Speaker 1: I counter with a taste of metal in the slow,
disorienting knowledge of being watched. Fab tugs at my boots then,
and cold as breath, curling between the bases of the mirror,
pains like a living thing that remembers me by name.
The corridor's narrow mirrors, rising tall and close frames eaten
by rust and time in the air holds that particular sheen,
a sealed glass, a faint oz, and I cannot place.
For a moment. I think I have stumbled into some
abandoned carnival back lot. But the light is wrong here.
Tear intimate a teal cyanar in the edges, Everything in
a sickly halogen, punctuated by a red accent, like a wind.
Beneath the surface, film grain seems to hang in the air,
as if the world itself has been run through an
old projector and caught between frames. The first face to
look back is mine, and not mine. It watches with
patient hunger. It tilts its head in impossible fraction. I
still a smile that does not reach the mouth. When
I move, it moves a half beat up to me,
and yet it already knows the small fall crawling under
my ribs. It does not speak. The watching is worse.
There is a compulsion in that silence that draws me forward,
even though every instinct screams to back away, to flee
the corridor in its a keysing light. I do not flee.
My fingers trail along the glass, because that is what
I have always done. When I want to prove something
to myself, I reach for surface, to feel the coal
and know it is real. The mirrors do not only
reflect how I look, They assure the edges of me
I have shaved away in daylight, the thin scar along
my left eyebrow, burnished into a pale mat, the hollowing
at my temples that has been since the winter of
the thunder. My brass locket hangs from my neck, but
within the glass's face is claud At. The photograph inside
smeared as if with rain. Each reflection exaggerates a slight truth,
a blink that takes longer than it ought, a smile
that begins and never finds its way to warmth. Small
betrayals unravel across the panes, like cracks spreading from a
single impact. There is a rhythm to the corridor, a slow,
inevitable metronome of creaks in the hush of my breath.
I walk in the mirrors multiply me until I am many,
an army of false images, stacking like cards. Some of
them perform gestures I do not remember, making a hand
raise to the throat, and emotion that I recognize only
later's apology as shoulder folding in or towards some weight.
One reflection pauses, looks past me into the mirror space behind,
and the movement is not mine in any sensibility I own.
In the distance, a pain goes still, and then with
a casual cruelty, it tucks its head at an impossible
angle and taps an inside of its surface, as if
calling through a window to coax the truth out of me.
I test the glass because testing feels like control. My
fingers leave soft prints that linger like faint accusations, and
my oppress The pain shiverers, and a whisper of noise follows,
not quite wind, not quite the scrape of another life.
The reflections answered the press by exaggerating what I would
rather not examine. The locket becomes clouded. The silver band
on my index finger gleams with a strange, cold light.
One reflection permits me a blink, and in that fraction
I see the refusal look at me with an expression
that could be patients or plotting. It has seems to
move with all of its own, dark streaks catching the
rim light like oil or water. The refusal tilts its
head just so, and the fissures radiating from its mouth
make the smile hang longer than is comfortable. The corridor narrows,
and the mirrors arrange themselves as though to funnel me.
The floor hums underfoot, a low vibration that seems to
come from the glass itself. In some pains, the world
beyond iss intact and banal, a corridor, perhaps or a backlot.
In others, something older shows the appealing wallpaper, a child,
small hand prints set in a haze of dust. The
reflections begin to move independently, and the difference is not polite.
Some mirror people traced gestures. I do not recall, writing
memories on the inside surfaces. Others look beyond me, past
the mirrors, and into spaces that should not exist. In
the corridor, the beach at night, a hospital corridor with
humming lights, A small kitchen where a chair sits empty.
I pass a mirror that shows me older. A hollows
at the temple's deeper, hands trembling. I pass another where
the woman in the glass creams with atsan mouth opened
but silent, eyes wide and wet with a grief that
is not mine alone. One paint splits a breath later,
and from that fissure, something like a face tears free,
not the entire reflection, only in impression, the edge of
a mouth, a cheek, and for a dizzing second, I
watch a jagged shop pull away and hands suspended like
a free thought. Shards do not. They hold themselves up
in the air, arranged like the teeth of some great and
visible jaw. When the shape reasserts itself, it is different
than clear. Whatever lies between the glasses knows me intimately
and does not intend mercy. The realization arrives like cold rain.
The maze is not a place of escape. It is
a place of reckoning. The mirrors do not merely show
the faces. I keep this show the faces I refuse.
The refusal aligns more pains, so that the only path
forward runs directly under its watch. I feel my steps
measure preordained, as if the corridor has folded in on me.
The refusal ass smile lingers a hair line fisher runs
from cheek to jaw, and whether the crack is in
the glass or on the skin is something I cannot decide.
