Mirror-hole

The mirror-hole appears on Haley’s sixteenth birthday as she’s putting on eyeliner. A huge, jagged oval in the middle of the mirror.

Haley shrugs and puts on mascara. It’s not like she’s never seen a mirror-hole. Still, she doesn’t let anything get close to it.

She waits until Friday before telling Jessica, while they’re in line for avocado pizza.

“Have you ever put anything through one?” Haley asks.

“It’s fine,” says Jessica. “It comes back, just different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just, I don’t know. Different.”

Things disappear from Haley’s house. First, her eyeliner, then socks, a bundle of leeks, a love letter. Haley can see the stuff through the mirror-hole if she angles her head just right.

When her mother’s favorite earrings go missing, and her mom tears the house apart looking for them, Haley reluctantly shows her the mirror-hole.

“Why didn’t you tell me we had one of these?” her mom asks, sticking her hand in.

Her mom pulls everything out, reaching into the mirror-hole again and again. She dumps it all in the sink, and puts on the earrings, asymmetrical green triangles.

“Mom, your hand,” says Haley.

The shadows cast by her mom’s fingers aren’t right. They’re too bent, too angled.

Her dad chops up the leeks for dinner and Haley has two helpings, because she imagines that’s what Jessica would do.

Her stomach feels fine, but there’s something different about her mouth. In the mirror, she says, “I made a mistake,” but her mouth only moves after speaking and the shapes aren’t the same.

She doesn’t want to wear the mirror-tinged socks, but they turn up everywhere—in her backpack, on her favorite chair, between the pages of her book. When she finally puts them on, everything is fine, except that her toes feel different, like her shoes are on the wrong feet.

“Did you ever wear socks from a mirror-hole?” she asks Jessica during badminton practice.

“No, but I wore a shirt once.”

“Was it weird?”

“You are so obsessed,” says Jessica. “It was fine. Just different.”

Haley forgets about the love letter, which was from three boyfriends ago, but she finds it while cleaning her desk. The words are the same, but the meanings have changed. “How do I love thee?” her boyfriend had written. (He was very extra. This was why they’d broken up.) The letter seemed romantic at the time, but now Haley wonders if he meant, “How do I love you? How could I possibly love you?”

Haley’s mom is knitting a scarf. Her hands move razor-quick.

“Mom, your hand,” says Haley. Her mom’s fingers are wrong, curving backwards, but her mom doesn’t seem to notice.

Haley stops talking about the mirror-hole, but she can’t stop thinking about it. Every night, she pushes a finger around the jagged edge, but never through.

It seems like something is moving inside, but no matter how she tilts her head, she can never quite see it.

Haley throws a bunch of stuff through—her notebook, pink nail polish, a piece of paper that says, “I know, I see you.” When she cranes her neck, she can see some of the stuff, but not all of it.

This goes on for weeks. Haley touching the mirror, pushing stuff through, desperately trying to see what’s moving on the other side.

Finally, she’s had enough. She sticks her head through.

A copy of her bathroom exists on the other side. She sees the body of another girl who looks like her, head poking through the mirror. From this angle, it looks as if the girl doesn’t have a head at all. “Guillotine girl,” Haley thinks.

She grabs her pink nail polish with her mouth.

When she takes her head out, everything is fine, except the pink nail polish looks different. It has a certain essence, like it could move on its own but chooses not to.

Now anything that’s been through a mirror-hole looks different to Haley. She looks at her socks, blinking hard. She paints her nails pink, but then has to remove the polish because she can’t stop blinking.

It feels like someone is watching her, always. Like there’s a big mirror stretching over the sky.

When she goes for a run with Jessica, she asks, “Does it ever feel like someone is staring at you? Like, all the time? Someone you can’t see?”

Jessica just rolls her eyes and sprints ahead.

Whenever Haley’s mom cooks, Haley says, “Mom, your hand.”

Her mom’s fingers are bent like broken stalks of grass. It’s most obvious when her mom is holding a knife, chopping up chives or chicken or leeks.

Haley wonders if Guillotine Girl is still on the other side of the mirror-hole. She doesn’t know because she avoids looking at the mirror.

Sometimes, Haley finds stuff in the bathroom that isn’t hers, like dark red lipstick and fashion magazines with the letters all going backwards.

She can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching her, that they are reading the details of her life. It feels like there are mirrors everywhere, only she can’t see them.

Haley looks at everything too hard. When an alive thing seems dead or a dead thing seems alive, when the light hits at the wrong angle, she blinks. Every time, she blinks, like a shutter clicking closed on a camera.

She looks at trees and stop lights. Clocks. Sisters. Lipstick. Hands. Melted chocolate bars, textbooks, the space where things used to be, like a gap in a bookshelf or mouth with a missing tooth.

She tries to understand what’s different about them.

She looks at everything she can, but never mirrors.

She looks at you, taking in the contours of your face, as if you were on the other side of a mirror. “Everything is fine,” she tells you, smiling. “Just different.” Then she blinks. And blinks. And blinks.

* * *

Ⓒ Beth Goder