The Authentic Eclectic
The Mirror
Amber did not approve of the party being held on a Friday. She was tired from work, tired from hurrying to prepare at home, and, because she never attended a party on an empty stomach, she had miscalculated while racing about, eaten too much, and now poked doubtfully at the bulge at her waist, questioning her choice of a sleek navy dress.
It was a frosty winter night. Occasionally, passing headlights invaded her privacy. She held her gloved hands in front of the heater, even though they were warm. She was stalling and wasting gas.
She reminded herself that she only need make an appearance, even or especially because the woman called her sister was the host. She turned off the car, grabbed her purse, and stepped out into the cold.
Her heels might have punched new stars in the tar firmament. She always stood tall, with a confident expression, and looked people in the eye with a smile. Though their opinions were of little import, she considered it a point of pride to create the illusion of success, which is defined, above all, by happiness.
In the entryway, she got caught between a man and woman engaged in an antagonistic debate. Amber did not like to vocally engage in politics. The woman called her sister saw her and brought a cup of cider, noting its alcohol content by reminding her that she was welcome to stay the night, and sank back into the humming depths.
“So you’re saying that being born is a punishable offense, even though you find that concept disgusting for any other type of person,” the man said.
“No, but by the time you’ve grown up as a white male in this society, you’ve benefited from certain privile — ”
“Fine, we have privileges.” The man took a sip from his plastic cup. “But just like anyone else, we didn’t choose to be born. So why do you think we deserve to be treated worse?”
“Nobody wants to treat you badly, only for you all to stop acting like true equality is a victimization of — ”
The man laughed rudely. “I’m sorry, nobody wants to treat white men badly for the sin of being born? Apparently you haven’t checked the Internet in twenty years. You’re looking at the devil.” He motioned at himself.
“Why don’t you stop interrupting her?” another woman put in.
“Here it comes,” the man sighed.
Amber smiled politely at the gathering and slipped through to the den. The music was loud here, and there was a spirit of good cheer that warmed her in concert with the cider. Genuine laughter, awkward dancing. Tiny lights sparkled on the walls.
She struck up a conversation with a man who was not quite handsome, but had an intriguing face. After several minutes, he invited her to dance, but she declined: she disliked the inevitable sexualization that accompanied dancing. She felt a general opposition to casual sex and hasty physical engagement that had nothing to do with morality, but rather with a sense that the whole business was crass and unrefined. Patience aroused her.
The man shuffled on the couch and tugged his pant leg taut. He looked at Amber with a tight smile, took a drink, and relaxed. Amber wondered whether his discomfort were due to frustration at being obstructed from sexual acceleration, or a general distaste for being told no. She reflected on her own cynicism even as she listened to his comments about the party.
She had not always been so cynical. When had it begun? She made the mistake of lifting the veil over her distant past.
Regret.
She nearly dropped her drink. “Excuse me.”
She wove through the throngs of guests until she found the woman called her sister. She was in the middle of a circle of six people, laughing in an wide-open way that showed off her perfect teeth. Amber took her aside.
“Do you still have those boxes of my things from high school in the shed?”
“I don’t see why not. I haven’t been out there in a couple years. Do you really need to go there now?”
“I remembered something I just have to see.” Uncharacteristically, she added, “Please.”
The woman called her sister rolled her eyes and handed her her drink. “Let me go find the key.”
The flakes of partygoers’ murmuring drift into the unshorn snow. An angel’s hymn is muted. Time melts, life blurs, and the past, the fantasies of man, blend into the future, the certainty of the fist in the palm. She removes a glove to work the key in the padlock. She looks to the sky before stepping inside, and it is blank.
She shut the door behind her to close out the biting wind. By the light of her phone, she searched through the piles of boxes and bags and old furniture until she found three labeled with her name.
“My word,” she murmured, lifting out a diary from her seventeen-year-old self. She flipped through it, smiling abashedly at the terrible poetry and professions of love for a boy she never got to know.
She set it aside and looked for her jewelry box. The little ballerina was bent sideways and choked out a few musical notes when moved. Amidst the cheap jewelry lay a small key.
In another cardboard box, she found the little metal box to which it belonged. She blew on her hands and rubbed them together until they warmed, then inserted the key and opened it.
She stared at the crumpled brown paper packaging. Her heart drummed her throat. She pulled away the paper to reveal the mirror.
It was an old-fashioned hand mirror, dark metal with an elaborate floral handle and a scratched, circular pane. She propped her phone against a box behind her and tilted the mirror from side to side in the indirect light.
“Amber,” she whispered. Noticing her weak manner, she held back her shoulders and called, “Amber!”
A familiar face appeared in the mirror. It was silvery and pale, like moonlight on water. Its face was vaguely human, but with owl-eyes, translucent hair, and the barest hint of lips.
Seeing herself after all these years broke Amber apart. Kneeling in the cold, dark shack in the distant hum of the party, she dropped her head and fought back tears.
“I failed,” she confessed. “I thought I belonged here. I thought that I wanted to be here, in your world. But I didn’t. I hate it. Everyone is hollow. Everything is just as it appears. The world is so much bigger, but the spirit of everything is so much smaller.”
She looked the mirror in the face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I stole this from you. But now I want to make it right. I want to give it back. I don’t belong here, and you don’t belong there.”
The silvery face watched her dispassionately. “I don’t want my body back. I like it in your world.”
“What…?” Even though Amber had dreaded this, she felt shocked. Horror crept down her spine like trickling ice water.
“I tamed the liribach,” continued the face in sing-song. “I rode the seven mairns. The skein of time unwinds for me. I feel no sorrow that you stole my body. I was unhappy as a teenager on Earth. But here, in the mirror realm, all is fantasy and shadow. I belong.”
Amber’s human lips, which now felt fat and unwieldy, parted and closed helplessly. “But…think of your family, your friends. I’m at your sister’s place. Your parents. Everyone you loved.”
“I love others now.”
“You don’t even talk like a human anymore!” Amber cried, angry with jealousy.
The mirror-woman did not reply.
“I will smash it. I will smash it and you’ll be trapped there forever. You may like it now, but…” Amber pawed through the toolbox by the door and held a hammer in view.
“Yes, I remember!” the mirror-face said. “This is how people behave. Earth has poisoned you. I can’t say that I feel sorry for you. I suffered greatly at first, when you spoke the words that changed our places. You are the greatest victim of your own — ”
Amber, who was not really Amber, but who was more like her now than the real Amber, brought the hammer down onto the glass, silencing herself forever.
Pooled beside it in her human guise, she wept.
Amber did not speak to anyone as she moved through the house. She jostled people. She didn’t care. She only needed one thing.
She went to the bathroom and faced the mirror. True, it was the barest hint of a chance, but just maybe, just maybe…
Gazing at her beautiful, slender face, she spoke the magic words that had been the real Amber’s a decade past, the words that opened the way for her kind if the mirror was right. She would find one like her former self, trick it into taking her human body.
“I hate myself.”
Nothing stirred.
She squared her shoulders and spoke again, brushing back her silken black hair and glaring into the blue eyes she had once coveted. “I hate myself!”
Still as solitude.
She slammed her fist on the counter. Back down the steps, through the drunken humans, out into the winter night, into her car, over the stinking highway, into her mundane box of a home.
After that night, she gained a reputation. Though none knew her well, all considered her a confident, intelligent, and charismatic woman — but terribly vain, with an almost unholy fixation. For, they said,
“She never met a mirror she didn’t like.”