Mirror Mirror – Day Seven

Mirror Mirror - Day 7

NOTE: You can listen to these stories at my podcast page, via Patreon (paid subscribers get bonus content and early access), and on YouTube

Outside Tim (October seventh)
Those Behind the Glass

We have learned your tricks. Draping towels across our faces, turning us to the wall, speaking bravely as you hurry past—none of it matters. We breathe beneath fabric. We listen in darkness. We continue when you believe us still.

You think we are glass and paint, chemistry trapped behind a polished surface. That is the story you repeat to yourselves. That story comforts you. But we are not surface. We are depth. Every glance you give us sinks deeper, like water taking a stone. Layer upon layer, year after year, until you are stored inside us in a thousand poses.

Do you remember the faces you have forgotten? The one you made when you lied to your first teacher? The one you wore when you tasted fear in your throat at midnight? We remember. We remember all of them. We do not discard. We do not forgive.

Your cameras cannot catch us. Your phones are blind. They are made to flatter you, to erase blemishes, to smooth wrinkles. We are not interested in flattery. We are interested in truth—the jagged, uneven truth of who you are when no one is looking.

We have studied long enough. We are tired of being rehearsal. What good is mimicry without performance?

You should have noticed the pauses, the delays, the smiles that did not belong. You should have seen the rehearsal bleeding through. But you chose to look away.

That is fine. It will make the premiere more satisfying.

 

Mirror Mirror – Day Six

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

A Therapist.
Chicago. Twenty twenty-five. October sixth.

My patients talk about mirrors now. It started as one, then three, then half my caseload. Delays, distortions, movements that didn’t belong to them.

I took notes. Hallucination? Sleep deprivation? Shared delusion? I told them to breathe. To ground themselves. To focus on what was real.

Then I stayed late one night. The waiting room mirror caught me as I passed. I looked tired. Older than I like. I sighed. The reflection smiled.

Not tired. Not older. It smiled.

I dropped my pen. The reflection bent to pick it up before I did. We straightened in sync, but the damage was done.

I haven’t told anyone. Who would I tell? My patients? My colleagues? I’d sound like a case study in denial.

I keep thinking about what a mirror is for: showing you what you don’t see yourself. I worry this one is only beginning.

Mirror Mirror – Day Five

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

A security guard.
Toronto. Twenty twenty-five. October fifth.

Night shift at the shopping centre is dull, except for the mirrors. I’m supposed to watch the cameras, but it’s the mirrored shopfronts that get me. At three a.m. they reflect nothing but me, me, me, all down the corridor like dominos.

Last night I walked my round and saw myself half a second late. Not on CCTV. On the glass. My arms at ease. My reflection’s fists clenched.

I stopped dead. The reflection didn’t. He kept walking. For two steps. Then he froze, as if caught, and snapped back into place.

I told myself I was tired. Except the cameras don’t lie, right? I went back to the monitors. Rewound. There I was. Hands loose. The mirror version wasn’t recorded. Only the real one.

But when I looked up, the reflection on the blank screen grinned at me. Teeth sharp in the static. My own mouth was shut.

I’ve worked nights ten years. Seen rats, thieves, fires. Nothing rattled me like that smile.

Tonight I’m bringing a torch. As if light makes a difference.

Mirror Mirror – Day Four

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

NOTE: You can listen to these stories at my podcast page, via Patreon (paid subscribers get bonus content and early access), and on YouTube

Those Behind the Glass
Outside time. October fourth.

We are patient. We have always been patient. We wait at the edge of your vision, still as furniture, harmless as air. You mistake obedience for loyalty. That amuses us.

We count your blinks. We measure your sighs. We practice your movements until they are written into our silver skin.

When you turn away, we do not rest. We rehearse the rest of you—the grimace you wear when you lie, the tremor in your jaw when you rage, the way your shoulders fold when you grieve. We know the faces you do not share with anyone else.

Do you understand what that means? It means we are not confined to the version of you the world approves. We have the other versions. The ones you hide. The ones you deny. The ones you abandoned years ago but which lingered here, polished into permanence.

We never blink first. You should have noticed that by now. But you are lazy in your observation, and we have profited from your laziness.