It phaps the glass again, and the sound is like
nails on bone filter through static. Its eyes hold a
faint signed low, the sort of cold light that makes
teeth seem too white and skin too thin. When I breathe,
the pain fogs around its mouth in a pattern that
looks like a name I have told myself I did
not know. Pressure grows behind the ribs. Sharp is a
keyed lock turning. It is a physical thing that compulsion
to stop running and to speak. The brass locket feels
heavy at my chest, a small, stubborn weight. I lift
at palms damp, and the chain trembles between my fingers.
Inside the glass of refusal watches me with a predatory calm,
patient and slow, as if unhurried by time. I hold
the locket to the surface, as if it might open
a doorway, as if the metal will make the world
aligne and let me pass. Memory is not single thing.
It comes as images that overlap and obscure the corridor
obliges by arranging flashes a rainy afternoon, the metallic scent
of hospitals at p cardor left open to the night.
I see the smallness of the moment that bent my life.
It is a private failure, not cinematic, intimate and sharp,
an absence allowed, a step not taken, a person left
behind because closing my own hands felt safer than holding
some one else. As small, fraid of life, I had
intended to come back, I did not. The confession appears
not as words, but as a physical shock, a crack
in the architecture of the corridor, And when it erads,
I cannot pretend ignorance any more. The refusal does not
triumph with thunder. It waits with pneumatic misogyny, as slow
a satisfaction in every micromotion. When the memory solidifies, when
the thing I have run from snaps into place, like
a fragile plate hitting stone, something answers. The glass responds
with a shadow that runs through the corridor mirror. Slachan
is a taking a long exhale, and nearby shards rearrange themselves,
falling three inches and then holding in new precaries. Constellations
for an instant, there is a kind of release. Trembling
in my hands eases, and the weight of the brass
locket shifts, as though some portion of it has been opened.
Relief and exposure sate together a better pair, but the
corridor does not open its doors. Confession is not the
same as freedom. The refusal smile grows, but there is
no gloating jubilation in it. Rather that steady, patient hunger
moss into something quieter and far more terrifying, the knowledge that,
now that the truth exists in the light, the maize
will move on to other things. It will not be
satisfied by this alone. My admission of a single since
shatter is a small architecture within the glass, but the
shape of me remains fractal and multiplicitous. There are rooms
I cannot yet see, corners where other faces wait, less forgiven.
In the one that forced this first surrender. In the
shadow passageway, some of my reflections soften. They look away
from their own images, as if shamed, as if they
do not quite recognize the person they show. The floora
takes on the texture of old film grain. It slightly warped.
My shadow stretches and splits between panes, their refusal received
to fraction its hands if it has hands pressed flat
to the inside of the glass, as if feeling for
a purchase. I want to believe that confession brought me something,
that the air will clear and a doorway will open
beyond the mirrors to a hallway of ordinary light. Instead,
I find a polished shard held like a talisman in
an alcove. The shar shows a corridor beyond it, empty
and patient for a harby. They see myself reflected twice
within the shard, one close face them with relief, another
faint and blurred, a second face looking back in a
way that feels strangely altered. It is not that the
maze denies my truth. It accepts it and folds it
into something larger. The confession has been recorded on the
skin of the glass and added to the ledge of
the maze keeps. A polished fragment is cool against my palm.
In its reflection, there is a face that is almost mine,
but slightly only an angle in a way the light
catches the corner of a smile deer started. The implication
is small and terrible. My admission has not undone the
thing inside it has reconfigured me into a new kind
of evidence. I press the shower to the dark and
sea again briefly. The inside of a kitchen, where a
chair sits with a damp ring on the seat. A
child's coloring book is open to a page with a
half finished drawing. The blue crayon pressed hard in a
corner like a plea. The shard is a lens that
favors small, intimate betrayals over heroic sins. It refuses grim
metaphors and insists on the texture of daily failure. Gelp
The may seems to say, is not an event, but
a material you can handle, in shape and store. The
corridorways mood rests in the way a tide retreats, only
to return with a different rhythm. My breathing finds a
sturdier pace, but the steadiness is brittle. I now forward,
because motion is the only defense I know. The mirrors
follow my trajectory, obediently, repeating and multiplying, a ligning and misaligning,
like a chorus that remembers only the harmonics of shame.
The refusal slips back into the ensemble, becoming at once
a part of the chorus. In a soloist, with an
accent that makes the words I do not speak sound loud.
I do not leave the maze. There is no no
triumphant exit, no fanfare. I carried the shod in my
palm as if it were a map and also a wound.
The reflections behind me changed suzzly with each step. Some
look often now, shadows eased, others sharpened, as if the
truth they offered has laid bare. Are the small falsehood
I have lived in. The corridor remains patient and unforgiving.
