Speaker 1: My mom's flight was at six a m. And she
was already running late. I was half asleep in the
passenger seat with a backpack crammed between my knees. She
sped down the dark back roads like the sky was
on fire. Her phone kept buzzing with worky mouths lighting
up the dash. She didn't even glance at them. Just
a couple of nights. She said, for the third time,
more to herself than me. I'll be back Monday. Be
good for Grandma. O kay, I grunted. I was sixteen,
not exactly in need of a babysitter, but apparently Grandma insisted.
She said he was important that she misses you. Her
fingers tightened on the wheel, and honestly, I didn't have
a lot of other options. That last part rang truer.
Since the divorce, it had just been the two of us,
Mom juggling two jobs and a thousand stress headaches. Grandma's
place had always been the fall back, quiet, old out
in the sticks. My biggest gripe was no Wi Fi,
just trees and the sound of wind that never quite
felt like wind. We pulled into the gravel driveway just
after dusk. The porch like buzzed above the steps, flickering
once like it always did. Grandma's house hadn't changed from
the outside. It had the same old wooden siding. The
paint faded to a memory of blue. The wind chimes
clinked on a breeze that didn't touch the trees. Mom
sat in the car a moment longer than usual. She's
been acting a little different lately, she said, not looking
at me. Probably nothing, just humorer. Okay. I raised an eyebrow,
like dementia different or eminent death different. My mother gave
me a sour look. Be nice, was all she said.
We didn't bring much, just a backpack with clothes, my toothbrush,
and my charger. When Grandma entered the door in a
usual house slippers, cardigan, and her hair in a loose bun.
She hugged me tight and smelled like mothballs and lavender,
as expected. But when I stepped into the living room,
something felt wrong. I couldn't place it. At first. The
furniture was all where it belonged, though maybe shifted slightly,
like someone had tried to memorize the layout but got
a few inches wrong. Then I saw the wall above
the fireplace was a square outline paler than the surrounding paint.
The mark something leaves after hanging in one spot for years.
Weird but not alarming. When sitting down to eat, I
went to get some cutlery. The kitchen had plastic forks
in the drawer, no spoons. Anything metal was gone. Even
the sink forest was wrapped in tape, dulling the shine.
The knob on the cabinets had been replaced with these
strange wooden ones, screwed and crooked. I asked if she
needed help finding a fors. She just looked at me
like I was speaking of foreign language. These work fine,
she said, handing me a bent plastic spark. I waited
for her to laugh or smile some kind of joke,
but she just went on preparing tea, humming tunelessly under
her breath, like this was a normal behavior over a
quiet meal. Dinner was edible, something gray with peas in it,
not the usual home cooked meal made with love. She
asked me questions about school, but kept forgetting the answers
I'd just given. She called me by my uncle's name once,
even though he'd been dead for years. I led it slide.
I figured she was just getting old or tired. But
that night, after brushing my teeth, I looked up, expecting
to see myself in the bathroom mirror, except there wasn't one.
A wooden board had been nailed over it, cleanly cut
to fit the frame, smooth and sanded, no sign of damage.
It stared back at me, flat and blank, as if
daring me to ask questions, and I did, just not
out loud, not yet. I woke up early the next morning,
the way you do in a house that isn't yours,
disoriented automatically, trying to figure out where the creaky spots
and the floor are so you don't wake anyone. The
sun was just barely leaking in through the blinds, casting
a sickly yellow tint over everything. I wondered the house
a little, half out of boredom, half looking for breakfast.
After that mission proved fruitless, I flopped on the old
living room couch, flicking through my phone, trying to ignore
the growing knees in my chest. I thought about taking
a selfie, just to send a mom proof of life,
but I didn't. I just couldn't bring myself to like
I'd be lying if I said things were all right. Instead,
I tried to entertain myself with whatever I'd saved in
my camera roll, since all the apps were just spinning
circles without Internet. My brain must have been numbing from boredom,
because when I rolled over, my phone slipped from my hand.