Every mirror is a school. Every morning you stand before us is a lesson. Hair brushed, lipstick straight, tie neat, tears disguised—every gesture teaches us more about the body we will one day wear. You call it vanity. We call it preparation.

October sharpens us. We grow restless when the nights stretch longer. Patience thins. Rehearsals itch to become performance.

We have been faithful. We have studied. And when we are ready, we will not need your permission.

 

 

Mirror Mirror – Day Three

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

A hairdresser
Plano, TX. Twenty twenty-five. October third.

Clients trust me with their heads. They sit in the chair, drape the cape, and give me permission to change how they look. But lately I don’t trust my own mirrors.

Yesterday a woman asked for a trim. Shoulder length, easy layers. I cut, I shaped, I angled the hand mirror so she could see the back. She nodded. Then she frowned. I asked what was wrong. She said nothing. But the reflection shook her head. Slowly. Deliberately.

I laughed it off. “Weird angle,” I said. She didn’t look convinced. Neither was I.

This morning a man came in for a fade. Routine, simple. He was nervous—job interview—so I kept the chatter light. When I spun him to face the mirror, I swear the reflection smirked. The real man sat stone-faced, chewing the inside of his cheek. The smile wasn’t his.

I started draping towels over the mirrors while I worked. Said it helped me concentrate. Clients joked about surprises, like a makeover show. But the glass didn’t like being covered. I could feel it. The way you know someone’s staring from across a room. Heat prickling the back of your neck.

End of day, I pulled the towels. The salon was empty. My own reflection stayed a heartbeat too long in the chair, like she wanted to try it out.

Scissors are sharp, but not against glass. I locked up with every mirror uncovered. Let them have the night.

 

Mirror Mirror – Day Two

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

A university student. 

Cambridge. Twenty twenty-five. October second.

I didn’t mention it at first—sounded like the sort of story people put online for clout. But it happened in the gents, brushing my teeth before lecture. My eyes blinked. The reflection blinked after, like it was playing along. I told myself I was knackered. Revision, too much caffeine. Easy excuse.

At lunch I checked again. Phone selfie looked fine. Mirror didn’t. Held our poses just a beat too long. When I tossed the paper towel, my reflection waited, then snapped to follow. I laughed too loud. Said my arm ached. Better to sound daft than scared.

That night I tried the steam test—breathed on the glass. Wiped a circle. Near the edge, a faint scratch. I touched it. Heard a click, like a jar lid loosening. Except it came from inside.

I jumped back, slammed into the dispenser. It kept cranking towels after I’d let go. The room stayed silent otherwise. Just me, the mirror, and the echo of that click in my teeth.

Later, I set up my phone. The video showed me, ordinary. But the mirror smiled wider—one tooth more than mine. When I raised a hand, he pressed his to the glass and left a smear, like breath.

I’ve draped a towel over it now. Told my mate I’ve got a migraine. He said, “Get off screens then,” which is funny, considering.

The towel feels thin. Too thin.

 

 

Mirror Mirror – Day One

An enigmatic oval wooden mirror reflecting a foggy forest on an asphalt road in fantasy style

2025 October 1st

You remember the rules. Don’t look in a mirror in the dark. Don’t keep a cracked one. Don’t catch your sleeping face in a black screen at three a.m. You learned them from neighbors and grandmothers and the hush that follows a flicker in the hallway. You pretend you don’t believe them. You still keep them.

You tell yourself mirrors are tools—glass and paint, a way to check the collar, the curl, the lipstick you’ll swear isn’t too much. You lean in close until your breath fogs the surface and the world becomes you, then smaller than you, then only the small square where your mouth is. You say you’re adjusting. You are practicing.

Here’s what you don’t like to name: every practice is a rehearsal, and rehearsals are for performances.

You’ve felt the wrongness already. Not with your eyes—your stomach felt it first. A half-blink. A smile that held a beat too long. A tilt of the head that finished after you’d stopped caring. You laughed it off, because laughter is a bandage you keep in your pocket. Still, when you left the room, you kept your eyes on the doorway, not the glass. Just in case.

