Snaggletooth

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. I called her Snaggletooth.

She scared me at first. What twelve year old wouldn’t scream at some evil spirit with a bloody, jagged smile from ear to ear staring back through a dinged, silver hand mirror?

I didn’t look at it again for another year after morbid curiosity won me over, and even then it took a week for me to be able to look into it for more than a few seconds at a time. Snaggletooth never changed, though. Pallid skin with sunken, unblinking eyes, and that terrible, deformed mouth of ruined and bleeding teeth ever present in that reflection.

It wasn’t curiosity that made me check it every year after that, though. There was a pull it had in my mind, something I couldn’t name but still understood. Something in its unchanging nature always drew me in like a siren song. It became as routine as taking a temperature.

When I was 16, I noticed something behind Snaggletooth. Something that I recognized. It was my house’s front door. When I threw the mirror down and ran to the porch with a kitchen knife, though, I found no one.

The next time I looked in the mirror, Snaggletooth was outside my bedroom window. When I turned off the light, it shut out in the reflection at the same time. I thought about opening the curtains, but instead I shoved the cursed mirror under my bed and left it.

This morning, my 18th birthday, Snaggletooth was there in the mirror, like always. But she wasn’t alone. Over her shoulder I saw my own backside, hunched over the mirror.

“Pauline!”

I jumped and so did the me in the mirror, behind Snaggletooth. I set the mirror face-down. “Yeah, Mama?”

“Come out here and help me,” she called from the kitchen.

I gripped the handle of the mirror and held it behind my back. Since I found it in my mother’s closet, I’d wanted to ask her about it. After I stopped being so afraid of Snaggletooth, though, I feared my mother’s rage at my taking her things without permission. No matter how many times I faced that, it never got easier.

“You’re an adult now,” she said, thrusting a sponge into a sink of soapy water and a spatula in the drying rack. “You’re going to make your mother do all your cooking and your washing up?”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“Don’t tell me sorry, tell me what you’re gonna do about it.”

I nodded and slid the mirror onto the dining table between my cake - chocolate with fudge icing - and a tray of vegetables and hummus. The candles sat, unlit, in the early morning shadows. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, go on,” she gestured with a wet fist.

“Mama, can I ask you about something?”

“Can it wait? Your cousins’ll be here in an hour.”

I kept a fingertip on the handle of the mirror and balled my courage in the other hand. “I’d rather talk about it now.”

She dunked another utensil into the sink.

A cold feeling slid up my arm, two dots inches apart and always together. Like eyes. A piercing gaze.

Mama licked her lips and sucked her teeth, a space flashing between the dentures and her gums. “If you want to talk, get me the Polident.”

“What do you know about Snaggletooth?”

“About who?”

“In the mirror. The Snaggletooth woman.”

Her hands stilled in the water as she turned her head to me. She pursed her lips and shifted the false teeth in her mouth. “A Snaggletooth woman in the mirror. Are you out of your damn mind? What’s wrong with you talking to me that way?”

“No, I don’t mean it like that,” I said and gripped the tarnished handle.

“You better make some sense before I call your father and tell him not to come today.”

“Mama, listen, please -”

“I hear all kinds of nasty things from people who see a woman like me out there, I raised you better than to say ‘em in here.”

I swung the mirror forward and faced my mother. “Not you, this!”

My mother’s eyes locked on to what I knew had to be Snaggletooth, and all the color left her face as her jaw dropped.

Then Snaggletooth stood in front of us, the flat part of the mirror pressed against her back. With a terrible roar and a sickening squelch, she descended on my mother. The next few moments were a blur of confused chaos with choked screams and the wet smacking of bloody lips.

I dropped to my knees and ducked under the table. I screamed.

When I turned the mirror to face the glass and try to find Snaggletooth again, to make sense of a way to trap her.

Instead, I saw a dark spirit with gouged out eyes crying streams of blood. Then the glass creaked and I heard it shatter, but I never saw it happen. The final clear vision in my mind was of that dark creature looking back at me.

One glass eye and seven surgeries later I regained partial vision. That memory of the new Snaggletooth never left me, though, and the only way I ever got her horrible face to go away from behind my scarred eyelids was by replacing it with that of my own daughter.

I found the mirror again. It appeared in my closet. The glass was whole again, but I wasn’t foolish enough to look directly at it. I hit it with a hammer, it came back. I burned it in the fireplace and once more it appeared on my bedside table.

When I dropped it in the bottom of the lake I thought I’d finally gotten rid of it for good.

Then, on the morning of my 36th birthday, my daughter teetered into the room on short legs. “Mama, who is the Blood Face woman?”