Alphabet Soup for the Tormented Soul

by Tobias Wade

  I purchased the correct anchors and brackets to really secure the mirror and installed it the next morning. I added an even more secure joint, not wanting it to ever fail again. When I hung it on the wall and peered into it, I found the reflection of the first infinite wave from the opposite mirror, but it had changed. What before was an infinity effect, was now the old mirror in the reflection of my modern mirror, showing a glorious mosaic of fractured cracks. I spun my head and inspected the mirror I just hung, and it was again and still blemish free.

  I called out to my wife and as she arrived I told her to look at the mirror. She looked, looked at the modern one, and quickly glanced back, just as I did, confirming my experience. She stared at me slack-jawed, when my daughter entered the room. She asked what we were looking at, and when we tried to show her, she couldn’t see the reflected cracks. Scratching our heads, we simply dismissed it and headed out to the ice cream shoppe.

  I would find out later that the red flag of refracted cracks should have prompted me to remove it. No one but my wife and I saw the cracked mirror. We would entertain occasional guests and friends, family would visit, and no one noticed anything odd. No one announced any odd feelings felt from it, even in my immediate group, and often we received compliments on its beauty and condition. A year and seven months passed, when one day, I noticed a slightly askew view in the perception of the modern mirror.

  I happened to walk past the old mirror and casually glanced into it. I saw myself in the reflection, but my head was turned a slightly different direction . I stopped my trot, spun around and stood directly in front of the old mirror, and stared at my own face, cautiously, momentarily. I watched as my face, no, my head turned slowly to the left, not breaking contact with my own eyes. My daughter walked in the room from the left just a second after my head in the mirror turned, and I realized that I too turned my head just as the mirror did.

  Neither my refracted doppelganger nor myself broke eye contact. I thought to myself about those comedic moments in cartoons where a person meets his twin, convinced it’s a mirror, and starts doing silly things to test it. Sometimes it’s a mirror, sometimes it’s a twin. Just as I remembered the Marx Brothers famous Duck Soup mirror scene in which Harpo pretends to be Grouchos’ reflection, the twin in my mirror raised his hand and waved at me. I gasped.

  I startled back a step and stared intently at the waving hand. It seemed like me, it moved like mine, even sharing the same scar as mine from when I had cut it with a carving knife one unfortunate Thanksgiving ago. I realized then that as I was looking at its wave, I was waving too, my hand feeling alien. It seemed to be that whatever it did in the mirror, only seconds later I would copy it; it felt like an echoed delay. I was instantly uncomfortable and I quickly left the room and found my wife.

  We conversed about it and she agreed that she had noticed peculiarities herself, such as noticing a piece of furniture was moved in the mirror, but not in the room. She’d return later to see the room rearranged to mimic the mirror. She originally assumed our daughter had done it. Later, she noticed in the reflection a book on a table, but again not in the room. She found that same book on her nightstand that evening. The book was the first Harry Potter book, one of her favorites. She found that the chapter which featured Harry sitting with the Magic Mirror and his dead parents was earmarked. An obvious omen, but overlooked as coincidence. Her repeated mantra was “it feels like a bad dweam” every time she commented on our odd situation.

  We decided then and there that it was time to take it down. I’d sell it, probably for a fraction of my investment, or cover and store it. We headed downstairs and found our daughter talking to the mirror, to herself. Our interruption disturbed her, and we asked who she was talking to. She simply said “Myself, duh.” and hopped away. My wife and I heaved the thing up off the clevis joint I made and set it down. As I turned to grab a hold of it from behind, I looked straight on into the modern mirror, and saw an oddness. The reflection showed the mirror still in place, still cracked, still hanging on the wall.

  At the base of it was my daughter – lying still in a pool of blood. I remained fixated on the scene, unable to turn away. I was standing in the spot that the mirror showed my dead or dying daughter. For a brief moment, the scene changed to my wife and I having sex in the blood puddle. The love-making session evolved until the two of us, covered in blood, merged into one, hideously large, woman. She grabbed at her thigh, ripping flesh off, and daintily placed it into her mouth.