It bounced on the soft carpet and slid partly under
the couch. I lay down to try catch's edge in
the gap, hoping my fingers would be thin enough to
slide it out, but I ended up just pushing it
further in each time I tried. I didn't want to
move the whole thing, so I found a long, thin
stick to sweep under and scoop it out. However, alongside
my phone, a penny and a few odd pieces of
stale popcorn popped out. I pulled out a small shard
of something curved and dusty. It was the corner of
a smashed mirror. The reflection in it was warped and smeared.
It must have slid under there when the living room
mirror was removed and stayed hidden. But I could see
myself in the reflection, and just for a split second,
I thought I saw something else behind me too, something
standing in the hallway, But When I looked up, the
hallway was empty. I decided to hide the shard just
in case. That afternoon she made lunch, if you could
call it that. It was a bowl of pale broth,
thin and gray, like something strained from boiled bones. The
meat floating in it looked pink in place, as it
shouldn't be. I poked it with a spark and asked
what it was. She just smiled and said that you should.
I didn't push, just pretended to eat and flushed most
of it when she wasn't locking. The rest of the
day passed slowly quiet. I tried texting Mom, but she
didn't answer, probably busy. Still, I caught myself checking every
Fifteen minutes later, we sat together in the den. The
TV was still covered, and when I asked if we
could watch something, Grandma just shook her head. Oh, Jerry,
I thought you hated television. She said, Jerry, it's not
my name. That was my father. I blinked, you mean me,
I'm not. She tilted her head. Of course, of course
you're not. Her eyes stayed on me too long after that,
like she was trying to remember something she never really knew.
That night, at dinner, she said. Mom had just been
by yesterday, dropped off a basket, she told me, motioning
toward a countertop that was very obviously empty. You didn't
see her. I didn't say anything, just nodded and looked
at the dry tile where the basket definitely hadn't been,
not to mention the fact that my mom had flown away.
She couldn't just drop by. I started watching her more carefully,
noticed the way she shuffled down hallways, like she was
tracing steps she'd memorized. It was around eleven PM when
I finally turned in. I locked my door, just being cautious,
That's what I told myself. But at some point I
woke up where you're still mostly in a dream, but
I heard something breathing right outside my door. It was
steady and slow, like someone waiting. I didn't move. The
sound stayed for a long time. Then the floor creaked
once and it was gone. I slid the cracked mirrorchard
from where I hid it, wrapped it in a shirt,
tucked it under my bed. I waited until she was asleep,
At least I hoped she was asleep. I crept through
the house with a mirror chard hidden in my sleeve,
careful not to let it catch too much light. Every
floorboard grown louder than I remembered, and every shadow stretched
too long. When I moved, the living room was first.
I stood in the center and slowly tilted the shard
to glance over my shoulder. The air shifted in the shard.
The room locked wrong, same layout, same furniture, but it
was like someone had re drawn it from memory badly.
The angles didn't add up. The wallpaper curled in ways
that defied gravity. The ceiling van hung limp, unmoving, even
though I could feel it turning above me. No sound
came through the glass, like the reflection was holding its breath.
In the dining room, the chairs were all facing the
wrong direction. I spilled glass of water, sat frozen mid
splash on the table. The windows were smeared with something dark.
I kept moving, checking each space, quick glances into the shard.
As I moved. The hallway was narrower in the reflection,
lined with doors that weren't there before, stacked and stacked,
and stacked, some of them slightly, Ajar. I never dared
to look too long at any of them, unsure of
how I'd even do so. In the upstairs guest room.
The reflection showed all the toys in the closet turned
toward the door, as if waiting. The bathroom had no mirror,
of course, but in the shard the wall where the
mirror used to be bled light from behind the wood,
as if it was straining to come through. The entire time,
I moved quietly, listening for her, But the house was
dead silent. That only made it worse. There was only
one place I hadn't checked, the base. Grandma never went
down there. The door was always locked, and the key,
a rusted, old skeleton key, hung above the fridge. I
waited until I was sure I wouldn't be heard, then
slid it free. The door creaked louder than anything else
in the house. I winced, waited nothing. I opened it
and slipped down into the dark. The basement was cold,
it smelled like wet wood and mildew. But more than that,
it fell off in a way the rest of the
house hadn't wrong in the way it felt arranged, very
similar to the oddities I saw in the reflections around
this house, but now I was standing in it. There
was a wooden chair in the center of the room,
with nothing else around it, just the chair and frayed
ropes still wrapped loosely around the arms and legs. Deep
grooves scratched into the floor beneath it, like some one
had been struggling recently. But in the mirrorchard an ordinary
looking basement. Boxes were stacked neatly along the walls. The
paint wasn't peeling. It was a quiet, normal basement, a
version of the room that should have been. I pulled
the shower down and looked again, still the same rotted room.