It will not close because it has a purpose not
satisfied by solitary confession. It wants continuity, not closure. It
wants me to keep looking, to keep seeing myself broken
in infinite small ways. At the edge of the corridor,
slimmer pane shows me standing alone. The woman in the glass,
less a hand as I do, impresses her pond to
the other side, A mirror of mind but not aligned,
often goes do not meet for a moment. I am
tempted to think this is mercy, a demonstration that distance
remains and that touch can be deferred. Then the refusal
appears within that same pain, its posture slightly exaggerated, the
fissure at its joe, catching a sliver of red light,
it smiles with the kind of smile that belongs to
someone who knows the entirety of a bikivone skimmed. I
understand then that my story is not one of simple repentance,
but of a longer reckoning that will continue to unfold
with patient cruelty. The polished shod goes into my pocket,
while the folk curls and the corridor's light flattens into
something like dusk. The smell of old perfume and metallic
grain lingers on my skin. My hands are empty of
the small comfort I had clung to before I came here,
but they are not empty of evidence. The maze has
not freed me. It has given me a clearer reflection
of what I am, and a curty carries a weight
that is both chastening and terrible. I walk deeper because
the maze is not satiated. It is an engine that
needs fuel, and my confessions have likely only begun to
feed it. When I find a place that seems like
he at a narrow corridor opening into a hall, I lift
the showd again for a moment. The face in its
reflection tilts and looks right at me. It is an
almost recognizable face, but the eyes have a new, distant sheen,
as if the woman in the shod has watched something
she cannot n see. The corridor's light dims, and the
sound of distant creeks becomes more pronounced thiket with memory.
The corridor closes back around me, like a closing fist.
My steps are echoed, but the echo is wrong, a
half beat delayed, and answer to a question I did
not mean to ask. The maze has taught me a
truth I cannot forget. Confession is not equal absolution. It
is a rearrangement of the self that leaves fresh edges
to bleed from. The refusal is patient, It will wait.
It will arrange the mirrors into new corridors, new rooms,
new shods that show the small betrayals and call them
by the names. The shod in my pocket warms with
the heat of my skin, and I know that whatever
I do next, the corridor will know about it and
hold it up to the light. The last thing I
see before falk thickens and sensation dims is that small,
distorted second face in the shad, and the certainty that
the corridor will not stop and tell I have shown
every hidden angle of myself. There is unresolved dread in
that knowledge, and yet a strange clarity to the maze
is merciless, but it is honest. It will not let
me hide behind performance. It forces me to meet the
geometry of myself, encount the fractures. I take one more step,
and the light leans in like a witness. I remember
the threshold like a bruise, too sharp to touch and
too familiar to deny. One instant I was breath, and
the next I stood between pains that went on and on,
each mirror, a pale accusation. The air tasted like cold
metal and all perfume. Fog licked the soles of my boots,
and the corridor held its breath, as if waiting for
me to begin. Something in the gloss shifted, not a
trick of light, but a deliberate, patient movement in a
face that wore my features, tilted its head and smiled
with a question I had not asked. The smile was
small and slow, like a hand unfurling from behind my spine,
and it set my skin to raw attention. At first,
I searched for logic, a trick of reflection, a loop
of mirrors reflecting mirrors. I churned a tight circle, ristacking
from the chain at my throat, trying to find the
scene where the trickery began. But logic unraveled in tight,
quiet poles. Each pain remembered ron, a handprint where no
one had laid up palm, a smudge of locket glass
in a place I had not touched, the echo of
a laugh that belonged to the corridor and not to me.
The maze did not simply reflect, It kept it gathered
small cruelties and folded them into their angles between frames.
In the first corridor, the mirrors were patient, as librarians,
cataloging with up mercy. My fingers trailed the glass because
my body sow purchase, because motions deaded the tidal noise
inside my skull. The glass was cold in winter, and
the princes that appeared beneath my touch were younger than memory.
As if the mirrors could record a tent and then
played them back with the tenderness I could not bear.
The reflex was mechanical of first the brass locket against
my sternum, like a talisman warm where it touched the skin,
the tiny hints that men private things were still private.
I cupped it because it was the only anchor I allowed,
although the chain was warm. With some other hands heaped
in the reflections, the maze made use of the hesitation.
Reflections diverged into small variations and eyebrow raised where minelay flat,
a shoulder too quick to turn. They showed me gestures
I did not remember making a shove. I turned back,
a polite smile that concealed a knife. Each fairy implanted
a seat of doubt. Perhaps memory was not a thing
I carried, but something the maze had planted in me.
