The Mirror

Tired from the work and the people, I swing open the door to my attic, the one that hides itself in the far corners of the hanging gardens of my mind, the parts I don’t walk through anymore. Wisteria vines cloak its open walls, old growth, the kind that takes years to choke a house this thoroughly.

The room bleeds straight into the field beyond, no clear line between where the attic ends and the meadow begins. The air is heavy and stale. But the coziness redeems the toxicity, the way a familiar ache can feel almost like comfort once you’ve lived with it long enough.

Confiding in people like I did, in the ones that I had known, whom I had taken to be my own has now inevitably disparaged my own soul.

There’s a mirror leaning against the far wall, half-swallowed by the wisteria, its glass blurred with grime. I catch my reflection in it without meaning to, nothing sharp enough to call a face, and for a moment I can’t tell if it’s looking back at me, or past me, at whatever’s standing where I can’t turn to see.

There’s a room in disarray: drawers rifled through, a wardrobe ransacked, ink spilled across a letter that sits on a dusty desk no one has written at in years. Cryptic symbols, scrawled in a language it would take a lifetime to decipher. I don’t try to read it. Some part of me already knows I won’t like the handwriting.

Then I see them.

The bloody footprints, smeared across the floor and out toward the open field.

No trail leads in from anywhere else.

I crouch down, comparing them to my own. My stomach churns. They resemble my own feet.

There is only the logic of a betrayed soldier’s path, the kind left by a man who can no longer say whether he was the one who fell, or the one who dealt the blow. For a while I just sit with that.

Something presses against my face, heavy, suffocating. My fingers trace its shape, and the truth of it dawns on me.

A gas mask. Torn, battered, greasy, and warm, wrong in a way I can’t name, like it’s been worn recently by someone standing exactly where I stand now. The thought creeps in before I can stop it. How did it get here? No answer comes, only the cold certainty that it is.

My mind writhes like a squashed centipede. I don’t feel the pain, for now. I stand there and let it sit on my face a moment longer than I should.

The back of my ears go numb from the weight of it. I claw at it, desperate to tear it off. It doesn’t want to come off.

When it finally does, a sharp scent of metal and rust spikes the air, jarring against the same field that has been watching me through the open wall this whole time. The meadow looks the way it always has. Green, alive, indifferent. It has no reason to lie to me, and so it doesn’t.

There is silence over here. But I can’t shake the feeling that the wind carries screams with it, like the walls of this place have seen something unkind, something the letter on the desk was trying to say.

Silence, not the peaceful kind, but the kind that looms in old houses after everyone who could tell you what happened there has stopped speaking. No one left to say who went quiet, and who was silenced.

Something is not right here. And my eyes can’t see it.

I don’t think I want them to.