  As she consumed herself, she morphed into my daughter. I looked closer, getting tunnel vision, and I strained to see the faintest of movement from her body. That's when I noticed an angled reflection in the blood – a face, my face. My face stared back at me from the puddle. Once I made eye contact with it, it started to rise up out of the puddle, taking a crimson form as its volume and mass increased. The body of my daughter seemed to wisp away, as if an invisible vacuum was sucking her inside itself. As my copied, bloodied form emerged, my daughter steadily grew smaller.

  My wife grabbed my arm and shook me, pulling me out of the hypnotic trance I was in. I stole a look at her, then right back to the mirror on the other wall – all was back as it should have been. I saw myself, bracing the mirror against my bosom, my wife adjacent staring deeply at me, and my daughter standing to the other side of me. I looked away from my wife and glanced at my girl, but she wasn’t there. Back in the mirror, she wasn’t either, seemingly disappearing from both realities. I wasn’t quite sure what I had seen, and so I buried the ideation away into the farthest recesses of my mind.

  Later that evening, I wrapped the mirror up in some old blankets, tied the bundle, and moved the package to the shed. My wife had already had some photos of the thing saved from earlier, and she listed it in all the she could.

  Later that evening, we watched a newer romance on VHS, cuddling on the couch. During the scene in which Tom Hanks reaches the top of the Empire State Building and runs into Meg Ryan, curing his sleeplessness, the screen faded darkly for just a second, and in that second, I saw a bloodied me standing over my shoulder, pointing at me directly through the screen. I convulsed slightly, startling my wife. She accused me of falling asleep during her favorite part, but I know what I saw.

  As we cleaned up the popcorn and our empty chipped mugs, the news was blaring about some incident with a woman and a bus. I found myself walking past the spot where the mirror used to be hung, I took care not to look at its empty space where the clevis joint and other hardware still hung. Instead, I tilted my head to my left as I passed, and in my peripheral vision, I saw myself walk past the modern mirror.

  As soon as I crossed my own path, my reflection abruptly changed course and charged at me. I turned my head to fully grasp the vision, and I realized that the running me was coming from the reflection of the old mirror, still hanging. As I turned to look at the blank wall, I was struck hard from behind, plowed down like a defensive tackle sacking a lazy quarterback.

  The shock of the hit knocked the wind out me, and the two of us toppled to the ground. I rolled onto my back and started to wrestle my attacker. As I reached with searching fingers for a hold, I realized I was fighting my bloodied self. He straddled me, smacking my hands away, and at once grabbed my throat with both hands and squeezed. We locked eyes, and I felt a withering sensation overcome my entirety.

  I choked the life out him. It was so easy, he was so scared. He had no idea what was happening, only that I was there, killing him, and he was defenseless. He tried to grab at me, pull my hands away, but he kept slipping off, unable to grasp the slick blood that coated my body. He tried hard, and after three minutes of desperation, he finally went limp. Not dead, just unconscious. I picked him up over my shoulder and carried him into the mirror. I washed the blood off of me, put on his clothes, and stepped out of the mirror into the completely ignorant bliss of his wife and daughter. Later he awoke, as I had once done, and he slammed against the mirror, glaring at me, screaming at
me. I simply mouthed to him “Don't wait for me”.

  Occasionally, I will see him at the mirror, trying to break the mimic he’s forced to repeat. I will bring his wife to the mirror, the modern one as he called it, and show her off to him. Of course, she can’t see that it’s him. She can’t see the ancient mirror still hanging on the other wall. Sometimes, when that girl of his is out of the house, I will make love to his wife in front of him. I do it where he can see it, but doesn’t have to mimic it, since it’s just out of perception. I can hear his desperate banging on the mirror as he gets furious at me, but she can’t hear it.

  He always stays in the room. If only he would stop obsessing over me and what I am doing to his family, he could explore the world out there, on his side of that mirror. His new wife can't understand his madness as he yells at the mirror, and she can't talk to him, talk him away. His face has grown shaggy with unkempt hair, his body thinning from starvation. He can’t die in there, though, not until he learns how to stalk and mimic another perfectly.