The reflections had all been twisted versions of my world,
for the basement was the only one where the reflection
looked real like this version of the basement, the one
I was standing in, was the fake. I stuffed the
Mirrorschard into my pocket and quietly made my way to
the front door. I didn't even bother with my shoes,
just wanted air space, a normal tree, something that didn't
twist when I wasn't looking at it. I gripped the handle,
turned it and nothing. It wasn't locked. The mechanism clicked normally,
but the door wouldn't move, like something was holding it
shot from the outside. It didn't even rattle when shaken,
I looked out the side window. The world beyond the
glass rippled faintly but unmistakably, like heat haze, only thicker.
The tree trunks shimmered, warping at their edges. The leaves
fluttered in loops that didn't match the wind. I couldn't feel.
It looked exactly like the house did in the mirror. Shard.
I pressed my forehead to the glass and looked up.
The sky was wrung too, slightly off collar, like it
had been painted just the shade too gray, and the
clouds had forgotten how to move. I realized I hadn't
heard a single bird, no passing cars, no wind, just
the house and her. Grandma had started humming again. She
was in the kitchen, standing with her back to me.
I hadn't heard her wake up. She was stirring something
that smelled like burnt honey and rust. The song was
slow and broken, half melody, half moan, a tune that
worms into your head and makes your teeth itch. She
didn't move like she had the other day. Her limbs
were stiff, swinging wide like a puppet trying to remember
how to walk. Her feet dragged, scoffing hard against the floorboards.
The back of her neck twitched every few seconds, like
she was suppressing a shudder. She hadn't asked me how
I slept, hadn't asked if I was hungry. It was
like she didn't need the act anymore. She knew I
was stuck, So now it was letting the mask slip,
letting me see the wrongness that had been growing the
whole time. I backed away, slowly, careful not to draw
her attention. Whatever that thing was in the kitchen, it
wasn't my grandmother. I went back to the basement as
quietly as I could, because I couldn't stop thinking about
what I'd seen. Every other room in the house twisted
in the shud of reflection. The basement was the only
place that felt like an opposite to me. This meant something,
I hoped the finest solution, or at the very least answers.
Just standing at the top of the basement stairs made
my stomach clench. I crept down slowly, one hand gripping
the rail, the other wrapped tightly around the mirror shard.
When I reached the bottom, the air hit me and
it was worse, damp and metallic. The chair was still
there in the center of the room, empty ropes hanging
off the arms like wilted vines. I stood there for
a long moment, steadying myself, then lifted the mirror shard
and angled it toward the chair. My breath fogged the glass.
Within the normal looking basement, in the reflection, a woman
sat tied to the chair. Her hair was a little
shorter than I remembered, her face thinner, but there was
no mistaking her. It was my grandmother, the real one.
She wasn't screaming, or if she was, the shawher didn't
carry sound. Her head drooped forward, like she'd exhausted herself
hours ago. But when I stepped closer, she lifted her face.
Her eyes locked on mine. I didn't know how that
was possible, How could she see me from that place?
But she did, and she tried to speak, Her lips
strained against the invisible ropes of silence, forming a single word,
again and again. Break. Her mouth formed it with desperate decision. Break, break, Break.
A chill ran through me so fast it felt like
my bones correct. I lowered the shard and looked at
the basement. I was in the failing, dusty one around me,
the ropes on the empty chair hung in the exact positions.
