the woman finished her self-regard and turned away. I tapped against the glass, watching as she jumped and glanced back toward me. She was hesitant and unsure as she raised her hand to meet her reflection, drawn in by the sound, held at bay by superstition and fear. Her eyes unknowingly traced every element of my being, caressing me, warming me with her attention as she scanned the mirror.

The mangled party cup slipped away as I pressed myself to the glass in preparation.

One touch was all I needed to bring the very essence of her into my world, more whole and real than she would ever be again to her feckless companions. I had waited without patience and without urgency, for unknown depths of time. As she ignored the jibes of her friends, and closed the final distance between her painted fingertips and my own smiling face, unseen beyond her reflection, I knew that my waiting had finally come to an end.

A gentle kiss of skin to glass and she was falling forward through the veil; a vivid, breathing, trembling oblation. I held her close in the darkness, turning and swaying in time with her struggles as her frightened screams echoed across the void we now shared.

In the mirror reflection behind us, as in the outside world, her lifeless body leaned heavily against the glass and slid to the floor. Already, the color had leached from the body, the clothes, the once bright hair. I turned my attention away as the sight was obscured by those left behind, frantically shrieking as they scrabbled along the body for some flicker of an eye, or a pulse, even as the corpse deteriorated beneath their hands.

My ministrations were needed here, with this soft and fragile thing in my arms. Her eyes rolled wildly, straining white and large in a gawping face. There was a sweetness in the heaves of air that shuddered from her, and a poignancy in her thin, reedy sobs that sated longings I had long forgotten to name.

I continued to rock her gently, surrounding her in the endless darkness. Slowly, savoringly, I tested the indulgent crush of her in my arms. I was deeply pleased by the sound.