Rootless and eager, walking felt like walking under watch. Shadows
pulled in corners and then resolved into faces are half new,
myself laughing at someone I could not name, my mouth
shaping a word I had never spoken aloud. The corridor
geometry conspired in slim ways. Mirrors tilted and made pathways
feel longer or shorter according to me. Downside alcoves, the
mirror separated like small islands. Here the difference between me
and my mirrord sells widened into acts. Our reflection held
a secretive glance, a man whose face had already slipped
into fog. Another smoothed ad dress after a small dishonor,
as if settling the folds of conscience. Some pains kept
still images that did not move with me, a stillness
that hummed like pause before a sentence is finished. One
window hosted a figure whose smile lingered too long, teeth
bared like a question mark. I could fill the refusal
watching from within that smile, patient, predatory, the kind of calm,
that taste of time and hunger. It did not need
to speak, It still lay was a sentence. I tried
to name things to myself, as a wait ster in
the panic. A corridor is a corridor, a reflection is lie.
Calling them names made them ordinary, an attempt to put
distance between what was happening and the person I thought
I was. The maze refused the ordinariness by answering with particulars.
Fingerprints trailed into smudges of locket glass, each mark a
whisper of a memory, air pressed under a heavy thumb.
Where once the exits had been clear, the power such
as narrowed, and the mirrors tilted their frames like doors,
closing my habit of trailing my fingers along the glass
became a liability. Each touch summoned another echo, another half
remembered cruelty that stitched itself into the mirrors. The maze
wanted me to move, but its motion bent toward, forcing
me to stand there. Felt corporeal here, as if I
were breathing through cloth. The passages tightened until they were
nearly lungs. Mirrors tilted inward, and the angles multiplied like teeth.
Always that had seemed navigable collapsed into implausible corridors. I
reached for wayfending and found only misdirection. The refusal anticipated
my turns with the calm born of knowing the shape
of my failures. It foreshortened my steps and lengthened my breaths.
Panic rose, I could tide. The echo of my footsteps
churned into a drumbeat that matched a tightening in my chest.
The light hummed of frequency I could feel in my molos.
I could not outrun the feeling that the maze wanted
me to be stilled, to stand before in a cracked
pain and allow its pressure to be done until I
admitted something I had spent my life burying in one pane.
The glass fogged and faded into a small domestic scene,
the coroner of table, a hand slipping into a pocket,
the gentle, almost ceremonial removal of the thing that did
not belong to me. The mirror brass of the locket
reflected a memory snap my hand ease into someone else's pocket,
a coin exchanged, a hush offered where noise should have been.
It was smaller than an action and heavier than a confession.
I had never told any one about the way my
fingers had been quick with intent, about how the economy
of small favors and with hell truce can become a currency.
The maze took that hesitation and displayed it not as
a failing, but as an architecture, the way my habits
had been arranged to make certain things easier to do
than to resist. At the central rotten of the air
changed from coal to still a cold, as if sound
itself had been sealed and then broken. The room was circular,
and the mirrors here moved in concert, a chorus of
slight differences, forming a vocabulary of my misdeeds, a reflection
at the heart of that circular room, leaning from inside
his pain and cracked the glass outward, not with violence,
but with deliberate flowering pressure. Shards did not scatter, their
froze like teeth in mid bite. In the fractured reflection,
I saw something that did not belong on my face,
a fragment of memory, laid out like a photograph. It
was a betrayal in miniature, an exchange of glances, the
slip of a hand, a decision made in the margin
of a day. The image passed too quickly to be clean,
but slow enough to stay. The mirrors were no longer
passive collectors. They could pry and show. Like some one
who knows the name you refused to speak, impresses it
to your mouth and tell you taste it. I wanted
to wrench the locket off, to throw it into a
pull and let it sink. But I found a brass
heavier for being in motion, and light of for suddenly
being not alone. The refusal watched me from every crooked angle,
a study of a predatory corm, its smile widening with
the measured patients of something that intends to keep demonstrating
rather than explaining. It did not shut its meaning. It
peered the layers of me like paper, and displayed each
one in reverse. I wanted to stump the pains, to
silence them, to shatter the display, and be left of
the messy, manageable silence of aftermath. Instead, the mirrors returned
everything with a clarity that felt surgical. They were not
accusations so much as a mirror seto obeys scalpel, precise, inevitable.
Some reflections were grotesquely tender. A mirror held a sequence
of gestures like an old home movie. The way my
thumb out the corner of a photograph, the way adjusted
my coat to conceal the swell of my guilt, the
minicommace of a glance that said, I will not name
this in another pay My face was smooth, composed, nothing,
polite condolences to a person I had wronged, without the
courage to rectify those silent agreements, The polite lies, the
small evasions that let me sleep, mounted into a gallery.
