“Everything breaks eventually.”
It’s stopped raining, and I take a deep breath of fresh air when the door slams behind me. As much as I love it, I also kind of miss the oddly familiar, nostalgic smell of the shop. I pass the kitchen store where the condescending old lady was. If my hands weren’t full, I would’ve flipped it off as I walked by, but instead, I just look into the window. It’s impossible, but I swear my reflection doesn’t follow me.
Chapter Two
My paints are laid out perfectly next to the mirror, plants staged in the background just so, a throw blanket tossed over the end of the couch to looktotally natural,and all of the books on my shelf behind the mirror are color-coded to match the paints. Gotta love social media, everything has to look perfect yet natural, casual yet classy. What my followers don’t see is the pile of dirty clothes right out of frame, the too-ripe bananas on the counter, and a mess of coffee-flavored drink cans next to them. I line up my phone’s camera for a well-lit shot. I snap about a dozen pictures and upload them to my editing app to sharpen everything up a bit and remove my reflection from the mirror.
I polish off the last of my second glass of wine and head to the kitchen to pour another. I’ve had a wild day, to say the least. Luca being a fuck nugget, the weird old lady at the weird old shop, being out of my favorite cup noodles, and the fact that I didn’t even get to share with anyone the huge news I got today.
I’ve been invited to be in a gallery exhibit in the next town over. The pain in the ass social media I complain about so often paid off, finally. I hit 13,000 followers a few weeks ago and apparently caught the eye of the right people. They’re handlingall the advertising and promotion. The feature is only me and one other artist, so the chances of me making decent sales are very high.
When I lift the wine bottle, I almost fling it across the room. I expected it to be significantly heavier, but I guess I’ve drunk more than I thought I had in the past few weeks. It’s probably for the best that it’s empty, anyway. I grab a cold water from the fridge instead and check the status of my uploads, which are finishing up. I lean against the counter and open one of the better-lit photos and start blurring the background slightly, enough to make it look a bit whimsical. I add some little, wispy graphics and zoom in on the mirror to take my reflection out. My brain feels a bit fuzzy when I notice something strange. I’m not in the picture. My reflection isn’t there, and it absolutely should be, given I was standing directly in front of it. I close out the app and open my gallery, scrolling to the picture in its unedited form.What the fuck?I’m also not in the original image. Before I can get too involved in trying to figure out what happened, I hear an ear-splitting yowl, followed by a heavy thud, shattering, and then complete silence.
I sprint around the counter to check on Wallace, my two-year-old cat. The terrible twos doesn’t only apply to toddlers, it turns out. He’s flying around the corner at the same time I am, though, and that results in a very clumsy near-collision. I jump over him as he skids around the counter and loses his footing on the linoleum, skittering away to hide in the bathtub.
“Wallace, what the fuck, man?” I groan when I see the state of my once-perfect, beautiful mirror. One of the snakes has broken off the frame, a million pieces are shattered on my floor, and a web of cracks creeps from the side of what’s left intact. I feel defeated. I was so excited about the vision for this piece that I forgot to make sure it was secure before leaving it unattended with my cat, who was clearly born in the depths of hell. I liftthe frame cautiously to assess the damage and make sure that there’s no worse than what I can see right off hand.
As my fingertips graze the metal, the pieces that shattered begin to float upward, hovering around me. The light from my floor lamp shines through them, causing prismatic rainbows to explode in my living room. I feel panic starting to rise, and I reach out to try to grab some of the shards and put them back. The mirror, now upright again, shows my reflection. I don’t look alarmed. I don’t look like there are hundreds of pieces of glass hovering waist high to me right now. I’m assuming I am way more inebriated than I believe I am, because even though I’m moving, my reflection isn’t. I lift an arm and wave at myself like I’m trying to get someone's attention.
