Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Mirror with a Later Hour
Her mirror shows her a few minutes ahead of the present, and she has begun trusting the reflection forward, tidying her rooms and her face for a time that has not arrived.
- perspective: close-third
The mirror came with the flat. It hangs on the inside of the linen-cupboard door, which is an odd place for a mirror and an odder place for a good one, and the agent's inventory, when Enid checked it against the fixtures list, listed it only as *glass, door* — as though the mirror were a matter of the door and not of the glass. She has thought about that phrasing at intervals for four years, the way you probe a tooth.
The wrongness, when she first noticed it, announced itself as a clock does: quietly, on a Tuesday, with nothing else happening. She was running late. She saw, in the glass, a woman reaching for the second coat hook, and thought, *I haven't done that yet,* and a moment later did it — same reach, same hand, same small miss of the first hook on the way to the second. Perhaps two minutes ahead. She tested it with the kettle, of course; any honest woman tests first with the kettle. The reflection boiled her water before hers was boiled, poured before hers was poured, and set her cup down at an angle her own cup was still travelling toward.
So: the mirror ran ahead. Not fast — never fast, never wildly — only a few minutes later than now, later by a margin that varied like a tide, low some days and high on others, longest, she noted in a kitchen calendar she kept for rain and bin rounds, at three in the morning. She stopped looking at three in the morning fairly early on.
What Enid has come to do, and she would call it nothing, is to trust the reflection forward. If the glass shows a fire laid, she lays her fire to match it. If the glass shows a bed made at an hour she would not normally make it, the bed gets made, because the other her is already finished and leaving one woman ahead and one behind is the sort of doubled interest nobody needs. She has reorganised the kitchen so that the actions in the mirror are easier to perform: the tin moved down one shelf, the chair angled out by a hand's width. She is, in the plain sense, tidying for the future — but the future is only ever a few minutes away, and she is tidying for it every day, and her flat has never been so orderly, and she has never slept so badly.
The tenderness of it is this: the woman in the glass takes her time. She is never rushed. Whatever wait or worry Enid carries into the doorway of the linen cupboard, she sees it resolved on the far side of the glass — the letter answered and sealed, the argument with the electricity board over and the pen capped, her hands steady, her hair gone greyer in the manner of grey that arrives rather than the manner of grey that is dreaded. Enid has seen herself calm, in the mirror, on the afters of days that gave her no calm whatsoever, and she has learned to arrange her face to arrive at that calm, the way you walk briskly to meet a train you can see slowing in from a long way off.
There is one thing in the glass she has not yet fitted herself to. On Thursday evenings — and only Thursdays, and only after the four o'clock news — the reflection pauses at the linen cupboard and looks back directly at her. Not around. Not sideways. Directly, the way a person looks at someone standing on a platform, someone they are leaving or someone who is leaving them, and the look holds for exactly as long as it takes to say a short sentence to.
Enid has begun to prepare for Thursday evenings. She does not decide to; she finds the vacuum run before her bath, the good cardigan out over the chair, the small light by the cupboard left on though she has never once needed it to see the glass. She is dressing, in all honesty, for an appointment with her own reflection, and she knows how that sounds, and she has stopped caring how things sound, which at her age is called peace and at the Archive would be called something with a reference number.
Last Thursday, for the first time in four years, the reflection's mouth was already moving when the look came.
She has spent the week, without admitting it to herself, practising the shape of that sentence on her own lips — rolling it soundlessly, syllable by syllable, the way you rehearse a question at a counter. She has it almost triangulated. It has, she is nearly sure, four words.
The mirror, tonight, is already looking.