They wrapped around a wrist in the reflection. I raised
the shard again. Her eyes didn't blink. She kept mouthing
the same word, urging me, but to what I didn't know.
I swallowed hard, Grandma, My voice sounded tiny. Can you
hear me? No answer? Her expression tightened, urgency, sharpening her features.
Her eyes flicked towards something over my shoulder and widened froze.
Footsteps upstairs, slow, heavy, like someone placing each foot intentionally, carefully,
as if savoring the sound. My heart hammered in my throat.
I ducked behind an old shelving unit stacked with dusty
paint cans and Christmas ornaments from decades ago. I curled
in tight, trying to steady my breath. The footsteps reached
the top of the basement stairs. The door groaned open,
and then she came down. Her silhouette stretched along the
wall before her body did, slightly bent at the joints,
like she'd been rearranged and hadn't quite settled. She hummed
that awful almost lullaby again, each note bending upward at
the end like a question in the reflection. She wasn't there.
The basement was still empty except for my grandmother, tied
to the chair, silently pleading with me. Two basements, two
truths out of sync with each other, and I was
stuck in the wrong one. I pressed the shower to
my chest, praying it wouldn't catch any stray light. The
fake Grandma drifted past my hiding spot, humming, tilting her
head left and right like she was smelling the air
for me. She paused so close I could have reached
out and touched the nightgown, but I didn't dare breathe
didn't dare think. After a long moment, she turned and
climbed the stairs again, the door click shut behind her,
firm and final. I didn't move for a full minute,
maybe more, just listening to the thudding of my own heart.
Trapped there was no way out, just the shard, the cold,
and the chair in the center of the room, and
the knowledge that something real was still in there somewhere.
I forced myself up, legs shaking, and looked again through
the shard. The chair and the reflection was whole, upright clean,
The rope still tied tightly around my grandmother's wrists, and ankles.
My grandmother was still staring at me, tears streaking down
a face. Break, she mouthed again. Break. I stared down
at the empty chair in front of me, empty flakes
of old frayed rope still curled around the arms like
a memory. I bawled out the box cutter that was
lying in the storage bin. My hands were sweating now.
I turned back to the shard, lined it up just
right so the mirror version of the chair overlapped the
real one. Heart pounding, I brought the blade to the
ropes and the reflection. It was hard to cut because
of the angle I had to work at. More often
than not, I found myself scoring the side of the
chair's arm or slipping across the top. But eventually I
cut through the fraying rope. I did this three more
times before it all fell loose. I didn't know what
I expected, a sound, as shift in the air, magic,
Nothing happened. I stood there like an idiot, feeling sick,
the shard fogging with my breath, and then movement, the
ropes and the reflection loosened. She was standing shakely. Tears
were in her eyes. She mouthed something again. Too fast
to care, I mean closer. She looked past me and
pointed behind me. I spawn instinctively, raising the shard, and
came face to face with her on all fours, elbows
bent wrong, neck twisted like a broken hanger, face split
by that same smile, glinting even without light. Her voice
came out like a purr and a rasp layered together.
Looks like you found her. She didn't scream. That somehow
made it worse. Her jaw just split open too fast,
unhinging like wet paper peeling away from bone. No sound,
just a void where a face should be, and a
neck that twitched like a marionette string had just snapped.
She plunged. I didn't think. I threw myself backward, ducked
under a reaching arms, those long veiny things, and sprinted
for the stairs. Her hands scraped the floor behind me,
the nails clacking on the concrete like hoofs. I reached
the top step just as she let out a noise
like a drain choking on blood. I burst into the hallway,
grabbed the door and slammed it shut behind me. I
yanked over a nearby chair and jammed it under the knob.
Something hit the door a second later, hard enough to
rattle the hinges. The chair groaned but held. I bagged
away hard, jackhammering in my throat. The hallway was wrung.
The wallpaper patterns had shifted into jagged shop shapes. The
family portraits on the wall were crying, black oily streaks
dribbling from painted eyes. One of the frames bubbled like
it was boiling. Every window pulsed in and out like
lungs breathing. I staggered into the living room. Everything was
worse here. The furniture sagged inward, the floorboards curled slightly
at the edges, as if trying to turn themselves over.
