Amelie Meinel
Mara stepped onto her father’s estate, and the gate yawned closed behind her like a jaw dislocated by time. Her palms grew clammy as the crumbling loomed over her, her instincts screaming at her to turn around, to flee. The smell of rot hung thick in the air, heavy in her lungs. Underneath it lay something more familiar, the smell of pipe smoke and dust; the fragrance of her father.
She paused in the foyer; the empty stillness of the house consuming her. Shadowed memories flitted across her vision, and she clenched her eyes shut, forcing them away. She flinched as a crow-call cracked through the silence. The bird perched on the windowsill, feathers like spilled ink. It blinked at her, knowing.
Spine growing cold, she turned away. In the hallway mirror, her reflection moved a heartbeat too slow. Head still turned, eyes still watching.
She walked through the house, fighting back the memories that threatened to overwhelm. Drawn to her father’s study, Mara found the room draped in dust like a mourning blanket. She ran her hand over the dark wood desk, pausing on a stack of leather-bound journals. Thumbing through the pages, she recognised her father’s spidery handwriting, interspersed with frantic sketches. Eyes piercing through the darkness, crows with red-tipped beaks, a woman’s face fractured like glass.
And one phrase, repeated again and again.
‘The glass between worlds.’
Mara dropped the book and stepped away from the desk. She looked at the mirror across from her, and her eyeless face stared back. The reflection grinned at her, lips stretching wide in a grotesque smile. Her breath hitched, her heart pounding in her chest like a bird in a cage. She fled the room, her reflection watching her as she ran.
That night, Mara dreamt she stood barefoot before a tall mirror, the edges framed with thorned vines. Heavy and warm on her shoulder, the crow pecked at the reflection, cracking the glass. Mara jerked awake, bringing her hand to her face. Blood coated her fingertips.
Time no longer moved in straight lines.
She would blink and find herself standing in an unfamiliar room, with no memory of how she got there. One night, she awoke on the cold tiles of the bathroom, dark water flowing over the brim of the tub. She avoided looking in the mirrors, but she could feel her reflection’s eyeless gaze watching, the way a crow watches a mouse.
Despite resolving to never return there, she found herself back in the study. The crow, now her constant companion, walked over to the desk, claws whispering on the floorboards. It pecked at the bottom drawer, then looked at her, head cocked. In the drawer, half-hidden underneath a yellowed map, Mara unearthed a black-and-white photograph, faded and creased.
A chill flew up Mara’s spine as she stared at the photo. Her eight-year-old self stared back, holding hands with an older version of herself. It looked exactly like her, except for the eyes. Eyes that were too hollow, too wide, too knowing. Something was wrong.
Something had always been wrong.
Hands shaking, she pored over her father’s journals by the spluttering light of a dying candle. His handwriting had grown more erratic as time passed, his thoughts unravelling into desperation.
‘There is no clean cut. To sever the self is to invite the shadow in.’
‘He watches from the other side. He’s waiting for me to slip.’
Her eyes razed the journals, trying to make sense of the jumbled ramblings. He’d been trying to excise something from himself. His grief, his rage, the darkness that lived like a tumour behind his calm façade. The mirror; his scalpel. The crow; his unwilling psychopomp.
The deeper Mara read, the more the memories began to resurface. Her breath expelled from her lungs in rapid, shallow bursts. Her father hadn’t just looked into the glass, that wasn’t enough for him. He had used it on her, made her part of his experiment, afraid to use it on himself.
She slammed the journal shut, seeking refuge in her room, the only place in the house without any mirrors. In her dreams, her reflection stood inside the tall mirror, awake, autonomous, lips still curled upward in cruel mockery.
The memories broke through. The coldness she’d buried, the screams she’d swallowed, the part of her that bore the fear in silence. She had pushed it away to survive. Her father had tried to do the same. He failed.
The mirrors shattered.
One by one, without warning, without cause, veins of glass cracked under pressure after holding on for too long. The shattered fragments formed a glittering path that led to the attic. The shards cut into Mara’s bare feet as she climbed the stairs, drawn to the attic by some unseen presence. The crow perched on her shoulder, talons digging into her skin.
The attic smelled of rotten pine and forgotten winters. Mara breathed deeply, letting the scent fill her lungs, providing a brief reprieve from the dust and grime that coated them. Pale light slanted through the single window, highlighting the dust motes that swirled like snowflakes.
Trembling hands pulled back the cloth.
The mirror hummed, vibrating with a soft sheen. Her reflection stood inside, waiting. Its eyes glinted with something ancient, something reclaimed.
‘You left me here,’ it said, in a voice that was not quite hers. It resonated too deeply, cracking through the air like old bone.
‘I didn’t know,’ Mara whispered.
‘You did.’
The reflection pressed her hand against the glass. The surface rippled.
Mara stepped closer, her heart hammering like a fist against her ribs. Her pain, her fury, stared back at her. The face that had been stolen from her, the child left to rot behind the glass. Did she really want to take back all her grief, all her hate? Or did she dare risk repeating her father’s mistake? What use does a broken mirror have?
She pressed her palm into the surface.
The mirror rippled, thousands of needles pricking her skin as it wrapped itself around her, her mirrored self merging with her physical. When she finally stepped through, she was whole. Her fury bubbled deep within her, yet she felt at peace, more than she had in years.
Sunlight seeped into the corners of the house. The air shifted warmer, more flavourful. The oppressive weight that had settled on the walls began to lift.
The crow vanished.
Mara gathered the journals, their pages soft with age. She took them outside, setting them alight in the garden her mother had once tended. Smoking ashes curled into the sky, taking her father’s madness with them.
She didn’t look back as she walked away.
Weeks later, in a café window across the street, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass.
She paused.
Her reflection did too. No hesitation, no delay.
And when she smiled, it smiled with her.
Perfectly in time.
Perfectly whole.