Mirror, by Edward J. Rathke

The ghosts chase me into the bathroom.

Lock the door and I’m safe. They won’t get me here.

I look into the mirror and see a girl but not me.

The mirror ripples like a puddle. An unrecognizable person peers from the Otherside. I speak, but don’t hear, look and see a face inside mine pulling me forward.

My breath forces through my teeth and my hands move without thought and shake uncontrolled. My chest seizes and erupts, splashing into the mirror that swallows my heartburst and drums the beat back too loud and too high, sucking out my thoughts. My body damp with sweat, hair clings to my face and sticks in my eye, but on the otherside stands a girl with ravenblack hair and goldviolet eyes, smiling. I try to smile and taste blood. The machinegunning of my jaw grinds my teeth to dust and I wonder if I bit through my tongue.

The mirror draws me into the Otherside and the room I stand in feels far away but twists viciously past me. My mouth full of blood, I bite my hand to keep from eating my tongue and I feel wet enamel dust on my hands while tooth after tooth clatters into the sink. I pick one up to examine it but the ground slides up and almost knocks me down. My hands clutch the sink to steady the world. The mirror wants to swallow me but I’m not ready to dive into a glass pool, though she looks so inviting. The faucet’s on and I drink like I’m drowning and let the water fill my lungs.

I relax. Splashing water in my face and watching my forgotten teeth cackle down the drain. Like someone else, the room stops spinning and the world stops screaming, but the mirror ripples and reaches out to me and it starts again. I flick off the lights and the mirror glows violet from her abyss eyes.

I stand upright, gasping a deathwheeze. The room spins and my left eye loosens in its socket. It drops into my open palm, connected to the inside of my skull by a pink and purple ligament that crumbles to dust. I watch me looking at my eye with the violet heat staring from the Otherside. The mirror. I smash my eye against it and it explodes in purple and crimson that rolls down my arm while the glass falls like ice into the sink where the water pinks. I lift up the shard with her violent violet eye and squeeze it until my hand turns a wet red, but the grip’s right. I carve into my wrist and stab into my thigh until the room hurricanes and blooms in red sparkles.

A door opens and closes far away from the velvet encircling me. There’s a woman running up the stairs who needs to be warned about the ghosts and the mirrors. That woman has a name and face impossible to remember. The room swirls in black cherry technicolor. Seeing through the walls and falling through the floor while a smile crosses my lips to the Otherside of the glass in my hand. Pounding at the door like a million car-wrecks, screaming a word that sounds like a name. The noise from her mouth slurs into the running water of the pipes in the walls. The world muffles and the cars crash against me miles away. I sink into an ocean of violence beneath the floor where dead hands caress me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward j rathke is a wandering sort who spends his time making bad decisions and trying to not die. More of his words and life can be found at edwardjrathke.wordpress.com.