Mirror Mirror Art and Décor stands in a Tucson strip mall, part of the never-ending strip mall of Speedway Boulevard. It neither sticks out nor blends in. Most shoppers never notice this store, they would prefer Hobby Lobby or Big Lots. Those who do are called to by the mirrors suspended along all four walls. The mirrors come bordered in a variety of ways: romantically rounded and edged in brass, squared off by tiles, or warped with seaglass. They are like wallpaper with a perfect seamless stature against the wall. The store across the street from Mirror Mirror Art and Décor cannot see the mirrors, only the sun that reflects off them. Every noonday in the winter, when the sun is in the South, and shines most on the mirrors, the cashier wonders what the flashing lights from across the street mean. He begins to come up with theories, conspiracy theories. One week the lights are coming from extraterrestrial space signals, the next they are solstice calendars. Finally, the cashier believes that the lights are morse code signals, and even though he doesn’t know morse code, the employee decodes the message “HELP ME” from them. The cashier grabs his coat, hat, and rushes out of the store. He runs straight into the oncoming traffic to help the store across the street. The Police afterward declared it a suicide since the man was holding a note that said “help me.”
***
There is a house four miles from here that has seventeen mirrors. The house is older than Arizona, a Tucson original. None of these mirrors come from Mirror Mirror Art and Décor. The house is made of red brick and has a small green lawn. The floors are wooden and honeyed, the glass of the windows single paned. Handmade wooden furniture decorates all rooms, refurbished, though it has been chewed on by generations of dogs. The kitchen is white laminate counters, a smelly gas stove, and a fridge accented in dark wood. One man lives in this house and he is young, maybe twenty-six. The Man is muscular and neither very tall nor very short. He has tanned skin and caramel colored hair and eyes. Sometimes he has a mustache that matches, but usually he shaves. Every morning he likes to stand outside a cup of coffee and pretend he’s an old man. He’s a performer so he considers this practice. He’s a performer so he goes by many names.
The Man works as a drag queen, under the alias Mimi Solay. The seventeen mirrors in the house are therefore very important to him. They help him do his make-up, take off his make-up and make sure that he is taking care of his looks in between. A drag queen must be beautiful. From wherever he is in the small house, he can see his reflection in a mirror. At two points in his house, the bathroom and the dining room, there are mirrors lined up just-so, allowing him simultaneously to view his front and back. Even though he lives alone, he feels his reflection keeps him company. He is never scared of his own reflection.
At night when the Man comes home from work, he wipes his makeup off in the mirror. He uses long methodic strokes that streak the piles of makeup across his face, dragging it to the side of his chin where it piles and blends. One night the makeup piled and blended on his jawline in such an assortment of colors that he recognized himself as neither the drag queen nor the man. He felt like a fish. How strange he thought. He tenderly touched the tip of his fingers to his jawline, as if to make sure that he was in fact still human. The reflection in the mirror wavered before his eyes and he realized that he was in fact the person he had always been.
After this incident the man began to feel more and more that his reflection was someone other than himself. At times brushing his teeth in the bathroom he would see his arm moving with an aggressive back and forth motion that he was sure didn’t match that of his arms. Another time over dinner he swore he saw a third arm appear and scratch his belly when he glanced up at himself in the dining room mirror. When he got out of the shower, he would see that the towel had already been used by the version of himself in the bathroom mirror; when he applied eyeliner, he would realize that his vanity mirror version already wore it.
Gradually, his house edged away at his comfort, and he grew claustrophobic within it. He began to avoid the mirrors as much as he could. To do so, he walked with his head tilted toward the floor and slight inclined to the left or right. Yet images of transparent motions, or figures, like ghosts running away from the corners of his vision persisted. He began to believe that the mirrors were worlds unto themselves and that there truly existed seventeen other versions of himself in his house. The Man locked his fridge lest his other selves started to eat his food. He locked his bedroom door at night to block any of their chatter lest they began to speak.
However, the Man never felt frightened until he began to see other people that weren’t himself in the mirror. He would wake up and before seeing his own face in the wardrobe mirror, he would see that of a woman in her thirties, hair askew. Who is she?He would fill up water from the sink at night but the reflection in the kitchen mirror was of a haggard serial killer. He felt that wherever he went within his house, something that was part himself but not entirely followed him, as if his reflection in the mirrors mutated. He swore was someone else, maybe even a devil lived in the house with him. It followed him from room to room like a shadow, all the worse for its gleaming clarity. It haunted him.
A Saturday afternoon, and the Man was cutting limes to prepare mojitos for his guest and himself when he realized with horror that in the gleam of the countertops and appliances he distinguished a spectre-like glow with the nebulous form of his own body. Even outside of the mirror he was being reflected, fragmented into thousands of tiny ghosts across his house. The cabinets, the wood of the furniture, the single paned windows, everything appeared to steal a part of the man’s self. And, he depended on them to ensure himself of his own existence. Suddenly the man’s relationship to the house changed, and he realized that he belonged to the house, and not the other way around. This thought disturbed the man so much that he drank eight mojitos with his guest, who ended up very drunk and had to spend the night.
That night the Man dreamt that all his reflections threw a party in the house. They danced across the walls and floors, their laughs shaking the walls and their steps creaking upon the floors. Their horrible faces and bodies all looked like him, but none of them were him exactly. The man woke up panting and sweating. The house was sleeping calmly. He looked over at his guest, who slept on the trundle bed slightly below. The sleeping guest’s skin was so perfectly smooth and still it appeared to be glass. The Man neared the guest, stood over the guest, and peered down at the guest’s face, their nostrils, their slightly parted lips, the two white teeth gleaming behind them, and the Man’s tiny reflection in them.
Flying back on his bed, the Man stifled a shriek. The guest was nothing but another reflection of the man, nothing other than another slightly different version of himself! When the Man looked into the guest’s face, he realized that although their nostrils were of different sizes, they were the same, and that although their lips were of different hues, they were the same, and the two white teeth could be none other than his own. The Man moaned, a deep moan that arose in his chest like an earthquake. How could he trust to know what he looked like? How could he know that he even existed if not for his guest reflecting him?He reached up to touch his face, it wasn’t there. He looked down at his hand, no hand looked back at him.
The next morning the guest awoke in the house alone. He got out of bed and made himself a cup of coffee, stood on the porch, pretended to be an old man.
Grace Penry (she/her) recently graduated for the University of Arizona where she studied Anthropology and Creative Writing. She has edited the Sonora Review and currently reads poetry for The Offing. Her favorite novels are the Neapolitan Novels and she craves Alice Munro’s stories like a five year old does Sour Patch Kids. She is also within Amy Winehouse’s top 1% of listeners on Spotify. She hopes you thoroughly enjoy this story.