My reflection waves back, and for a moment, I feel relieved. That feeling doesn’t last long. When my reflection’s arm lifts and extends a hand towards me, I find myself gravitating towards it. I tentatively reach my hand out, too, and the minute our fingers touch, I’m not met with cold glass. I’m met with a ripple in the glass, the temperature and appearance of it similar to a nice, hot bath. As the ripples begin to get bigger, my stomach drops. I can feel my fingers touching my reflection’s fingers, which may be the weirdest fucking sentence I’ve ever said. They’re cold and feel wrong, like they’re not made out of the same skin mine are. Before I know it, the grin on my reflection has grown menacing, and her hand moves from touching our fingers together to wrapping around my wrist and jerking me towards her.
I’m falling. I don’t feel like I’m falling, exactly, but I am definitely moving in a direction that I wasn’t before. As I’m going, I see flashes reflected in the storm of shards that has followed me. The colors are bright and vivid, almost a pop art style, but quickly change to actual images. I see a throne room, its floor covered in broken glass with hundreds of empty frames hanging from the ceiling and on the walls. I see a gorgeous blackcrown with moss agate stones in it lying on a pile of thick moss. I see… I see my own eyes now, thousands of exact copies of them, surrounding me, staring at me, and I get lightheaded. I try as hard as I can to stay alert, to cry for help, but the only thing I’m met with is a silence so loud that it causes my eardrums to hurt. I can’t stop my eyes as they close.
Chapter Three
I hear a crow cawing loudly right next to my ear. My head is splitting. I know I have some ibuprofen around here somewhere.
When I open my eyes, I realize four things are true.
One: I am not in my house anymore. I’m not in my bed. I am in a giant ass moss patch.
Two: Instead of wearing my baggy, paint-stained T-shirt that declares that “my tummy hurts and I’m mad at the government”, I am wearing a long, white cotton nightgown-type dress and some broken-in brown leather ankle boots.
Three: What a wild dream. I’ve read about lucid dreaming on chat boards before, but I’ve never done it.
And four? The weird old lady who sold me the mirror is standing above me, poking the end of her cane into my rib cage.
“Jesus, what the fuck?” I demand, trying to sit up.
A deeper voice comes from across the way. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I grunt and turn my head to the side. I can’t see whoever is talking, but there’s definitely another person in the woods with us. I sneer at the body-less phantom in the trees, telling me what to do.
“Is that her?”
The voice is closer now, and definitely masculine. I have stubbornly been trying to fight the pain, but I stop and take a moment to lie here. His voice feels familiar, warm, and I’m basking in it until the croaky voice of the shopkeeper ruins it, like a cloud moving in front of the sun at the beach. She stands over me and stares silently for a brief moment.
“It’s her, alright,” she confirms.
“How do you know?” The man’s voice is closer, and I can see the soft glow of a lantern swinging as its carrier comes near.
“Right, Your Highness,” the shopkeeper responds in a saccharine-sweet voice, dripping with sarcasm. “I forgot that plenty of women have fallen into the forest from the mirrored world, the very night my cloaked shop is revealed to them.”
Whoever she is talking to chuckles. “Point made, Veyra.” The sound of crunching leaves stops, and I’m forced to squint briefly as the glint of a steel sword against a hip blinds me. The man crouches down next to me, and when my eyes focus, every muscle in my body stiffens. “Hello, Echo,” he says, and his greeting is a warm blanket being draped over me, cocooning me in the safety of his voice. He’s not someone I’ve actually met before, but I know him. My paintbrushes have shaped every angle of his jawline, my pencils have sketched every tendril of hair that’s fallen messily around his face, my heart has beat in sync with his in every stroke I make when I paint or draw him. This man has been haunting my art for the past year or so. I keep my works of him off of social media. It feels too intimate, too emotional to share with the world. I feel possessive over him, as if one glance from someone else and he’d be taken from me. In my world, he’s fiction, and I dream of spending the rest of my days locked inside with him in our own little universe.
“Am I dreaming or dead?” My voice sounds like I’ve been sleeping for days. I can only assume it’s one or the otherbecause this man doesn’t exist except in my brain. The logical explanation would be that I finished my wine, and before I fell asleep, I saw one of the pieces I’ve done of him.
A smile stretches across his face, and my heart beats faster at the familiarity of the dimples in his cheeks. “Must you be one or the other? You can’t simply be awake and alive?”