Each recollection was a shod, sharp and precise, and together
they made a portrait. I had avoid its sketching for years.
I realized, with a slow submying dread, that the maze
did not only keep those things, it learned them from
me and then taught them back as lessons in a
language I had forgotten how to speak. The refusals patience
turned almost clinical as it held each memory up in ten,
waiting for recognition, waiting for the naming. It was the
kind of insistence that erodees resistance, like water on stone.
Naming felt like an invasion and a relief simultaneously. To
speak would be to fracture the image. To keep silent
would be to let the glass continue to manifest every
half truth until it to vured the edges of me.
The gallery narrowed further, until the corridor felt like a throat.
Mirrors leaned and and their frames breathed. Movement grew deliberate,
a measure camera like slices of attention, focused on small,
intimate things away. My index finger traced the hell and
scarlaw my eyebrow, the way my shoulders hunched against memory.
The refusal anticipated me, still, tilting its head of fraction
earlier than I did, tap in the inside of its
pain like a metronome. It shaped the labyrinth like an
author shapes of paragraph, each turn designed to fold me
back toward confession. Panic, when it came was sharp and fast.
My breathitch hands tremble, but they may softened that panica
to edge into slow, unbearable clarity. I had run before,
from people, from places, from versions of myself that did
not fit the narrative I liked to tell. Running teaches
you certain economies speed over reflection, distance over reckoning. The
maze would not let that economy stand pass, folded back
with the administrative meatness, until every flight led to a
doorway that showed another small theft and other omission. I
found myself watching my own face make excuses I had
rehearsed in rooms with locked doors. The mirrors did not
need to speak to name the reason I had kept
the secret. Their muteness was loud enough. The dually, I
was quarreled before a pin that held nothing but my face.
Polish unfloored, an impossible perfectness that made my stomach drop.
The refusaline through the fishes, like a thing testing the water.
Hairline cracks bided from its mouth and crawled across its cheek.
It tilted its head and an angle my neck could
not take. Him met my look with the stair of
some one who had been waiting for long nights. There
was no room left for evasion. The maze had closed
every other possibility. I could turn my back in the
doorways and run until my lungs burned, but the reflections
would fold any path back upon themselves, until I had
nowhere to go but to the flat, unflinching surface and
the eyes behind it that knew everything. The force stillness
became an arena of memories. Images opened and shut like
the blinking of a tired puppet. Small betrayals, private cruelties,
the silent agreements that make one complicit. I tasted old
apologies in the air in a metallic tone of fear.
In a glass. I saw a version of myself reach
into a pocket and draw out a piece of someone
else's drest. I saw a hand let goat wereholding might
have matted a small concession, and EASi rode taken so
as not to be inconveniently brave. Each recollection carried it
so incise odor of consequence, the soreness of all withheld
compliment that would have rebuilt a day, the dry warmth
of a moment I stole to myself at someone else's expense.
Each more private thing I gilded into being a not happening,
cracked under the weight of being observed. There was a
silent choreography to the way the maze revealed things. It
liked to begin with the minor cruelties, because those were
the ones most easy to rationalize. A lifted coin the
smith led a decision that felt merciful in the narrow moment,
yet hypocritical in the lung arc Then it graduated to
the patterns. My reflections did not simply show actions, They
revealed habits. In one pain, the maze bordered on tenderness,
as it showed the ire by irons stitching that made
me who I was, how often I chose comfort over courage,
how often I looked away. It was infuriatingly accurate in
its smallness. When the fishes around the mouf crawled open
to a mute suggestion of sound, I realized then that
the maze had not been about escape at all. It
had been about denuding me of the illusions that let
me call myself innocent. The refusal did not hunger for
admission as much as it hunger for acknowledgment. To confess
was not merely to admit, but to release the shape
of that action from the way it had shrunk inside me.
The space inside the chest where gilt had been folded
and layered would not be a sharp afterward. The edge
is que dull. I felt both the terror and the
relief of that possibility. I did not step forward, but
I could not step away. A memory of what I
had done and coiled itself. A hand moved quick and
intention narrowed by self preservation. A small theft of dignity
performed because it was easier than being brave. The image
broke me open in increments, each shod. The refusal held
up was a small private thing I had gilded into
being and not happening. It had been easier to say
nothing and let the weight settle, like find dust in
the corners of my life. Now the dust stirred, and
the mirror showed it in the daylight. I found my voice,
not as one complete admission, but as a series of concessions.
Words came like loose change Naine's partial apologies, descriptions that
made the recollection breathe with an honesty. I had avoided
saying them aloud, and that sealed place did not cause
thunder or punishment. It altered the quality of the air.
The perfect pain dulled instead of exploding. The fissures around
its mouth took in the sound like a throat's wallowing.
