Mirror Image

Carol was fascinated by reflections. It started with a childhood trip through a mirror maze when the circus came to town. She’d mocked the thing when she was outside—a real baby attraction for sure—but it became a different story once she was in there.

She got separated from her mom and brother. She could see them—could see two and three of them. Each time she ran forward, though, she just smacked into glass. She came close to real panic before her mom finally put a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s tougher than it looks, isn’t it?”

Ever since then, she’d been unable to pass by a mirror without stopping to stare into it. Storefront windows became whole other worlds when the sun was at the right angle. Lakes were her favorite, though. Lakes not only made reflections, they made reflections she could dive into.

When Carol was underwater, she thought about the reflection on the surface above her and felt she’d actually stepped through the looking glass. She’d broken into the world on the other side of the mirror maze, the one where her mother and brother had hidden from her so long ago. Sometimes she made a game of seeing how long she could hold her breath. She liked to stay down long enough to be sure the water over her had settled and stilled to show reflections again.

There weren’t many opportunities for the breath-holding game now that Carol was an adult, but she still paid attention to the reflections. There was a bridge she drove over every day on her way to work. She always watched her car’s reflection race along the water beside her, and she wondered what it was like in that car, the one hanging under the bridge rather than over it, the one filled with icy lake water.

It might have been an accident. It might not have been. She might have been paying too much attention to the reflection and too little to the road, or she might have had a momentary lapse of sanity. Perhaps the reflection itself had cast a spell over her. In the crazy few seconds between the time Carol’s car slammed into the guardrail and the time she realized she was going over, Carol was as surprised as if another driver had crashed into her. Except no driver had. She couldn’t blame this on anyone but herself—or her mirror self.

The car filled with water. Carol fought to get out, but even as she fought, another part of her mind wondered what it would be like once she couldn’t hold her breath anymore and she truly became her mirror self. What would it be like to exist only as an image, something to be seen but not touched, something only half real?

That’s what ghosts are, she thought. They’re reflections. I wonder what the mirror is?

She stopped fighting to get out. She realized she couldn’t wait to step through.