The Mirror That Holds the Elsewhere
In the attic of a house that had been waiting for someone to forget it, a tall mirror leaned against the dust-worn wall. The frame was carved with vines that seemed to move when you weren’t looking, a trick of the light that made the room feel watched. The previous owners had left behind only a story and a hinge of windows that never caught the sun. It was there, with a thin film of ash on its nightly glass, that I first saw something other than myself.
At dusk, the glass did not reflect the room but a street I did not recognize. A red-brick row of houses, a sky the color of old copper, and a lamppost that hummed in a way that sounded almost like a heartbeat. I pressed my palm to the cool surface, expecting to feel the glass, but instead I felt a pulse—like a shared breath between two rooms that never touched. When I withdrew my hand, the image lingered for a heartbeat longer, as if the other world had borrowed time from mine.
In the evenings, the doorway into that elsewhere grew clearer. A child soaked in rain stood beneath the lamppost, looking straight at me through the glass, as if we had met before in some dream we both forgot. The room behind the mirror began to tilt: the air grew heavier, the light sharpened, and the sound of distant drums pressed through the plaster. I found myself listening to a second clock, a clock that ran backward, counting down not to noon but to a moment when the line between worlds thinned to paper.
“Not every reflection is a mirror,” the glass seemed to murmur, “some are doors you forget to close.”
From that night, the rules revealed themselves in whispers and scratches along the frame. I jotted them into a notebook, a list I never intended to keep, yet could not abandon:
- The elsewhere appears most clearly when your hands are cold and your breath is shallow.
- It asks a question you do not want to answer, but must.
- Looking away does not end the moment—it binds it tighter to your memory.
- Once you walk through, you must choose a piece of your life to give in return.
One night I pressed my face to the glass and stepped closer than anyone should. The child in the rain raised a hand, and the world beyond pressed forward, not into the room but into me. The mirror trembled, the other side exhaled, and for a moment I understood: the Elsewhere was not waiting to be seen—it was waiting to be kept alive by someone, somewhere, who remembered it. When I pulled back, the room looked ordinary again, as if nothing had happened. But the glass remained colder, heavier, and I could swear the lamplight throbbed with a heartbeat that might have been my own.