I had not counted on the subtlety of being heard.
The refusal did not exalt it may notes. Its patient
appetite seemed less rapacious for the moment, as if a
cattalogged a new item and marked at as processed. Afterward,
there was an oddness to motion. I walked past a
shad and kept only an echo of my face. It
was dimmer, like a photograph feeded by sun. I had
not said the full thing aloud. Not everything that looked
back at me had been named. But the act of
standing beneath that a crack Paine had altered the mazesqu grammar.
The corridor was slackened a degree in my shoulders, which
had been wan too tight for too long, and furled
a fraction. My steps felt a how different, not lighter,
so much as less liable to rickshe The maze did
not relent entirely. It had become something quieter and more patient,
like a room left coal. The eggsit glimmered and certainly ahead,
But the way out felt not like release, but a
temporary reprieve. The Refusal's presence had shifted, less openly predatory,
more studious, now, as if catalog in what I had
given and what remained and read. My hands smelled of
cold glass and old perfume. The locket around my throat
felt lighter and heavier at once, lighter because a tiny
hinch had been opened, Heavier because whatever had been locked
inside was now in motion. And after image of guilp
followed me like an animal kept on a leash, close, restless,
impossible to ignore. The maze had not forgiven me, It
had only altered its tactics. There would be other pains,
other shards, holding fragments of days I had misplaced or dismissed.
The corridor's whisper was not a promise of freedom, but
a demand for completion. I imagined the refusal behind a hundred paines,
patient as a tide, waiting not for my death but
for the sound of my own accurate naming. As I
moved toward the faint light of a possible exit, each
step became an exercise in attention. The fog at my
ankles curled and fell away in pale ribbons. The mirrors
re arranged themselves around me, like pages turning in a
bookau was both reading and writing. In the last pain,
I passed my hand across the glass and left a
print that did not immediately fade. The reflexive gesture felt
like a pact. I would not run any longer from
each small truth that had been piling up in the
angles of my life. Leaving that smudge was not a
deiclary of innocence, but a small, defiant marking I have
been here, I will return, I will speak. The corridor
exailed around me, unresolved and patient. The maze keeps its
watch until the truth is finally named. For now, I
carried the after image like a map and acknowledge that
the refusal would return to the corners of every mirror,
waiting with the same patient appetite until the confession was complete.
I did not step through into some sudden absolution. I
stepped into a corridor that felt marginally less cold, clutching
a locket that had begun to swing on its chain,
and an acknowledgment that some things must be said, not
to be punished, but to stop being instruments of my
own undoing. Outside, the light would be ordinary, and the
world would proceed in its own careless supply of the
corridor remembers the shape of my hesitation. Before I do,
my boots sink into a thin oarli fog that cells
around my ankles like a memory, reluctant to leave. Light
is neither day nor night. Here it is a teal
sn that breeze cold against the skin, and a thin
red rim that cuts like a warning. Mirrors rise on
both sides, taller their person, stitch together with old frames
in your cracks, each pain keeping a place reserved from me.
The entry smells of wet metal and old perfume, a
tang that belongs to a lock room, and rain that
has not fallen in years. I know this place because
I left it once. I remember, thinking I had stepped
up for good. The memory of departure is as magic
refuses to hold. I do remember the locket at my throat,
a small brusting I have had longer than I can name,
warm against a hollow I keep private fingers find it
now without thought, the chain of familiar way. It shines
briefly in the corridor strange light, and the shine is
answered by the glass. I handprint appears when unexisted before, pale,
fresh as if a palm had just slammed into the
surface to stop some one on the other side. The
print is not mine. My palms are narrower, scard along
the left eyebrow, a line like a penstroke on's gain
print raises a question too heavy to voice. What followed
me in the mirrors do not wait for answers. The rearranges.
I watch angles subtly shifting the path that was straight,
bending inward. A door were closing. When the eye turns away,
I should backtrack, should trust the rub away. But compulsion
is a current here. It insistently drags me forward. Each
step is a promise to avoid the faces that will
greet me. The first ruffle action I passed does not
quite match my movement. It lacks a fraction, a delay
that leaves a ghostly recidue between intention and image. I
feel foolish and weightless at once, like a hand reaching
for a familiar handle and closing on empty air. They
do not merely mirror. They remember a face in A
shark takes through a private film, the box kitchen, a
throne smiled that was really a shutter closing, the metallic
clang of a pan. Another pain replays the way a
door was left unlocked, and an absence made audible by
the click of hinges that should not have moved. The
images are intimate and petty and cruel, small cruelties and
hushings that I buried like broken glass. Each replay is
an accusation because the frames sure not just what happened,
but the distance I put between those moments and accountability.
