Reflection

The first time Daniel noticed something was wrong, he thought he was just tired.

He had been brushing his teeth late at night, leaning over the sink. When he looked up, he paused. His reflection was already staring at him — too fast, too soon, as if it had anticipated the movement.

He blinked. So, did the reflection.

He laughed nervously and wiped his face with a towel. “Losing it,” he muttered.

But the feeling didn’t go away.

Over the next few days, the mirror felt wrong. At first it was little things — the reflection smiled a moment too late, or moved just slightly out of sync, like watching a video with a delay. Once, when Daniel rubbed his eyes and looked up, the reflection stood still, eyes wide, unmoving.

Then it copied him perfectly again.

Daniel stopped turning on the bathroom light. He avoided mirrors when he could. But at night, he felt watched. Not by someone behind him — but by something within the glass.

He called in sick to work. He searched online: "mirror not reflecting right," "reflection behaving differently," "mirror copy alive?" Most results were jokes or horror stories.

One post stood out. It read:

THEY WATCH US. When you notice, they start becoming real. They know more than you remember. Never talk to them. Never break the mirror. They want out.

Daniel scoffed. “Internet weirdos,” he said aloud, trying to dismiss the crawling feeling in his spine.

But that night, as he passed the hallway mirror, he paused. His reflection was already standing there — turned toward him, waiting.

And smiling.

“Who are you?” Daniel whispered.

The reflection smiled wider. Its lips moved, but Daniel heard no sound. He leaned closer.

The mouth formed words:

“I’m you. The real you.”

Daniel stumbled back.

For the next two days, he covered every mirror in the apartment with sheets and duct tape. Even the screen of his turned-off TV started to bother him — he caught glimpses of movement that weren’t his own.

But the dreams were worse.

He saw himself — or something that looked like him — standing in his room, watching him sleep. It whispered secrets: the location of a lost photograph, a memory of a fight Daniel didn’t recall, a password he didn’t know he had ever set.

He tested one. The password unlocked an old email he hadn’t used in years. In it, he found an unsent message to someone named Emily.

Emily, he realized with a chill, was the name of a woman who had gone missing three years ago — a woman he faintly remembered from blurry party photos, someone he swore he’d only met once.

He started digging — news articles, missing persons reports, police archives. Her last known location?

Daniel’s old apartment.

The memory clawed its way back like a breath held underwater for too long.

The party. The fight. The mirror shattering in anger.

The blood.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, now uncovered. The reflection looked calm. Too calm.

“You did it,” Daniel whispered, trembling. “You hid it from me.”

The reflection tilted its head.

“You made me.”

Daniel backed away.

“No. I didn’t—”

The reflection moved first.

With a crack like thunder, the mirror shattered outward. Shards sprayed the floor, glittering like teeth.

The glass was empty.

Daniel turned slowly — and met himself, standing there, whole, alive, and smiling with cold familiarity.

The new Daniel whispered, “Time for you to rest.”

The police report would later say that Daniel Harper had a psychotic break. When they found him in the mirror-shattered apartment, he was sitting quietly, muttering to himself, blood on his hands.

They never found Emily’s body.

They also never noticed the faint outline in the new bathroom mirror — a man, silent, screaming, pressing his hands against the glass from the inside.