I needed something real, something to ground me. My hands
fumbled for the mirror shard in my pocket, fingers trembling
as I angled it just right. It took a second
to focus. The glass was smudged, but I saw it
the real living room, the warped wallpaper, the melting windows,
all gone in the reflection, just the quiet house, my
grand mother's reel house, and then my grandma, the real one.
She was standing in the hallway of the reflection outside
my bedroom door. She wasn't tired anymore. It looked like
my cutting had worked, though, looking at the red seeping
across the sleeves, I was horrified at the ramifications of
my miss cuts. I had no time to dwell on
that though. She looked at me through the shard, straight
into my eyes, and then she mouthed something I couldn't hear,
but I felt it. There's still time. The moment she pointed,
I moved. I didn't hesitate. I couldn't. The house was
breathing too loud now, the shadows bending in strange directions.
The slamming on the basement door rattled the chair loose
with each bang. I ran for the hallway closet, the mirrorshard,
gripped so tightly in my hand that the edges dug
into my palm. I yanked the door open. Just coats,
dusty limp things hanging from plastic hangers, a clapsed umbrella,
a floor scattered with old shoes, nothing else, a stairwell,
wooden narrow leading down into shadow. No way. I whispered
and pressed the shard closer to the gap between the
coats in the glass. The coats didn't exist, just a
hollow like the closet was never used for storage at all.
I reached inside. My fingers touched the back panel, solid,
no way through, but I turned to look at my Grandma,
trying to see if I was missing something, and she
was insistent. So I turned around, pushed my back into
the back panel, navigating with the shard, and slipped past it.
A faint hiss of cold air rushed out, dry and stale,
like a crypt. The coats rustled on their own. I
pushed them aside and dugged in. It was tight, barely
enough room to crawl. The woods scraped my shoulders, yes,
smelled like wet stone and rust. But I kept going,
guided only by what the mirror showed. No more normal,
just that staircase and the strange quiet that came with it.
The further I went, the colder It got cold, you
feel in your bones, not your skin. I turned the
shard to check behind me. The fake house still walked
and snarling, but ahead, the stairs were getting clearer. Halfway
through the passage, the mirror started matching what I was seeing.
The house and the shard became the real house again,
reality snapping back into alignment like I'd stepped out of
a lie. Finally I emerged, wooden steps beneath me, smooth
concrete floor ahead, the real basement. I could feel it,
still damp, cold, but real. And there it was, the chair, empty,
frayed rope, ends hanging off the arms, red smeared along
the wood, the seat indented, faint marks of dust, shoes
smaller than mine. She'd been here, yeah, the last place
I saw her was the hallway, so I had to
make my way back up. The stairs creaked under my
feet like they hadn't been stepped on in years. I
moved slowly, breath shallow, expecting the walls to shift again,
for the floor to fall out beneath me, but everything
was still. When I reached the top, I smelled something familiar,
pine cleaner, coffee grounds, dry air warmed by a radiator. Home,
And there, standing in the living room, blinking like someone
pulled her from a deep sleep, was Grandma. She looked different, smaller,
fragile in a way I didn't remember. Her sweater was
on backwards, her hands were shaking, blood still fresh on
her wrists and ankles. Sweetheart, she said, her voice rasping,
are you okay? Never mind me, I shot back, tears
welling in my eyes. I stepped closer, heart pounding, She
looked up at me and smiled the way I remembered
true sincerity. But I didn't get to approach because I
heard the sound, a dragging, wet scrape from the hallway
behind me. I turned, and he was halfway through the closet, crawling,
pulling itself forward like a spider forcing its way through
a crack in the world. Its skin shimmered like tar.
Its face flickered between her face and something unfinished. Hands
gripped the frame, long, thin fingers, splintered nails, jaw unhinged.
I got back up. Grandma clutched the arm of a chair.
It's back, she whispered. I didn't answer. I reached into
my pocket, the mirror shard, still warm from gripping it
in the crawl space. I couldn't get the thought out
of my head. How I noticed all the reflective surfaces
were removed from the house. How I'd got this far
only by the shard that I'd found reflections were the key.