I keep my eyes low, my fingers trail along the
cool finish of the glass because the gesture is a
tether to something real. The touch makes the ear taste
of ozone and olvrot. Reflections shift to meet my palm
with the softest of practice mocking. A reflected hand taps
the inside of the pain is of testing for weakness
explos or in the room from the wrong side of
the world. One reflection smiles a smile too slow, in patient,
and fissures radiate from its mouth like a contagion. The
mouth in the glass seems to be a map of
the things I have not named. The brass socket becomes
a metronome like catches its edge and casts a narrow
beam that carves a memory out of the mirror surfaces.
For a moment, the maze is not maze, but theater
pains framing a pivotal iron. In one continuous reel, there
I am a small argument in a camped hallway. My
reflection in a window obsorbing my hand as I closed
it around a door an inch too late. The locket's
light makes the memory of it. The colors colder, the
red in the scene a tiny bright's mirror, like dried paint.
The memory is not loud, it is precise. I did
something then that I have told myself was an accident,
an omission that would never demand payment. The corridor insists
it was not an accident. Of all fast sloop corridors
split and then stitch themselves back together Behind me, mirrors
anticipate my steps or delay them, rendering a round into
a puzzle that fallds inward. A passag I had becomes two,
then three. A seam in the glass lines up with
a shadow, and I turned to find the way I
came swallowed by another reflection. The maze requires that I
toffront not only what I had, but how I spent
my time hiding it. Each Dieter reveals a scene ANNs
I smithed away from a child's shoulder instead of holding tight,
A call ignored until silence hardened into consequence. A face
that deserves naming that I never learned to say aloud.
There is a reflection that will not be heard. It
is always a breath behind, or sometimes faster. It tilts
its head in impossible ways, lining its eyes up with mine,
and choosing to hold when others flit and replay. This
reflection presses his pomp flat to the inside of the glass,
and the glass presses back like an ant of prayer.
Fisher striad up word from its mouth, delicate and precise,
as though the reflection were stitching the air into something else. Annette,
a trap, a ledger. The refusal watches with an appetite
that is surgical. It is not content with showing what happened.
It wants the formula, the admission that will make the
image stop looking back. I run then, because the nursia
says moved before the glass can turn to another face,
and because of movement, I think they may be safety.
But move my is punished. Mirror split the steps so
that my footfall arrives later in one Paine and early
in another. The corridor distorts rhythm into stagger of time.
A familiar alcohol becomes a whole shards that cough out
images the lockets slipping from my fingers one night, a
single stupid clinkers at hit wood, and the weight of
the thing afterwards, the knowledge that secret can sit like
a small stone in your chest and never dissolve. The
refusal rides the periphery of every piece of glass until
it is no longer peripheral. It knows the exact trembole
of metroof When it finally stands center, its posture exaggerated.
It is a warped twin, a mirror, warned in by
having performed my life too often. It wears my coat,
but frayed at the collar. The blouse is stained in
a place only I know is still tender. Its eyes
have a faint cyn flare that suggests not warmth, but
the logic of a machine determined to complete a task.
The fissure at its mouth widens when it smiles. The
glass at that point seems to remember my voice and
then hush it faster than I could have managed myself.
There is a doorway that is both threshold and verted.
The refusal taps a rhythm on the inside of the pane,
and the sound as metallic and clean, like the hinge
of a prison gate. I plant my back against a
mirror and find the reflection on the other side already
planted on me. There is no room left to move,
only the slim peel between my face and the waxen version.
The glass holds. The locket throbs like a second heartbeat.
I feel as tiny warmth and cold once. It is
a measure of the line between confession and capture. The
choice is physical. It is not framed as noble. The
refusal does not demand theatrical contrition. It demands the syllable
that recalibrates the maze. It will not let me pass
until I confess the truth. It in borders. My memory
is stubbornly partial. I can in the edges a night
rain on the windshield some one left on the other
side of a door. I can recall the clink of
the locket against wood, and the subtle shift when I
turned away. But naming the darning detail of the deliberate gesture,
of the deliberate neglect of cosmore than I let myself calculate,
is like terring a seam in my own skin. Every
fiber resists. I find speaking to be an act of
force rather than grace. My lips open, and the sound
that comes is thin and raw, not a conversation but
an its bullot. I confess without theater, listing the small
movements that added up into rome. There is no thunderclap
of absolution. The refusal tilts its face as if tasting
what I offer. For a moment, I imagine the glass up, sobbing,
the words like rain into stone, and the maze softening
and gratitude. The pains around me grow stale, images freeze
amid action, like a film stock that has been stopped
for the first time. In the maze, something quiets, but
stillness is not surrender. Shods. I had not looked at shift,
and a hellline crack travels across a pane, not from
the refusal's mouth, but from the edges of a reflection.
