Mirror

By Emily Allen, aged 16

The old house was all but empty.  Forgotten, decrepit, abandoned.  Gnarled vines swirled through the splintering shutters, the spawn of years of neglect and tragedy.  It was said to be haunted, trapping a spirit from a time when not even the oldest could remember.  They weren’t as far from the truth as they’d like to think.

The old house was all but empty.  All but an empty woman and a shattered mirror.  The woman was as aged and sunken as the house was; its exterior was a harsh reflection of the woman herself.  She would never notice this, of course.  Her life was spent at the mirror, staring into her clouded eyes as if expecting them to one day reflect something back.  She didn’t know what she was searching for; no one did.  A glimmer of hope?  Or perhaps, the last shred of sanity fleeing her mind, finally allowing her to escape her mortal existence.  She dreamt of it, sometimes – the euphoria as the life faded from her eyes, replaced by an eternal darkness. 

But the mirror yielded no such relief.  What it showed her every time she glanced was twisted, a reality stricken off course by an unknown assailant.  The shadows that flitted across her face were a little bit darker, the thorns that dug into her drooping flesh were a little bit sharper, the voices howling like tortured banshees a little bit louder.  Her bones contorted to a shape a little less human, her thoughts a little less sane and severely more ravaged.  Her entire body was a fractured porcelain bowl, the fragments glued together in all the wrong places.

She stared into the mirror, waiting for the utter wrongness of what she saw to consume her.  Praying to the gods which she had long since forgotten for an undeserved salvation.

Salvation, long-awaited death, never arrived.  There was only ever the mirror, a distorted spiderweb of glass, a reminder of everything that she wished she hadn’t forgotten.