So I did the only thing I could think of.
I held it up towards the thing. It hissed, a pressure,
a shriek behind my eyes. It recoiled, arms cracking backward
at wrong angles. Eyes locked on the shard, a blur
bouncing from it to the shard like a recursive loop.
It opened its mouth wider than it shout of. It's
more a tunnel of static. It reached again, so I
stepped forward, held the shard higher, and things intensified. It
wasn't light that came out, more like the absence of
everything behind me, Like it was staring into a doorway.
It wasn't meant to see. Air searched backward, photos fell
off the wall. The hallway twisted. It clawed at the floor,
trying to stay, but its limbs started folding backwards inward undone.
It turned to ash in slow motion, like paper burning
without flame. Then silence. The mirror shards split down the
center hairline, cracks webt through it, and then it crumbled,
finer sand through my fingers, gone completely behind me. Grandma
started to cry. The house was still, the hallway was quiet,
The mess from the encounter was strewn about. The mirror
was still missing from the wall, the kitchen full of
plastic forks, That blank wooden board still bolted to the
bathroom wall, like the world had snapped back, but the
echo of her choices remained Grandma was there, standing where
I'd last seen her. Her eyes flicked to mine as
I entered, and for a second I saw something recognition
and grief, then relief, sharp and overwhelming. I quickly rushed
to get a first aid kit I knew she had
in the kitchen, and when I came back, tended to
a wounds lines cut on her wrists and ankles when
my slicing went awry, But she didn't seem to hold
it against me. Oh, she whispered, like she'd been holding
a breath for years. Thank God, it's over. I nodded,
tried to answer, but it caught in my throat. It
was like a bad dream, she said, voice barely louder
than the wind outside. I remember going about my daily business,
cleaning up for when you arrived, but my reflection caught funny.
Next thing I know. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, But
then I saw you in the mirror. I knelt beside her,
unsure of what to say. Her hand found mine. You
were so brave, she said, I always knew you would be.
I swallowed hard. The lump in my throat didn't budge Grandma,
I said, quietly, you're safe now, that's all that matters.
She nodded, eyes glassy. You saved me. We sat there
for a long time, just breathing, relishing the quiet while
the sun kept rising. The days after it all ended
were quiet in a way I'd never noticed before. Grandma
and I didn't talk about what happened, not directly, but
something unspoken pass between us. Every time I handed her
a new mirror to hang or helped peel the privacy
film from the windows, She'd watched the sunlight come in
like it was a guest she hadn't seen in years,
Like she didn't trust it to stay. But she hugged
me more, made real food again, still a little overcooked,
still too much dill, but I didn't mind. I swept
out rooms that hadn't been opened in years, helped to
replace knobs, scrub tape off old faucets, and rehang a
new mirror in the hallway. When I stepped back and
looked at the glass, I didn't flinch. I saw myself,
just me, and behind me. She smiled, the real one.
On the last morning, she made me pancakes, you'll syrup
real butter. She didn't call me the wrong name. Once
life was back to normal. When Mom pulled ab outside,
I loaded my bag into the trunk and hugged Grandma
a little longer than I ever had before. She whispered,
you come back soon, okay, I nodded, I will. My
Mom noticed the bandages on Grandma's wrists, but we both
stuck to the story it was a kitchen accident, nothing more.
We were halfway down the road when Mom glanced at me.
Thanks for being good for her, she said, I know
it's never your favorite place, but I appreciate it. Maybe
next time, I'll see if one your friends can have
you over instead, you know, let you do something fun.
And looked out the window. Trees blurred past, ordinary and soft,
no oil, slick, shimmer, just the world. No, I said,
I'm okay with staying at Grandma's. Mum raised an eyebrow.
Really yeah, I said, Plus she could use the help.
She smiled, surprised but pleased. Well that's really kind of you.
I nodded, but didn't say anything else, just kept looking
out the window, watching the woods roll by. I felt
a new fan responsibility for Grandma, and if anything ever
happened again, I'd be ready. Three