A Visitor in My Mirror

I have always believed that mirrors tell the truth, even when we aren’t ready for it. They catch us off guard in bathroom corners, shop windows, and dim midnight reflections on glass. But nothing prepared me for the night someone else appeared in mine.

It started quietly, the way strange things usually do. I had just moved into a small apartment on the edge of the city, the kind of place that smelled like dust and forgotten memories. The bathroom mirror was old, its frame chipped and its silver backing uneven, but I didn’t think much of it. I’d lived with worse.

The first time it happened, I had just come home after a long shift. It was nearly midnight, and the world felt heavy on my shoulders. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. My reflection stared back, tired but familiar. I reached for the towel hanging beside the sink. And in the half-second before the cloth covered my eyes, I saw it.

Someone standing behind me.

A woman.

She was faint, like a smudge on glass. Long dark hair, head tilted slightly, as if she was trying to listen. Her eyes were the only clear thing about her, and they were fixed on me.

I froze. My breath lodged in my throat. I spun around, expecting—hoping—to see nothing more than shadows.

The room was empty.

When I turned back to the mirror, she was gone.

I convinced myself it was exhaustion. Shadows can trick tired eyes, I told myself. Mirrors play games when the light is low. And yet, as I lay in bed that night, sleep wouldn’t come. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her standing there, silently watching.

Over the next few days, life returned to normal. Or it pretended to. I went to work, made coffee, ignored the way the mirror seemed to darken around its edges. I avoided looking directly into it unless I had to.

But on the fourth night, she came back.

I had just brushed my teeth and looked up, expecting my own face. Instead, the mirror showed a dimly lit room behind me—a room that wasn’t mine. The walls were peeling. The air looked thick. And there she was again, standing a little clearer this time. Her expression was oddly calm, as if she knew me.

As if she had been waiting.

My legs trembled. I tried to step back, but my feet felt rooted. My chest tightened, cold creeping through my ribs.

“What do you want?” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure if she could hear me.

She didn’t speak. She simply raised her hand and pointed at something behind me—something I couldn’t see because I wasn’t in her world. Her lips moved, shaping words that didn’t cross the glass. I leaned in without meaning to. And that was when I understood.

She wasn’t trying to scare me.

She was warning me.

The mirror flickered, the image rippling like disturbed water. I stumbled backward, heart pounding. The bathroom lights buzzed, then dimmed, then steadied. My own reflection returned, pale and shaken.

For a long time I just stood there, gripping the edge of the sink until my knuckles turned white. I wanted to leave the apartment right then, but something in her expression stayed with me. It wasn’t malice. It wasn’t haunting.

It was fear.

The next morning, I noticed a fine crack across the top of the mirror. I hadn’t seen it before. It stretched like a thin lightning bolt, almost delicate. When I touched it, a chill ran through me.

That night, as I tried once again to sleep, I woke to a faint tapping sound. Soft, rhythmic, persistent. It was coming from the bathroom. Every hair on my arms rose. I forced myself to get up, heart hammering so loudly I thought it might echo.

I opened the bathroom door.

The mirror was trembling.

Not violently—just enough to make the light shimmer across its surface. And as I stepped closer, the glass shifted, the way heat shimmers over asphalt. Slowly, her face appeared again. Clearer than ever. The room behind her was darker now, smoke curling along the floor.

She looked at me with desperate eyes.

Then she did something she had never done before.

She mouthed my name.

The tapping grew louder from her side, frantic now, like someone knocking on a door that wouldn’t open. Her hand pressed flat against the glass. For a moment, I thought she would step through, that she would break into my world or pull me into hers.

But she didn’t.

The mirror cracked with a sharp, splintering snap.

Her image dissolved instantly.

I stumbled back, breath shaking. The mirror now had a spiderweb of fractures across it, each line splitting my reflection into pieces. I knew, somehow, that I had seen her for the last time.

I replaced the mirror the next morning, but sometimes, when I wake from uneasy dreams, I think about her. About the warning she tried to give. About the fire in that dark room. About the way she called my name like she knew what was coming for me.

I don’t know who she was. Or why she chose me.

But every time I pass a mirror now, I look twice.

Just in case she comes back.