Mirror Image

Note: I've started writing a series of horror microfictions based on prompts given to me by Little Buddy ChatGPT. The prompt here is:

Every night, Anna saw her reflection smile back at her, even when she wasn't smiling.

I plan on doing 100 of these. I don't write much fiction, so this is a significant undertaking for me.

Here goes.

Mirror Image

It was only after nightfall, when, tossing and turning and casting off the dross of dreams, Anna crept from her bed to the mirror.

It was a perfectly ordinary mirror. Reflected on the surface, she saw the reverse world wherein everything was turned to its opposite side. Left was right, in other words.

But what else was reversed in that world, she wondered. She stood in front of the mirror, sleepily, dreamily, night after night. Her somnambulism brought her sleeping, dreaming feet within inches of the polished surface, her pug nose touching the cold glass, wherein Alice, she knew, would venture in time.

"The Walrus and the Carpenter," she said to herself slowly. "T'was brilig in the slithy toves..."

Outside, a lonely dog howled in the night. Cicadas chirped. The wind blew softly. This was the world.

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--Of cabbages and kings..."

She smiled. She frowned. She was fully awake, or at least she thought. What was that shadow lurking in the corner? She couldn't decide. She felt too much fear to move from her position in front of the mirror. She knew that, as the sun peeped up above the trees, casting slicing orange and scarlet bolts of power through the sash, she would wake up back in bed, the preceding evening seeming to be only a dream remembered.

Her image, reflected in the mirror, smiled at her. She smiled back, then paused. Was that the order in which things were supposed to happen?

She frowned.

Her image smiled.

And smiled.

And smiled.

And continued to do so.

Even as she backed away and put her hands in front of her face, her reflection continued to smile. She recalled Poe's lines, shivering: "...and laugh, but smile no more."

No more?

Nevermore.

***

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