Three Seconds Behind

AI disclosure: This story was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), an AI writing tool.

The first time I noticed, I was brushing my teeth.

I spat, straightened up, and caught my reflection still leaning over the sink — mouth still moving, still spitting, a beat after I'd already stopped. I blinked. It caught up. I told myself I was tired, that fluorescent light does strange things to a half-asleep brain at eleven at night, and I went to bed.

The second time, I wasn't tired at all.

I was putting on my jacket in the hallway mirror, arm halfway into the sleeve, when I looked up and my reflection was still standing with both arms at its sides. Not moving. Just watching me get dressed, patient as a photograph, for a full three seconds before it lurched into motion and caught up to where it should have been all along.

I stood there with one arm in my jacket and the other frozen mid-air, and the mirror-me finished putting its jacket on with this awful, rubbery smoothness, like it was stretching to close the gap.

I did what anyone does. I googled it. Sleep deprivation, migraine auras, something called Alice in Wonderland syndrome that makes objects seem the wrong size or the wrong distance. None of it mentioned delay. None of it mentioned a reflection that watches you first and copies you second.

I covered the hallway mirror with a towel that night. I told myself it was so I'd stop obsessing over it, not because some very old, very unreasonable part of my brain didn't want to be looked at while it slept.

It didn't matter. Three days later I caught my reflection in the microwave door, heating up soup, and it was already looking directly at me — not down at the bowl the way I was — a full two seconds before I turned my head toward it. Like it knew where I was going to look before I did. Like it had gotten ahead of the delay instead of behind it.

That was the part that finally scared me enough to call my sister.

She listened for a while and then, very gently, the way you talk to someone you're worried about, asked if I'd been sleeping. If I'd been under a lot of stress. If maybe I wanted to talk to somebody. I understood why she asked. I would have asked too, if our positions were reversed, if she'd called me at ten at night talking about mirrors.

I said I was fine. I hung up. I did not tell her about the part I hadn't told anyone: that the delay wasn't random anymore. It had a rhythm. Three seconds behind, then two, then — the night after the microwave — one second ahead. Closing the gap from both directions, like something walking toward a door from opposite sides of it.

Last night I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, towel still balled up on the floor where I'd finally taken it down, because hiding from it had started to feel worse than watching it. I stared at myself for a long time. Ordinary. Tired around the eyes. My reflection did the same, in what I am almost certain was real time — the two of us matched up, moving together, like nothing had ever been wrong.

I lifted my hand to touch the glass, the way you do when you need to prove something to yourself.

My reflection's hand was already there. Resting flat against the mirror from the other side, palm to palm with empty air, fingers splayed to match mine exactly — except it had been there first. I hadn't raised my hand yet. I was still deciding to.

I stood very still and watched my own arm lower itself back down to my side, on its own, a full beat before I told it to move.

I don't know which one of us decided that.

I put the towel back up over the mirror an hour ago. I am writing this by the light of my phone, in a bathroom with no reflective surfaces I'm aware of, and I keep telling myself that's paranoid, that a phone screen is glass too, that glossy tile throws a shadow you could almost call a shape if you're tired enough and scared enough to look for one.

I haven't looked down at the phone screen since I started this sentence.

I don't think I'm going to.