The Mirror

The mirror had been there since before Ashley could remember.

It stood in the hallway outside her bedroom — tall, dark-framed, slightly taller than it should have been for the wall it occupied. She had never questioned it. That was the thing about the mirror. It simply was, the way the floorboards were, the way the morning light fell crooked through the kitchen window. Unremarkable. Permanent.

Every morning, Ashley told it a story.

"Someday I want to go to Paris" She had told the mirror once. She was so dead set on going that she started to put together a plan of action, leaving little sticky notes like photos a long the mirror decorating it in a highlighter yellow arch of her reflection. She would always talk to the mirror about it.

She didn't know when the habit had started. It felt ancient, older than memory, like something she had been doing since childhood without ever deciding to. She would stand in front of the glass in her pajamas, hair tangled from sleep, and talk. Sometimes it was about her day — what she planned to do, where she was going, who she was going to see. Sometimes it was about the night before. Small confessions. Quiet truths she wouldn't say out loud to anyone else.

But in the beginning it was mostly about her dream to go to Paris.

The mirror never answered. It was just glass. But standing there, watching her own lips move, felt like loosening something tight in her chest. Like letting air into a sealed room.

This morning, like every morning, she stepped in front of it and began.

"Yesterday I went to the market on Fifth," she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "The one with the blue awning. I bought bread and those small oranges you like — well. That I like."

She paused. Something flickered at the edge of her awareness — not a thought, exactly, but a sensation. A wrongness, thin as a thread.

She had not gone to the market on Fifth yesterday.

She had gone to the one on Crane Street. The grey building with the cracked sidewalk out front. She remembered it clearly now — the clerk with the scar on his chin, the way the bread had been wrapped in paper, not plastic.

But the words had come out so easily. The market on Fifth. The blue awning. As though she had actually been there. As though it were the truest thing in the world.

Ashley stood very still, staring at her reflection. It stared back, expressionless, offering nothing.

She shook her head. Tired, she told herself. Just tired.

She turned away and went to make coffee.

---

It happened again two days later.

She was telling the mirror about a phone call — her sister, Rachel, calling to say she'd gotten a new job. Ashley described the conversation in detail: the excitement in Rachel's voice, the way she'd laughed when Ashley congratulated her, the restaurant they'd agreed to meet at on Saturday.

Halfway through, the thread pulled taut again.

Rachel hadn't called. Not yesterday. Not in weeks.

Ashley gripped the edge of the bathroom sink and looked hard at her reflection. The face looking back was hers — same dark eyes, same small scar above the left eyebrow from a childhood fall. But something about the stillness of it unsettled her. The way the mouth held its shape a half-second too long after she stopped speaking.

She blinked. It blinked with her.

Of course it did. It's a mirror.

But the stories were wrong. That was the part she couldn't explain away. The stories were wrong, and she hadn't noticed until they were already out of her mouth, already hanging in the air between her and the glass like smoke.

---

By the end of the week, Ashley had begun keeping a notebook.

Each morning, before she spoke a word to the mirror, she wrote down what had actually happened the day before. She was meticulous — dates, times, details. The color of the sky. What she ate. Who she spoke to. Then she stood in front of the glass and let the words come, and afterward she compared.

The divergences were small at first. A street name changed. A conversation shifted. A meal she hadn't eaten. But they were consistent. Every single morning, the story she told the mirror was not the story of her life.

It was a story. Just not hers.

She began to wonder whose it was.

---

Thursday. The notebook was half full.

Ashley stood before the mirror, and this time she tried to fight it. She gripped the story she'd written that morning — I stayed home. I read. I ate soup— and she opened her mouth and forced the words out, one by one, deliberate and careful.

"Yesterday," she said, "I stayed home."

The words came out wrong.

Not wrong in sound. Wrong in weight. They felt hollow as she said them, like reciting someone else's lines. And then, without her permission, her mouth kept going.

"I went to the park. The one by the water. I sat on the bench where we used to sit, and I watched the swans, and I thought about how the light looks different here than it does on the other side of —"

She clamped her hand over her mouth.

The other side of what?

Her heart was hammering. She lowered her hand slowly and looked at her reflection. It looked back. And for just a moment — so brief she would later convince herself she imagined it — the reflection's lips moved.

Not in sync with hers.

Not at all.

---

Ashley stopped sleeping well after that.

She lay in bed at night and stared at the ceiling and thought about the mirror in the hallway, just on the other side of the wall. She thought about the stories — the wrong stories, the ones that poured out of her every morning like water from a tap she couldn't shut off. Stories about a life that wasn't hers. A life that was close — achingly, terrifyingly close — but different. A life lived in a place where the light fell differently, where the streets had different names, where the swans sat on water she had never seen.

She thought about the reflection that had moved its lips.

On Friday night, she got up at 2 a.m. and walked to the mirror.

The hallway was dark. The mirror caught the faint glow from the streetlight outside, and her reflection floated in it like something dredged up from deep water. She watched it for a long time. It watched her back, perfectly still, perfectly synchronized.

"Who are you?" she whispered.

The reflection said nothing. Of course it said nothing. It was glass.

But Ashley didn't turn away. She stayed in the dark hallway until the sky began to lighten, and she watched the mirror, and she waited, and somewhere in the long silence between one breath and the next, she began to understand.

She was not standing in front of a mirror.

She was standing in front of a window.

And she was not on the outside looking in.

She was on the inside, looking out.

---

The realization did not come all at once. It came the way dawn comes — slowly, then all at once, and then you couldn't remember what the dark had looked like.

The hallway. The bedroom. The kitchen with its crooked light. The floorboards, the ceiling, the door that led to a street she walked every day without ever questioning why it felt slightly off, like a photograph printed a shade too dark.