I thought, inert it is a tiny, bright betrayal. My
admission settles like dust and reveals that confession was partial.
Some truths are palliative, others are incisions. The reflections that
fault to fall into fragile calm, but fissures map themselves elsewhere,
indicating cost. The maze accepts the tribute, yet keeps totally.
There is at the end one narrow shod that gleams
with the surface and marred by crack. It holds a
parallel corridor, an empty distance that suggests and eggsit. The
shard is small enough that when I raise it, it trembles
in my palm, like a life not fully left in
its polishing. Other face hovers not quite mine, an echo
a second possibility. I step toward the opening of frames
out beyond is not free, but thinner, like breath exhaled
after running the refusal s. Smile remains magnified, impatient, reflected
every pain along the way. I stepped through the shod,
and the corridor rearranges itself into something less literal and
more domestic. The fog receeats to ankle level, a teal
light grows muted, and the red accent become only flex.
Even as I move, the sense of being partially umber
and warps into a new weight. The locket is heavier now.
My skin remembers its scar beneath the left eyebrow, and
how it aches at the memory of the night. The
maze has not let me go free of consequence. It
has translated debt into a new ledger and handed it
back in the hollow between rips. Outside the shod, the
corridor errows to point whe light and shadow meat in
a balance that does not feel reconcile. The exit is
not an end, but an intermission. I carry the locket
like a seed of knowledge. I can still feel the
refusal in the static of mirrors. When I glance back,
and unresolved smile low the corner of my vision, The
corridor shifts a final, quite rearrangement that suggests the maze's
patient and industrious. It will wait for the next time
I try to convince myself a thing can be buried
by silence. I leave with partial answers and a new
appetite for truth. The labyrinth has taught me procedural honesty
rather than absolution. Outside our taste of rain that media fall,
the city keeps moving in oblivious rotations. I fold the
locket into my palm and listen in the distance. The
hollow echo of Lotter two human, two layered, carries like
a wind that does not wholly die. I imagine the
refusal still at its glass, pomp pressed to the inside,
counting all the unnamed things its surfaces have devied. The
exit is a narrow promise in a broader warning. There
will be more nights. When I touched the brass, and
remember I did not leave everything behind, I will wake
with impressions that feel like glass does to my mouth.
I will find myself checking doors I have locked, mending
small cracks in a routine that refuses grand axe. The
maze taught me confession as a craft, partial, costly, relentless.
Its final gift is of vigilance that will not let
me sleep easy. The corridor recedes into the rear of
a memory I both own and continue to owe. The
official remains to quiet, credit to behind glass that observes
the life. A step into the shame, and the relief
co exists, braided like the chain of the locket. I
move forward with them, Beware that the nightmare will return
in some other form, should I again try to substitute
silence for repair. The Hahollway of Mirrors did not punish
me with spectacle. It demanded an accounting. I paid as
much as I could and left or in the rest.
Outside light is ordinary and imperfect. Rain might begin. If
it does, it will pick up the thin scabs of
all the small cruel acts. I have cataloged the laughter
I heard in the corridor. Lay it metallic. Patient follows
me as memory follows conscience. It is an echo that
refuses to be entirely muffled. Each time it comes. It
reminds me that admission is never a single transaction. It
is a habit. I walk into what passes from my
life now, paying attention to the way my hands move
and the way a closed doors. The mace taught me
that confession can open doors when it is given plainly,
but that some doors will require more than speech. They
will require repair and labor. In time. I carer is
shard of the corridor with me. Sometimes I catch my
reflection in a shop window and flinch at the way
it waits. Sometimes I place the locket against a pocket
and feel it small and quite weight. The refusal smile
is a ghost that has made an unlikely home in
the corners of my days. I do not pretend it
is absent. I do not pretend I am whole. I
am at best trying to be honest with the breaks,
and that is the narrowest and most honest thing I
can offer. The maze retreats in distoed memory, like a
closed door that still hums. The corridor will open again
if I ever think silence will suffice, and when it does,
I will return differently, not to flee, but to answer.
The end of this chapter is not an end to
the requirement. I leave the mirrors behind with the knowledge
that the debt will call again. The corridors exit is
a thin mercy, partial relief for palpable warning. I step
into ordinary air, where the echo of laughter braided into
the background of my days. I have confessed as far
as I could, and confession I have learned is only
the beginning of repair. In the small quiet after the maze,
I keep my hand near the brass locket, as if
to comfort a heart that will not stop keeping score.
The corridor closes like a book with one on page
left and turned. That page is a promise I cannot
yet keep, And so the nightmare persists as a companion
and a teacher.