  Hopefully, his wife that I have impregnated will birth me a son, one which I can sell the mirror to. Or maybe I’ll help the daughter find a suitor worthy of imprisonment in the mirror, so her real father can escape. Either way, he is throwing his life away on the other side of the mirror, instead of living it the way he could. Unfortunately, he is stuck in the infinity he created, and when his wife, er, my wife, sold the mirror to an avid mirror collector from the Pine Grove Mall, it meant his only easy escape from my trap departed with it. He can only escape to a son-in-law or step-son.

  I wonder what evil entity will trap that mirror collector. There are so many that can be trapped inside. I wonder how many will be trapped in that hall of mirrors the collector owns. I wonder how many mirrors he has sold with trapped innocents contained within, desperately trying to mimic him well enough to steal his soul and escape their imprisonment. After all, when I escaped, it was 1993. I had been trapped eighty years.

  A lot of mirrors have been made, bought, sold, and resold in the last two and a half decades. I wonder where he is now. Maybe best not to look too close at your mirrors…

  N is for Necrosis

  J. Y.

  When my mum died, she weighed two hundred and sixty two kilograms.

  As a kid, I never understood why she couldn’t come for parent teacher interviews, or school plays, or even just pick me up. It’d always be a nanny or a neighbor driving me to and from school, at least until I was old enough to take the bus on my own. And whenever I’d come home, she’d be slumped in a chair, chin dripping with grease and sauce from whatever ready-made meals she’d eaten. Our entire house reeked with the stench of sweat stains soaked into fat rolls, the musty aroma of a carpet left on its own for years. I wallowed in it for years, my childhood wasting away in that rotting house. I didn’t know then, but now I realize some part of me always felt the sickness of it all, the festering disease that was eating away at the very foundations.

  As I started to get older, my ignorance turned to disgust. It was a combination of shame and fear; shame that this was who I’d come from, that this was what I could become, and fear that she was going to die one day, die and leave me all alone in this world. And I grew angry. Why couldn’t she get better? Why couldn’t she just stand up, get herself further than the kitchen, maybe even out of the house? A part of me wanted to starve her, keep her choked for food until she shed that rubbery exoskeleton of fat. She was still my mother though, and I couldn’t just do that to her. She was the only person I had. Still, having to wash between moist flaps of skin and fat with a damp cloth every night, clothe her, and even take her to the bathroom had started to eat away at me.

  You have to understand what I was escaping when I got into med school the next state over. For the first time in my life I wasn’t directly responsible for that corpulent pig that was my mother. She’d stay in our sleepy Midwestern town, with a care-giver paid for with her insurance, and I’d be free to live my life. That’s what I figured anyway. The thing with that kind of plan is that there’s always something to drag you down, something to eat at your hopes until there’s nothing left. For me, it was my mum’s necrosis. If you don’t know what that is, here’s a basic definition:

  Necrosis: the premature death of cells in living tissue.

  What it really meant was she was rotting away in a cage of her own flesh. The weight of her own body had crushed the flesh on her backside so that it had stopped circulating blood, had started to die. It meant that, after only twenty-six days of freedom, I had to go home and take care of her again. I came back to a familiar smell of piss and sweat and mold; but that was all mixed with a new taint, the sour and yet sickeningly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. She wasn’t in her usual chair. Instead, I found her collapsed on a mattress in a bedroom she hadn’t used for as long as I could remember, the springs creaking under her weight. She was dressed in a simple blue shirt, almost like a hospital gown, and lifting up the bottom edge, my eyes came level to where she was rotting.

  It almost looked like some rabid animal had taken a bite out of her, except there was no raw wound. The entire gash was instead coated in some black, crumbly lumps of flesh, thick blood oozing from the cracks in between each globule of meat. Suddenly the rotting surface jiggled, and my mum turned around to look at me.