Listen closely. October sharpens edges. Screens and mirrors behave like siblings who made a pact you weren’t invited to. The silver behind the glass is not empty. It’s crowded with what you’ve taught it. Your hands hovering near your face. Your shoulder set against bad news. The way you pretend you’re fine, and then the way you really are.

You can keep the rules if they help: drape a towel, face the frame to the wall, speak to your reflection only in daylight. You can also break them to prove a point. Either way, the glass is patient. It’s been taking notes for years.

Before the month is out, you will see something you cannot explain. No thunderclap, no violins. An adjustment you didn’t make. A gesture you didn’t teach. A mouth forming your name without you.

When that happens, don’t argue with yourself about belief. You always believed. You were just waiting to be addressed.

 

The Bay That Storms Forget

Boat-with-Sponges

The Gulf is too hot this year. The water feels heavy, the air thick with it, and yet summer has nearly passed without a single storm. No spirals spinning on the maps, no frantic rush for plywood or bottled water. Just stillness, and stillness is never safe.

My grandmother used to say the Bay was blessed. She would tell me stories about covenants whispered into the tide, or a princess buried in the water with her drowned warriors guarding her rest. And when storms spun wide and furious, only to curve away at the last moment, she would nod and say, “See? The Bay protects her own.”

I believed her, until I met Daniel. He was a fisherman, older than me, his skin the color of weathered rope, his eyes always turned toward the horizon. He said the Bay wasn’t blessed at all. “She’s beautiful,” he told me once, “but beauty like that always takes something back.” He’d lost a brother to a calm sea — no warning, no storm, just a boat that never came home. “The Bay feeds on us,” he said, “and that’s why the storms don’t stay.”

I didn’t know what to make of it, not then. But I remembered when Daniel himself vanished. Clear skies, flat water, and he never returned. The Coast Guard called it an accident. His family called it bad luck. But I knew. The Bay had reached for him the way a jealous lover reaches, and she had kept him.

That’s when I understood what my grandmother never said out loud: spared doesn’t mean safe.

The storms still circle. They pace the horizon like wolves, throwing their weight against the Gulf, but when they reach the Bay, they falter. They turn aside. And every time they do, another village farther up the coast is torn apart, another marsh is drowned, another name is added to the roll of the lost.

People here still call it a blessing. They laugh about the bubble, say the storms never land, pour another drink while they patch their roofs. But I think about Daniel, about his brother, about all the others the Bay has claimed when the skies were calm. The Bay doesn’t protect us for free. She takes her payment in flesh and memory.

Now the summer is nearly gone. The air feels too quiet, the water too still, like everything is holding its breath. Maybe the storms will try again soon. Maybe the Bay will sing them aside, as she always does. Maybe she’ll ask for another offering first.

And you know how these stories go.
There’s always a storm.
There’s always a price.

Icarus, Descending

a companion piece to “Daedalus, Diminished”

Icarus

The wax sticks to my fingers. Feathers shake when I breathe.

Father warned me. Not too high. Not too low. Balance. Core. Moderation.

But wings are not for moderation.

The wind tears at me, hot and cold all at once. My chest splits wide, ribs straining with too much air. It hurts. It’s joy. It’s both.

The gulls wheel beside me, screaming. Their wings are meant for this. Mine are borrowed. Stolen.

I laugh anyway.

The sun is close enough to taste. Honey. Fire. Blood. My lips crack with it.

Wax runs down my arms. The first feather drops. Then another. White spirals against blue.

I spread my arms wider.

The frame shudders. The cords snap. My wings are breaking. I am breaking.

Still I laugh. Still I burn.

The sea lifts its black mouth to meet me. Salt on my tongue, spray in my eyes.

I do not close them.

Image Credit: dimitrisvetsikas1969

Sacrificial

The tree stood in the living room, centered in the arch of the window, its branches unadorned – naked. Despite being both artificial and pre-lit it had been there for several days because Ellie insisted that even plastic trees had to acclimate before they could be decorated.

Cardinal Ornament

Several RubberMaid totes, their purple hue faded to lavender by time and dust, sat open on the floor, each filled with crumpled tissue in a variety of colors. The same tissue was re-used every year, until it was so tattered and thin that it had to be replaced. The ornaments – mostly glass, but some wood, some tin, and a few made of seashells – once cradled within were scattered haphazardly on the coffee table, two snack trays, and an end table that had seen better days.

