Mirror on the Wall

GillVille Drive was a quiet neighbourhood with recently paved roads, manicured lawns, a playground and soccer field, and houses much too large and extravagant for the average person to afford. Some houses had two garages, third floor balconies, backyard ponds, and one even had solar lights in the shape of owls and pinecones lining the walkway to its massive oak front door. This such house was the left half of a duplex. The other half was unoccupied, but balloons of yellow, white, and blue brushed against each other softly in the wind. On each balloon was written the words “open house” with too many exclamation marks. The balloons looked cheap and informal. They stood out for that reason. Two of the yellow ones had already popped. They dangled limply on their string.

Hazel had no intention of actually purchasing the vacant property. Her measly salary hardly allowed her anything more than her current apartment, which was rundown and needed plumbing and electrical repairs more often than she could keep track of.

Before going into the open house, Hazel took some time to walk around the neighbourhood. She thought it interesting that there was a playground, because there were no other signs anywhere of any children living in the area. If there were children, they must have been more like mini adults, never playing roughly or messily in the pristine streets or lawns with grass so well taken care of that it looked fake. She had realized, in that moment, that though she had lived in the city for most of her adult life, she had never taken the time to explore the more wealthy areas. She was reminded of magazines she looked through at the dentist’s office when she was a child and waiting for her mother to get out of her appointment. Those magazines had houses and neighbourhoods as perfect as the one she was now in.

When she was bored of her walk, Hazel approached the doors of the open house, which were intentionally left open for people to easily navigate. The first area of the house was the living room. The TV along the back wall was on but no sound was playing. It appeared to be an animated cartoon. There appeared to be animal characters talking to the humans, but with no sound, it was hard to be sure. Next, she went downstairs.

There was a pool table downstairs but not much else. It was empty and mostly unfurnished. There was also a clock that ticked too loudly. She checked the time. She worked at her fast food job at 6:00 pm. It was only noon.

Figuring there was not much to see downstairs, she was just about to climb the stairs back up when she noticed a frame. It wasn’t hanging on the wall like it should be. Instead, it seemed to be lazily propped against the wall. It was backwards, not revealing what was on the other side. Hazel thought at first that it must be a mirror, but when she turned it around, she was taken aback by a gorgeous portrait painting that looked just like a younger version of her. The dark blue eyes and thin eyebrows matched hers in an uncanny fashion, and the hair was styled the exact same way she had styled it every morning before school when she was sixteen, right down to the middle part and the bangs held to the sides of the forehead with bobby pins. The bobby pins were even the right colour. She always used red bobby pins. This was reflected in the painting.

There was one thing about the painting that was different from the way she looked. The girl in the painting was wearing glasses. Hazel had never worn glasses. The bottom right of the painting had inscribed on it a name and a date, presumably the name of the artist and the date in which it was created.

Dahlia Porter. September 2001.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” said a deep, raspy voice from elsewhere in the basement, “apparently some people are unnerved by it, so we decided to take it down and turn it backwards so as to not ward off any potential buyers.”

Hazel looked around for the man behind the voice and saw the listing agent approaching her. He was wearing a boring suit but a fun, patterned tie.

”Any questions about the house? Anything you’d like a closer look of?” He asked.

Hazel was suddenly embarrassed of the fact that she had no intention or financial capability of buying the house. She thought maybe she could ward off the awkwardness by asking more questions about the painting.

“Where’s it from?” she asked, gesturing to the painting.

“You ever heard of Dahlia Porter?” asked the agent. Hazel shook her head.

“Dahlia was a prolific artist in the 60s and 70s. She retired early in the 80s. When she was diagnosed with a terminal illness, she decided to start doing art again, but she died before she could ever even finish this painting.”

The painting looked finished to Hazel. Plus, it was inscribed. Why would an artist put an inscription on their work before it was done?

“But what else is there to add?” Hazel asked out loud, more to herself than the agent.

“I’m not sure. It looks finished to me. Apparently, on her death bed, she lamented about the fact that she would never get to finish it. She was no longer able to hold a pen or paintbrush and asked her son if he could sign and date it with her name. My theory is that if he was the one to sign it, maybe he was the one that finished it.”

Hazel was intrigued but also hesitant. How come she had never heard of this ‘Dahlia Porter?’ And how did this listing agent know so much about her? Wasn’t it his job to try to sell the house? Why was he telling her stories about the artist of a painting that wasn’t even hung up? And most of all, why did the painting look so much like her?

The agent rushed off to help some other viewers that were arguing about the exact shade of brown on the walls in the downstairs bathroom. “Chestnut,” said one. “No, burnt umber,” said the other. Hazel was then left alone with Dahlia Porter’s masterpiece.

Hazel dug her cellphone out of her purse and snapped a picture of the portrait. She compared it to a picture of herself as a sixteen year old. She concluded that it must have been by complete coincidence that it resembled her younger self so much, because Dahlia Porter had created her work of art in 2001. Hazel wasn’t sixteen until 2012.

The open house was starting to get boring. The two that were arguing about the bathroom’s shade of brown were on their way out to look at the backyard. Hazel followed behind.

