Sibling Rivalry

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. A woman in a bloodstained white gown glared at me from behind the glass. She had a round face, wavy blonde hair, and cold blue eyes that pierced my soul like knives. She might’ve been beautiful, were it not for those perpetually angry eyes. The reflection looked exactly like me when I was young, but it wasn’t me. It was my twin sister Victoria, looking exactly as she did when she died fifty years ago. The day I killed her.

I remember the first time Victoria appeared to me. It was a few months after her death. Her funeral was the talk of the town. Throngs of people, my people, flocked to her lily white gravestone, leaving behind tears and flowers. All my friends and family abandoned me and took her side instead. Oh, how they fawned over her! The poor innocent flower, beloved wife and mother struck down by her jealous sister… If only they knew how wrong they were!

Little did they know that the woman in the grave was the same outcast they despised, and the object of their outpouring of mourning was alive and well. They buried the wrong sister under the wrong name. I tried to tell them, but no one wanted to believe a murderous madwoman! So the town darling became the town pariah. I could just picture Victoria in Hell, laughing at me. She must’ve loved it! She was one of those brainy types who enjoyed an ironic joke. Besides, why wouldn’t she love the chance to be me? I had everything she didn’t!

If I’d known that taking my sister’s life would ruin my own, I wouldn’t have done it! But there was no going back, and I was doomed to live out Victoria’s miserable existence. I was banned from her funeral, kicked out of my own home, and banished to the cabin in the adjoining woods, the childhood home I shared with my sister. After so many years married to a wealthy landowner, I was accustomed to servants doing everything for me. Now I had to do everything myself… farming, gardening, gathering, cooking, cleaning.

By and by, the manual labor ravaged my looks. My face became red and freckled. My hair became limp and brittle, and my fashionable clothing torn and dirty. Every day I would look out the window facing the mansion, waiting, hoping Benedict, my husband, would come and take me away from this hellhole. But he never did. I had to watch a distant cousin of his inherit the house and my children raised by strangers. I heard through the grapevine that Benedict died not long after Victoria.

In fact, the first time she came to me was on the day he died. I had just come inside from tending the garden, flushed and messy. I caught sight of my disheveled appearance in a hand mirror carelessly discarded on the table, a long forgotten birthday gift from my parents when they were still alive, and sobbed. “I-I’m so ugly!”

A deafening CRACK, like a thunderclap, echoed outside the cabin, WIping my eyes, I looked through the window just in time to see a flash of lighting, but there were no clouds in the sky. Where did it come from?

Then I heard it, that cold voice I’d know anywhere! “Tell me something I don’t know!”

“W-what? Who said that?”

“Come now, Virginia! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your own sister!”

“Victoria?” As I looked into the mirror again, the reflection changed. The sunburned face gave way to that of a deathly pallor, and the tattered pink dress was replaced with a bloody white nightgown. “But it’s not possible! You’re dead…”

“Yes, yet here we are.”

“What do you want?”

“The truth.”

“You think I haven’t tried to tell everyone?”

Suddenly the ever-stoic Victoria, whom I can’t recall ever hearing laugh in life, let out a sardonic chuckle that sent a shiver down my spine. “I believe you tried to save your own skin, but did you tell them who really killed me?”

“What good would it do to have me rot in a jail cell? I’m already stuck in this hell!”

There was that laugh again. “What do you know of hell? There are worse things, like answering for someone else’s crimes or being dead!”

I started to cry again. “I wish I was dead!”

“SO DO I!”

The whole cabin shook with the intensity of Victoria’s voice, so violently I thought the walls would fall down around me. I ducked, covering my head with my hands, though whether it was to shield myself from falling debris or to block out my sister’s cruel laughter I don’t know. Then a thought occurred to me. If I smashed the mirror, maybe she would go away!

“You don’t understand my pain!”

I grabbed the mirror. As soon as I touched the handle, a jolt like an electrical shock shot up my arm. Crying out in pain, I dropped it with a clatter. I waited for the sound of shattering glass, but none came. The shaking stopped, and the cabin was dead silent. Several minutes passed before I plucked up the courage to look again. The glass was still intact, and Victoria’s lifeless eyes glittered maliciously.

“No, you don’t understand mine, but you will. Mark my words, Virginia. You’ll pay for what you’ve done. If it takes me all eternity, I’ll have my revenge!”

Then she was gone.

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True to her word, Victoria haunted me for the next ten years in that cabin. Every time it was the same… the same cruel taunts, same icy laughter, same random lightning flashes, same electrical shock whenever I touched the mirror. One day, Victoria went too far with the lightning and caught the cabin roof ablaze. Funny, I never knew her to be that dramatic when she was alive!

Despite her best efforts, I managed to get out safely, but the cabin was lost. When the smoke cleared, I saw only one of my possessions had survived the fire. The hand mirror lay among the rubble, untouched by the flames and ash.

The fire drew onlookers from all over town, including the family living in my house. I tried to explain, but no one believed me when I told them my sister’s ghost had set the fire. All my words got were laughs, jeers, and eye rolls. Even my own children joined in the ridicule, left so long in the care of their extended family that they no longer recognized their own mother. The fire was the final straw for Benedict’s cousin. He decided he’d had enough of me and sent me to an insane asylum, where I spent the next forty years of my life.

****************************

I looked around the sparsely furnished hospital room where I’d spent nearly half a century… the blindingly white walls, the stiff metal-framed bed with matching white linens, the rickety nightstand, and that blasted hand mirror. Ironically the only comfort from my old life that I was allowed to keep. The doctors tried throwing it away countless times over the years. Each time, it would return to my nightstand the next day.

I sighed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Victoria wasn’t supposed to die. I wasn’t supposed to be a lifelong mental patient. I was supposed to be the darling of high society… until my sister took everything from me.

“You’ll get yours, Virginia,” Victoria hissed. “Your time is coming…”

I’d spent so many years listening to Victoria’s yammering that her taunts fell upon deaf ears. The lights flickered as she spoke, and ZAP! The room was suddenly plunged into darkness. I reached for the mirror, flinching at the familiar pain of electrical shock running through my hand. I couldn’t get rid of the mirror by smashing it, burning it, or throwing it out, The only way I could quiet my sister was by stuffing the mirror into a drawer. Even then, it didn’t stop her talking, just muffled the sound.

When the lights came back on, I saw a red burn mark on my hand… a burn that the doctors would undoubtedly think I caused. “Haven’t I suffered enough?” I wondered out loud.

Cold, mirthless laughter echoed from inside the drawer. “No, not even close. But you will.”

Her threats were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door, and two nurses stepped into the room. “What’s all that racket?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“My sister.”

One of the nurses shook her head. “Your sister is dead, Victoria.”

“No, Victoria’s dead. I’m Virginia!”

The nurses exchanged a look and a giggle. “Sure you are…”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the syringe in the nurse’s hand, and I knew what was coming. I wriggled and fought as hard as I could, but I was no match for the pair of nurses. One held me down while the other injected the needle into me. “Night night, Virginia,” the nurses taunted.

My eyelids drooped as the room blurred into an indistinguishable swirl of color. As the medicine began to take effect, I thought I heard another mocking voice join in. “Sleep tight, sister.”

I couldn’t be sure if it was real, but that voice stayed with me. As the drug-induced stupor overtook me, my thoughts turned to Victoria, our lives together, and that fateful day she died.