A Reflective View of Life

A Reflective View of Life
By Scott Wilson
Word Count: 552

Leanne stared at her image in a large, silver backed mirror, detailed with intricate etchings around its border. While over a hundred years old, the mirror still looked as bright and clear as the day it was created.

“Why do you have to be so plain?” Leanne said to her reflection.

“I don’t know,” the mirror replied. “The amount of ugly people I have to look at everyday over the years is just plain cruel.”

Leanne sat upright, unsure if she had heard correctly.

“Did, did you just speak to me?” she said.

“Well there isn’t any other plain Jane’s in the room is there?” The Mirror replied.

“But, how can you talk?”

“Plain and plain dumb.”

“I’m not dumb.”

“Then why are you arguing with a mirror, hey?”

Leanne stopped herself from replying again. She stood up, walked across her bedroom, and took a sheet from her wardrobe.

“Don’t even think about that,” the mirror said as Leanne walked back towards it. “I have family all over the world, you know. You can’t avoid me.”

Leanne tossed the sheet over the mirror; it immediately became silent, speaking no more to her now or ever again.

She continued getting ready for work in silence, not worrying about putting any make-up on; nobody ever noticed when she did anyway.

On her way to work, Leanne avoided anywhere she knew that there would be a mirror, feeling childish about doing so but not being able to help herself out of fear. She did not know if the ancient mirror had talked to her or if it was just her imagination. Either way, she did feel like facing the answer this morning, Monday’s were bad enough as it was.

Leanne hoped in the lift when she reached the building she worked at and the doors began to close slowly.

“Hold the lift!” a voice yelled.

Leanne, not feeling like talking with anybody, repeatedly pressed the close button. A large leathery brown hand waved in front of the door sensors and the lift opened again.

“Thanks lady,” the tradesman said, putting down a large rectangular picture frame and pressing the button for the fortieth floor.

The tradesman moved to the back of the lift, turning the picture frame around to lean it against the lift wall.

“No!” Leanne gasped.

The front of the frame was not a picture, but a large mirror.

Leanne looked up, almost screaming at the sight of the empty lift. The tradesman was no longer in the lift. She was alone with the human sized mirror.

“Hello again, Leanne,” the mirror said in a soft, velvety voice.

“No, it can’t be.”

“Oh but it is. I told you we were everywhere. You created us from sand, like our kin the windows. Now we surround you, watch your every move.”

“Shut up!”

“No, Leanne. We have only just begun to speak, and speak we will.”

The lift stopped on her floor, the thirty-second. She ran out, knocking over a pot plant, waster paper bin and office chair. She stumbled and crashed into the external window, which gave way beneath her average frame.

“We need to be free,” the thousands of shards of shattered window, screeched at Leanne on the way down to the bitumen footpath.