The backyard, like the rest of the yards in the neighbourhood, had an immaculate lawn. It also had bird houses that were clearly handmade and handpainted by someone with a real talent for the craft. Hazel, being an enthusiast of songbirds of all types, decided to look into the birdhouses to see if this would be her lucky day and she could catch a glimpse of a nest with eggs hiding within the safety of the sturdy wood walls. Though there were no nests or eggs, she noticed that the birdhouses all had writing in black marker at the same spot on the front near the perch. The writing was small and intricate. To actually read the words, she would have to lean in very close, which she did.

Dahlia Porter. May 1972.

She looked at the next one.

Dahlia Porter. December 1968.

She looked at the last one.

Dahlia Porter. February 2003.

2003? Hadn’t she died in 2001?

Whoever owned this house must have been Dahlia Porter’s biggest fan.

On her way out, the agent reached out for a handshake and slipped his business card into Hazel’s jacket pocket. “Call me if you have any further inquiries about the property,” he told her. She smiled and nodded politely. She was dreading returning to her rundown apartment after her time spent on GillVille Drive. Before heading home, she thought it might be nice to sit on the swings at the playground. There were still no signs of children anywhere. She wouldn’t be taking the swing from a child who wanted it.

On the swing, she let herself fall into the natural back and forth motion as she lifted her feet off the ground. The business card poked uncomfortably at her hip, so she took it out of her pocket. She lost her grip on it and it fell into the sand below. When she bent down to retrieve it, not wanting to litter in such a nice neighbourhood, she noticed that there was something else half buried in the sand. She used the card to dig it out so she wouldn’t get sand under her fingernails. There, buried in the sand of a playground that was never used, was a pair of glasses. One lens was popped out and the other was cracked. The glasses seemed oddly familiar.

Still swinging gently, she opened the photos on her cellphone and pulled up the photo she had taken of the painting in the open house. The glasses that she had found in the sand were the same pair that the girl in the portrait was wearing. Tentatively, she put them on her own face.

To leave GillVille Drive and get back to the main road, she would have to walk by the open house again. The agent was now standing outside near the balloons. More of them had popped now. She gave him a gentle wave, he gave one back, and she turned her back on the house.

From behind her, the voice of the agent broke the silence. “You know,” he said, “there really are no coincidences.”

Hazel paused. She didn’t know whether to keep walking or to turn around and face the agent. What an odd thing for him to say.

She took four steps forward and then curiosity got the best of her. She turned around to face him.

“Do you want to know what shade of brown is on the walls?” he asked her, his smile way too big for the casualness of the question.

“Sure,” said Hazel, though she didn’t really care.

“The walls are Hazel.” His smile was even bigger now.

He motioned for her to come back into the house, and against her better judgement, she did. She wanted to go back downstairs and look at the painting again. The agent came with her.

“Will you help me hang it up?” he asked her.

“Doesn’t it make people uncomfortable?” she said, not quite remembering the exact term the agent had used last time. It came back to her almost as soon as she said it. Unnerved. He said unnerved.

The agent’s smile faded. He frowned as he hung it up himself as Hazel only watched. The nail was already in the wall. She remembered when she had first seen only the frame and presumed that it was a mirror. Now with it facing forward, she felt like she was looking into her own eyes, and realized her presumption of it being a mirror was not all that far off. When she was wearing the glasses, the only distinguishing feature that set her apart from the portrait was that she was made of flesh and bone, not of oil and paint. When she could no longer bear to look at the portrait, she looked back at the agent. His smile was back. He tilted his head and exhaled.

“There really are no coincidences,” he said again.

Hazel took a step back.

“It really is you, isn’t it?” he said.

“Me?” Hazel stuttered.

“Hazel,” he said so quietly it was almost a sigh.

“But, how do you know me?” she said. She was starting to feel unnerved herself.

“I don’t.”

Hazel was confused. She was starting to feel afraid. “You’re real. You’re really real,” said the agent. He sounded relieved in a way.

The agent blew away a layer of dust that was concealing another word written above Dahlia Porter’s name. It was the title of her painting. The title was Hazel.

“It’s not me,” she said to the agent. “If this was painted in 2001, then it can’t be me. I was born in 1996. I was only five years old when it was painted. That girl is obviously a lot older than five years old.”

The agent ran his finger along the frame. “I always heard that Dahlia Porter had some clairvoyance abilities. Some even said she could see into the future.”

Hazel had so much she wanted to say. She wanted to ask a million more questions, to yell at the agent, to call him a bunch of dirty names and scream at him to leave her alone.

“I don’t believe in that. Goodbye,” she said.

As she left the house, she was worried that the agent was going to follow her out. He didn’t. He stayed with the painting.

Once she was away from the weirdly perfect neighbourhood, she once again retrieved the business card from her pocket. She wanted to find out where the agent worked so she could call his superiors and report his creepy behaviour. It took a little digging to find the phone number to the main office, but when she did, the phone barely had time to even ring once before a lady on the other end of the line picked up the call. Hazel found the name of the agent on the business card he had given her. Anton

“Good afternoon, I was visiting the open house on GillVille Drive and was put off by your agent Anton’s approach. He made me feel uncomfortable and unsafe while I was viewing the house. I thought you might want to know.”

The lady groaned. Hazel could then hear her yelling to someone else.

“Dahlia! Phone’s for you!”

Hazel hung up immediately. She blocked the number, deleted the photo of the portrait, and threw the glasses into the nearest garbage can that she could find.

By coincidence, on her way home, a songbird perched on Hazel’s shoulder and sang into her ear, but it flew away when she reached up to try and pet it.