None of it was real. Or rather — all of it was real, but it was not *hers*. It was a copy. A reflection. A room built to look like a room, furnished to look like a life, and she had been living inside it without knowing, telling stories every morning to the glass that separated her world from the one she actually belonged to.

The mirror was not a mirror at all.

It was the only door, and it was locked from the other side.

---

Ashley spent the next three days testing the boundaries.

She walked every street in the neighborhood, and they all curved back. Not obviously — not like a maze. More like a dream, where you walk for what feels like miles and end up exactly where you started, and only afterward do you realize the path never went anywhere. The shops were there, but if she looked too quickly, the signs were blank. The people moved, but if she watched them long enough, they repeated — the same gestures, the same routes, the same conversations, looping like a recording she hadn't known was playing.

She was alone. Completely, utterly alone, in a world built for one person, and that person was a reflection of someone she had never met.

The mirror — the window — was the only thing that felt real. The only thing that didn't loop or blur or dissolve at the edges if she stared too long.

So she went back to it.

And every morning, she told it a story. Not because she wanted to. Because she couldn't stop.

But now, she understood what the stories were.

They weren't her memories. They were Paris's.

---

Paris had a habit she couldn't quite explain.

Every morning, before coffee, before checking her phone, before anything — she stood in front of the hallway mirror and listened.

She didn't know what she was listening for. There was never anything to hear. The house was quiet in the way old houses are quiet: creaks and settlings, the hum of the refrigerator two rooms away, the occasional car passing on the street outside. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.

But she listened anyway, leaning slightly toward the glass, her head tilted just a fraction to the left, as though tuning into a frequency just below the range of her hearing.

This morning was no different.

Paris stood in the hallway in her robe, hair still damp from the shower, and looked at her reflection. Same dark eyes. Same small scar above the left eyebrow. The mirror was old — dark wood frame, slightly clouded at the edges — and she'd had it since she moved into the house three years ago. It had come with the place. She'd never thought to replace it.

She breathed in. Held it. Listened.

Nothing.

She exhaled and turned toward the kitchen.

She was halfway down the hall when it happened.

It was so faint she almost missed it — a sound, not quite a word, pressing against the inside of her skull like a finger tapping on glass from the wrong side. She stopped walking. Stood very still.

There it was again.

...the park. The one by the water...

Paris turned back toward the mirror.

The hallway was empty. The mirror reflected the hallway back at her — the worn runner on the floor, the closed bedroom door, the grey morning light from the window at the end. Her own reflection, frozen mid-turn, mouth slightly open.

She stared at it for a long time.

Nothing moved. Nothing spoke.

Paris shook her head, pressed the heel of her hand against her temple, and went to make coffee. She was tired. She'd been working late all week. That was all.

---

It happened again on Wednesday.

Paris was brushing her teeth when she heard it — clearer this time, unmistakable. A voice. Faint, like it was coming from very far away or through a thick wall, but undeniably a voice. A woman's voice. Speaking in a calm, measured tone, as though recounting something to someone who was listening patiently. "

"...and then I went to the shop on Crane Street. The bread was wrapped in paper, not plastic. The clerk had a scar on his chin..."

Paris spat into the sink and straightened up, toothbrush dripping.

The voice was coming from the hallway.

She walked to the bathroom door and peered out. The hallway was empty. The mirror stood at the far end, dark and still, reflecting the same quiet space it always did.

But Paris could hear it. Faint, and growing fainter, like someone walking away while they spoke. The voice was describing a life — small, ordinary details, the kind of things you'd say to someone you trusted. *I did this. I saw this. This is what my day was.*

And then it stopped.

Paris stood in the bathroom doorway for a full minute after the silence returned, her heart beating faster than it should have been.

She walked to the mirror. Stood in front of it. Looked at her reflection — her own face, her own eyes, her own scar.

"Hello?" she said.

The mirror said nothing. Of course it said nothing.

But Paris didn't move. She stayed there, one hand raised as though she might press it to the glass, and she listened, and the house was very quiet, and somewhere in the silence she felt the faintest vibration — like a string being plucked on the other side of a wall she couldn't see through.

---

After that, Paris paid attention.

She noticed the mornings first. Every morning, without fail, the voice came — always at the same time, always for roughly the same duration. It spoke in the same calm, unhurried rhythm, describing a life that was almost Paris's own but not quite. Streets that sounded familiar but weren't. People Paris almost recognized. A version of her days, told back to her through the mirror like an echo from a place she'd never been.

Paris began recording it on her phone. She set the device on the hallway table, screen facing the mirror, and let it run each morning. When she played the recordings back, there was nothing. Just the ambient hum of the house. The voice existed only when Paris was there to hear it — only when she was listening.

She tried other things. She pressed her ear to the glass. She knocked on it. She spoke back, loudly, clearly, demanding answers. The mirror remained exactly what it appeared to be: a flat, dark, slightly clouded piece of glass in a wooden frame.

But Paris kept listening.

And slowly, over the course of days, the voice changed.

The stories it told began to crack open. The calm, measured tone developed edges — pauses where there had been none, hesitations, a tremor that hadn't been there before. The life it described began to contradict itself. Streets that looped back on themselves. People who repeated the same conversations. A neighborhood that felt less like a place and more like a cage.

Paris sat cross-legged on the hallway floor one evening, her back against the wall, and listened to the voice describe, in a quiet and almost wondering tone, the realization that the mirror was not a mirror at all.

"It's a window," the voice said. "And I'm on the inside. Looking out."

Paris pressed her fingertips to the glass.

It was cold. Colder than it should have been.

And beneath her fingers, so faint it might have been imagined, something pressed back.

---