Broken Mirror Challenge Winners

What makes a mirror so primed for horror? What is it about looking at ourselves that is so discomfiting? As humans, we contain so much beneath the surface and yet we are made to contain it all, pretty much always. And so, we have our faces, our bodies, what we present to the world, but that's just the surface, that's not really what's going on. All of the real stuff, the thoughts, the desires, the lies, the truths, they need to be let out, actively, brought up to our mouths, spoken, shown off. We need to bring our insides out.

But the strange thing is, no matter how much we speak, how much we share, there is always more, always another thought, another impulse that we won't share, can't share, because it's too much a part of us. It cannot be shown because it's simply not made for showing, for telling, for sharing. And so, even the most extroverted of us walk around with such a rich, deep, shadowy inner life that when we look at our face in the mirror, it's no wonder we see the fraud. Is that really me, this visage, this skin and teeth and eyes? Or is me something else entirely? Is me my thoughts? Is me what I don't tell people?

Surely it started long before mirrors, in the reflection of water, so beautiful, so easy to drown in.

Our reflections show us exactly what we want to see but also what we don't. That's what makes them so damn terrifying and so perfect for a horror Challenge.

Here are the Grand Prize and Second Place winners of the Broken Mirror Challenge. You can check out the full list of winners HERE.

$1,000 Grand Prize Winner

Amelia Moore for The River Styx

But I get the sense now, wandering around the town, that none of them knows what to do with the leftover parent who lingers behind.

It's difficult to write a story where the reader feels like they are losing their mind along with the protagonist. The River Styx delivered beautifully on the Challenge prompt, giving us a character who, at first, seems lonely and sad, just as any other man who lost his wife and son may feel. But, there are small moments within the story that unsettle us. He asks the mirror to show him images of his dead child, and it does! The author doesn't choose to address whether this is a magic mirror, an iMirror, or a cursed mirror. At least not immediately. And it is with this bit of tilting that we are then slowly drowned in a world of dreams and demons and hidden messages.

We loved this story because it left so much unanswered. The demon/tax collector/small man hints at the wife's infidelity, at her suicide, or was it a murder? And suddenly, we are on a cliff, really, there, but it is also a dream, but there are consequences. This is the stew of good horror, the literary, story stuff that leaves you sticky with belief, sucked into the story, parts of it staying on you long after it's over. Congratulations, Amelia Moore!

$250 Second Place Winner

Bridget Couture for Posthumous

Yoo hoists his gun high and begins leading me through the dark house. Our steps send squeals through the wooden planks, the limited quarters turning their echoes into a loop.

Rather than build to an eerie displacement of reality, this story brilliantly begins with a wracking, painful sense of confusion. In a sort of leitmotif, the protagonist, a police officer, the one we as a society (sometimes) look to for clarity, for closure, constantly reminds us of his distorted reality, that he is just so damn sure he's been in this house before, checked the rooms, seen the dead family...

We are given fragments of thought, messages scrawled on walls, universal truths, and yet, they are almost indistinguishable from one another. It is all a muddle and as readers we hold on, waiting for the truth.

And then it sets in, about two thirds through the story. We know what is happening but that's okay, the eeriness of it all means that the surprise isn't what this story is about. It's about justice and reality and what we see in a badge. Congratulations, Bridget Couture!

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