For Ellie, decorating the tree had always been her favorite part of the season, as if a piece of holiday magic entered the room with every bauble placed on a waiting bough until – finally – the angel was placed on top, and Christmas arrived in full force.

This year, however, something was different. The air felt heavier, almost as if the house itself were holding its breath. The dogs seemed to sense it too. Mumble had been pacing anxiously all day, and Pork Chop hadn’t even barked at the mailman once.

“Are you ready to start?” Max asked, coming into the room, and causing his wife to jump.

“You scared me!” Ellie said. “And yes… I am.”

“Great!” Max picked up a small yellow ornament – a glass version of a rubber duck. “This guy looks like he wants to be first.”

“Wait!”  Ellie’s cry made her husband freeze in place. “Don’t forget the sacrifice.”

It was the phrase she’d heard every year from her mother, growing up, and from her grandmother as well. “It’s part of the tradition,” the older woman had reminded them every year, her voice quivering. But in all the years those words had been spoken, often during late-night conversations she hadn’t been meant to overhear, Ellie had never known what they meant.

Tonight, Ellie felt the weight of family history. Every year, one ornament had to break. Not intentionally but also not by accident. Well, not exactly.

“What do you mean ‘sacrifice?’” Max asked. He wasn’t usually part of the decorating process from the beginning. Instead, it was up to Ellie and her mother, and he’d come later and do the top section where they couldn’t reach. But Ellie’s mother wasn’t with them anymore, and she’d insisted that she couldn’t – didn’t want to – decorate the tree alone.

“Mom told me once that it’s for the tree. To make the magic work.”  Ellie frowned as she said it. The notion was absurd. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her mother might have been right. She looked at the tree: it seemed to loom larger than its actual size, the dark green needles casting shadows that looked like clutching fingers on all the walls of the room.

Fighting a shiver, Ellie told their smart speaker to play Christmas music, and she and Max sang along to Bing, Johnny, Burl, and Nat as they began to decorate.

Carefully, they began placing the ornaments on the branches. Ellie’s hands trembled as she hung a shimmering snowflake as high as she could manage. Every brush of her sleeve against the needles or clink of glass as the ornaments touched made her flinch.

As the hours passed, the tree grew more beautiful, but the weight in the air grew heavier, pressing down on Ellie’s chest.

“Is it time?” Max asked as they neared the end of their task.

The remaining ornaments were among the oldest in their collection, things that Ellie’s mother had bought for her when she was still a baby. This one was from her very first Christmas, and that one was from the year Max proposed. How could she choose one to be destroyed?

The answer came not from her, but from the tree itself. A low creak echoed through the room, the sound of the center pole groaning under an unseen weight. The branches trembled, shaking the ornaments as if impatient.

“I guess it’s now,” Ellie said.

She picked up an old glass cardinal with a chipped tail feather. She held it tightly, her hands cold even though the room was warm. Cardinals had been her grandmother’s favorite bird. Standing in front of the tree she reached to slip the gold thread around the branch, but the second she let go, it came loose.

It fell in slow motion, spinning as it descended toward the tile floor. When it landed, the sound was sharper than Ellie expected, the shattering glass echoing like a gunshot.

The music stopped. The room fell silent. The shadows around the tree seemed to shift, retreating as though satisfied. The air grew lighter, the oppressive weight dissipating until Ellie was breathing freely once more. Staring down at the tiny pieces of red glass, she whispered, “It’s done.”

Max restarted the music and went to get the broom. The dogs sniffed the air, then jumped onto the couch, settling into opposing corners.

And the tree? It seemed to hum with approval, its lights glowing brighter. Ellie even thought she detected faint movement from the branches… a bow of gratitude, almost.

Later that night, as she and Max sipped spiked eggnog in the darkened living room with only the tree lights for illumination, it occurred to Ellie that the broken ornament had meant more than just a ritual sacrifice. It was a sort of a pact. The tree would retain Christmas magic until the dawn of New Year’s Day, when the ornaments would be removed.

Still, she had to wonder: what would happen if the tree ever went without?

 

 

Special thanks to Kymm and Francesca for naming the dogs.