  Her forehead was beaded with sweat, her glassy eyes straying away from mine. Shame flickered across her face for just a second, but quickly covered up with a weak smile. No. I wasn’t having it. I backed out of the room, shutting her behind the bedroom door. I’d deal with her later. Instead, I went to pack. My neighbor, Michael, raised his right hand and waved. Looking at his other, I realized it was just a stump. Things had changed around here, a lot faster than I’d realized. Things were only going to change faster from there though.

  The rot ate into the back of her thigh in just a week, pale white bone coming to surface, poking through a pit of slimy pus, lumpy flesh and dark, clotting blood. The doctor had told me to just keep it clean and disinfected, but it seemed like every time I tried to scrape off the gunk, a new layer would ooze out. I’d also started to ration her food, feeding her with a diet half the size of a regular person’s in the hopes that it’d help her slim down.

  That was a mistake.

  I caught her one night when she thought I was sleeping. Watching from the darkness, I saw her hand reach behind her, into the weeping crater of her rotting thigh. She scooped out some of the gunk and the flesh, her nails scraping against the exposed bone. Shivering and groaning, obviously in extreme pain, she brought her shaky slime-filled hand to her mouth and stuffed it in. I silently gagged as I watched her lick off the filmy white goo from her fingers, smacking her lips loudly. The next day, I covered the wound in several layers of bandage, and tried to forget that image. I still have nightmares about it.

  I nearly saw her do it several other times afterwards, but turning away every time I got close. I think the only reason I didn’t bring it up was because it would make it too real, and force me to acknowledge the truth of what I’d seen. She was eating her own, sour, rotting flesh, and I was just letting her do it.

  When she finally died of a blood infection a few weeks later , I couldn’t even stand her breath, as tainted as it was by the sickly stench of decay. She’d lost twenty-six kilos at that point; sometimes I still can’t help but wonder how much of that she’d eaten. In the end, I’d had to call in a crane to carry out the final, decaying remains of my mother. In a way, that was the most tragic part of her death; the first and last time she’d left the house was out of living memory.

  These days I look at my own thickening waistline and shiver. Will I become her? Will I surrender to my impulses, the hunger in my belly eating me alive? Will I start to rot away, start to eat myself just to feel full..?

  O is for Olivia

  Marni Sue

  It wasn’t even snowing when I left for work, but by the time I was halfway there the roads were coated in ic
e. People were sliding around like real-life bumper cars and there were accidents blocking every path to the office. With all roads blocked, I decided to just give up and turn back home.

  I was being cautious, creeping along in my little Echo at about 15 miles per hour. Down the road a stretch, I spotted a Toyota truck coming towards me around a curve, fast. He had to be going at least 70. He seemed, at first, to be flying by on my left. Then, he was sliding sideways towards me in a long, silver smear...

  It’s true that time slows down when you are about to die. I saw the clock click from 7:25 to 7:26. I looked at my hands, noticing every vein, every line. Heard the lyrics to the Imogen Heap song I was listening to:

  “...Where are we? What the hell is going on...?”

  I thought to myself, “I can get out of this.” Looked right: cement utility pole, ditch. Looked left: silver pickup truck. Then I thought, “I really can’t get out of this.” I saw particles of dust seeming to glow, suspended, in the air.

  Then there was crunching and spinning and glass and spinning and pain and then - darkness.

  I was alone in the darkness for a while, and then, I wasn’t alone. Darkness, heavy but awake, consuming me. I somehow was the darkness, and yet I was still very much myself. Or, I should say, I recognized myself in the darkness. Then I heard a rush of whispers and long, low, whistles. As the sounds grew louder, waves became particles and two forms started to appear: Mine, and hers. A shifting, swirling woman was standing in front of me. Like blowing smoke into a sunbeam coming through a gap in the curtains. Smoke all around, but only seen as it swirls through the sunbeam. She was like that. I could see that she had shoulder length brown hair, and she was wearing a light blue shirt and white pants. She appeared to be rather tall, but not as tall as me. I was watching her patterns shift and swirl when she spoke: