Speaker 1: I come toward a taste of metal in the slow,
disorienting knowledge of being watched. Folk hugs at my boots,
thin and cold as breath, curling between the bases of
the mirror, pains like a living thing that remembers me
by name. The corridor is narrow, mirrors, rising, tall and close,
frames eaten by rust and time. In the air holds
up particular sheen of sealed glass, a faint oz and
I cannot place. For a moment. I think I have
stumbled into some abandoned carnival backlot. But the light is wrong.
Here two intimate a teale cyand rim that edges everything
in a sickly halogen, punctuated by a red accent, like
a wound. Beneath the surface, film grain seems to hang
in the air, as if the world itself has been
wun 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
after me, and yet it already he knows the small
thaw crawling under my roops. 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 accusing 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 surfers,
to feel the cool and know it is real. The
mirrors do not only reflect how I look. They show
the edges of me I have shaved away in daylight,
the thin scar alarm I left eybrow burnish into a
pale mat the hollowing at my temples that has been
there since the winter of the thunder. My brass locker
hands from my neck, but within the glass, its face
is clouded. The photograph insides smeared as if with rain.
Each reflection exaggerates a slight truth, a blink that takes
longer than it ought, a smile that beginned and never
finds its way to warm. Small betrayals and revel 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,
and the mirrors multiplay me until I am many. An
army of false image is stacking like cards. Some of
them perform gesture. I do not remember making a hand
raised to the throat in a motion that I recognize
only later as apology, as shoulder folding inward towards some light.
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 paane goes still, and then with
a casual cruelty, it tucks its head at an impossible
ankle and taps on the 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 what I press, the pain shivers, 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 of plotting. Its
head seems to move with the wool of its own,
dark streaks catching the rim light like oil on water.
The refusal tilts its head just so, and the fishes
radiating from its mouth make the smile hanging long, longer
than is comfortable. The corridor narrows, and the mirrors arrange
themselves as though to funnel me. The four hums under foot,
a low vibration that seems to come from the glass itself,
and some pains. The world beyond is intact and banal,
a corridor, perhaps, or a backlot. In others, something older
shows to appealing wallpaper, a child's small handprint set in
a haze of dust. The reflections begin to move independently,
and the difference is not polite. Some mirror people trace gestures.
I do not recall, writing memories on the inside surfaces.
Others look beyond me, past the mirrors, and into spaces
they should not exist. In the corridor, a 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 weather woman in the glass creams without sound,
mouth open but silent, eyes wide and wet with a
grief that is not mine alone. One pain splits a
breath later, and from that fish of 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 jackage sharp pull away and
hangs suspended like a free thought. Shards do not fall,
They hold themselves up in the air, arranged like the
teeth of some great invisible jaw. When the shape reasserts itself,
it is different and clear. Whatever lives 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. They 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 an army. The refusal smile lingers a hairline
fisher runs from cheek to jaw, and whither the crack
is in the glass or on the skin is something
I cannot decide. It taps the glass again, and the
sound is like nails on bone, filtered through static. Its
eyes hold a faint synnglow, the sort of cold light
that makes teeth seem too white and skin toothin. When
I breathe, the pain faults 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
as a key lock. It is a physical thing that
compulsion to stop running and to speak. The brass locket
feels heavy at my chest, a small, stubborn way. I
lifted palms dam and the chain trembles between my fingers.
Inside the glass, the refusal watches me with a predatory calm,
patient and slow, as if in hurried by time. I
hold the locket to the surface, as if it might
open a doorway, as if the metal will make the
world line and let me pass. Memory is not a
single thing. It comes as images that overlap and obscure.
The corridor obliges by arranging flashes, a rainy afternoon, the
metallic scent of hospital soap, a card door 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 taking
a person left behind, because closing my own hand felt
safer than holding someone else's small freight 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 arrives,
I cannot pretend ignorance any more. The refusal does not
triumpher thunder. It waits with pneumatic misogynate, a slow satisfaction
in every micromotion. When the memory solidifies. When the thing
I have run for snaps into place, like a fragile
plate hitting stone, something answers. The glass responds with a
shudder that runs through the corridor, mere slackness of taking
a long exhale, and nearby shards re arrange themselves, falling
three inches and then holding a new precarious constellations. For
an instant there is a kind of valise. The trembling
in my hands eases, and the weight of the brass
locket shifts, as though some portion of it has been opened.
Relief and exposures it together a bitter 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 hungo
morphs into something quieter and far more terrifying, the knowledge that,
now that the truth exists in the light, the maze
will move on to other things. It will not be
satisfied by this alone. My admission of a single sin
shatters 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 weight less forgiving
than the one that forced this verse surrender. In the
shadowed passageway, some of my reflections soften. They look away
from their own images, as if a shamed, as if
they do not quite recognize the person they show. The
floor takes on the texture of old film, grainy, slightly warped.
My shadow stretches and splits between panes. The refusal recedes
a fraction it hands if it has hands pressed flat
to the inside of the glass. As a feeling for purchase,
I want to believe the confession brought me something that
the air will clear in a door we will open
beyond the mirrors to a whole way of ordinary light.
Instead of finding a polished shard held like a talisman
in an alcove, the shots shows a corridor beyond it,
empty and patient for heartby to see myself reflected twice
within the shard, one close face, thin with relief, another
faint and blurred, a second face looking back in a
way that feels strangely aldered. 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. The polished fragment is cooled against my palm.
In its reflection, there is a face that does its
almost mine, but slightly, only an angle in the way
the light catches the corner of a smile distorted. 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 shard to the dark
and see again, briefly at the inside of a kitchen,
where a chair sits with the damp ring on the seat.
A child's coloring book is opened to page with a
half finished drawing. The blue crey unpressed hard in the corner, likably.
The shard is a lens that favor is small intermiate
betrayals over heroic sinms. It refuses grand metaphors and insists
on the texture of daily failure. Gil there may seems
to say it is not an event, but a material
you can handle in shaven store. The corridor's mood resets
in the way a tide retreats, only to return with
a different rhythm. My breeding finds a steadier pace, but
the steadiness is bertle. I move forward because motion is
the only defense I know. The mirrors follow my trajectory, obediently,
repeating and multiplying, a lining and misligning, like a chorus
that remembers only the harmonics of shame. The refusal slits
back into the ensemble, becoming at once a part of
the course and a soloistry, an accent that makes the
words I do not speak sound loud. I do not
leave the maze. There is no triumphant exit, no fanfare.
I carry the shored in my palm as if it
were a map and also a wound. The reflections behind
me changed subtly with each step. Some looks often now
shadows eased, others sharpen, as if the truth I offered
has laid. There are the small falsets I have lived in.
A corridor remains patient and unforgiving. It will not close
because it is a purpose not satisfied by solitary confession.
It wants continuity, not cloverer. It wants me to keep looking,
to keep seeing myself broken in infinite small ways. At
the edge of the corridor, a slimmer pane shows me
standing alone. The woman in the glass lifts a hand
as I do, impresses her pond to the other side,
a mirror of mind but not aligned. Our fingers 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 jaw,
catching a sliver of red light. It smiled with a
kind of smile that belongs to someone who knows the
entirety of a book v the only skimmed. I understand
then that my story is not one of simple repentance,
but of a long, dirreckoning that will continue to unfold
with patient cruelty. A polished shod goes into my pocket,
while the fog curls and the corridors like flattens into
something like dusk. The smell of old puffume and metallic
rain lingers on my skin. My hands are empty of
the small comforts 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 the clarity carries a weight
that is both chastening and terrible. I walk deeper because
the maize 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 exit,
narrow corridor opening into a hole, I lift the shard again.
For a moment, the face in its reflection tilts and
looks right at me. It is an almost recognizable phase,
but the eyes have a new, distant sheen, as if
the woman in a shot has watched something she cannot unsea.
The corridor slight dims, and the sound of distant creeks
becomes more pronounced, thick out of memory. The corridor closes
back around me, like a closing fist. My steps are echo,
but the echo is wrong, a half beat delayed, an
answer to a question I did not mean to ask.
The maze has taught me a truth I cannot forget.
Confession does not equal absolution. It is a rearrangement of
the self that leaves fresh air just 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 their names.
The shoud 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 a
fog thickens and sensation dims, is that small, this storted,
sickened face in the showd and the certainty that the
corridor will not stop until 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, and 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
days between paines that went on and on, each mirror
of pale accusation, the air tasted like cold metal and perfume.
Fog lickd the soles of my boots, and the corridor
held its breath, as if waiting for me to begin.
Something in the glass shifted, not a trick of light,
but a deliberate, patient movement, and a face that warm
my features, tilted its head and smiled with a question
I had not asked. The smile was small and slow,
like a hand, and frolling from behind my spine, and
it set my skin to raw attention. At first, I
searched for logic, a shrik of reflection, a loop of
mirrors reflecting mirrors. I turned a tight circle, risticking from
the chain at my throat, trying to find a scene
where the trickery begae are, but logic unraveled in tight,
quiet poles. Each pain remembered rong I handprint when no
one had lit upon a smudge of lock a 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 the angles between frames.
In the first corridor, the mirrors were patient, as librarians,
cataloging without mercy. My fingers trailed the glass because my
body so purchased, because motions studded the tidal noise inside
my skull. The glass was colder than winter, and the
prints that appeared beneath my touch were younger than memory.
As if the mirrors could record attempts and then played
them back with the tenderness I could not bear. The
refix was mechanical at first. The brass locket against my
stonam like a talisman warm where it touched skin, the
tiny hinge that meant private things were still private. I
cupped it because it was the only anger allowed, although
the chain was warm, with some of the hands heaped
in the reflections. The maze made use of that hesitation,
reflexions that verged into small variations and eyebrow raised where
mine lay flat, 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
very implanted a seed 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.
Shutdows pulled in corners and then resolved into faces. I
half knew myself laughing at someone I could not name,
my mouth shaping a wood I had never spoken a loot.
The corridor geometry condspired in slim ways. Mirrors tilted and
made pathways feel longer or shorter according to mood. Downside alcoves,
the mirrors separated like small islands. Here the difference between
me and my mirrored cells widened into acts. A reflection
held a secret of glance, A man, his face had
already slipped into fog. Another smooth address after a small dishonair,
as if settling the folds of conscience. Some pains kept
still images that did not move with me, a stillness
that hum like the pause before a sentence is finished.
One window hosted a figure whose smiling or two long
teeth bared like a question mark. I could feel the
refusal watching from within that smile, patient, predatory, the kind
of com that tase of time and hunger. It did
not need to speak, it still A was a sentence.
I tried to name things to myself as a way
to stand in the panic. A corridor is a corridor,
A reflection is light. Calling them names made them ordinary
and 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, head
pressed under a heavy thumb, where once the exits had
been clear, the passages narrowed and the mirrors tilted their
frames like doors, closing My habit of trailing my fingers
along the gas became a liability. Each touched summoned another echo,
another half remembered cruelty that stitched itself into the mirrors.
The maize wanted me to move, but its motion bent
toward forcing me to stand. The air foult corporeal, here,
as if I were breathing through cloth. The passages tightened
until they were nearly lungs. Mirrors tilted in wood, and
the angles multiplied like teeth. Always that had seemed navigable
collapsed into implausible corridors. I reached for wayfunding and found
only misdirection. The refusal anticipated my towns with a comborne
of knowing the shape of my failures. It foreshortened my
steps and lengthened my breaths. Panic rose I could hide.
The echo of my footsteps churned into a drum meat
that matched the tightening in my chest. The lights hummed
a frequency I could feel in my molars. I could
not outrun the feeling that the maze wanted me to
be still, to stand before and the crack of pane
and allow its pressure to bed down until I admitted
something I had spent my life burying in. One paned
glass fogged and faded into a small domestic scene, the
corner of a table, a hand slipping into a pocket,
the gentle, almost ceremonial removal of a thing that did
not belong to me. The mirror brass of the locket
reflected a memory snap, my hand eased 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 withheld truce can become a currency.
The mace 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 the air changed
from cold 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 course of
slight differences, forming a vocabulary of my misdeeds. A reflection
at the heart of that circular room leaned from inside
its pain and cracked the glass outward, not with violence,
but with deliberate flowering pressure. Shouts did not scatter their
froze like teeth in mid bite. In a 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 shuro, like some one
who knows the name you refuse to speak, and presses
it to your mouth and tell you taste it. I
wanted to wrench the locket off, to throw it into
a pool and let it sink. But I found the
brass heavier for being emotion and light of suddenly being
not alone. The roofusal watched me from every crooked angle,
a study of a predatory calm, smile widening with the
measured patience of something that intends to keep demonstrating rather
than explaining. It did not shout its meaning. It peeled
the layers of me like paper and displayed each one
in reverse. I wanted to stump the pains, to silence them,
to shadow the display, and be left for the messy,
manageable silence of aftermath. Instead, the mirrors return everything with
a clarity that felt surgical. There were not accusations so
much as a mirror set to obey scalpel, precise, inevitable.
Some reflections were grotesquely tender. A mirror held the sequence
of gestures like an old home movie, the way my
thumb rubbed the corner of a photograph, the way I
adjusted my coat to conceal the swell of my guilt,
the minute commerce of a glance that said, I will
not name this in another pay. My face was smooth, composed,
mouthing polite condolences to a person I had robed without
the courage to rectify. The silent agreements, the polite lies,
the small evisions that let me sleep, mounted into a gallery.
Each recollection was a shod, sharp and precise, and together
they made a portrait I had avoided sketching for years.
I realized, with the slow submitting dread, that the Maize
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 Refusal's patients
turned almost clinical as it held each memory up in turn,
waiting for recognition, waiting for the naming. It was the
kind of insistence that eroded resistance, like water armstone. Naming
felt like an invasion and a relief simultaneously. Speaker would
be to fracture the image. To keep silent would be
to let glass continue to manifest every half truth until
it devoured the edges of me. The gallery narrowed further,
until the corridor felt like a throat. Mirrors lean in
and their frames breathed. Movement grew deliberate and measured, camera
like slices of attention, focused on small, intimate things. The
way my index finger traced the hairlines scar along my
eye brought, the way my shoulders hunched against a memory.
The refusal anticipated me, still tilting its head of fractionarilier
than I did, tapping the inside of its pain like
a metronome. It shaped labyrinth like an author, shapes of paragraph,
each turn designed to fold me back toward confession. Hannick.
When it came was sharp and fast. My breath hitched,
hands tremble, But the may softened that panicad edge into slow,
unbearable clarity. I had run before, from people, from places,
from versions of myself that did not fit the night.
If I liked to tell, running teaches you certain economies,
speed over reflection, disstance over reckoning. The maze would not
let the economy stand pass, folded back with administrative neatness,
until every flight led to a doorway that showed another
small Theat another 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.
Eventually I was quarreled before a pain that held nothing
but my face, polished and flawed, an impossible perfectness that
made my stomach drop. The refusal leaned through the fishes
like a thing tessing the water. Haline cracks spidered from
its mouth and crawled across its cheek. It tilted its
head in an angle my neck had not take, and
met my look with a 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 tear 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 fore stillness became an arena
of memories, images open and shut like the blinking of
a tired puppet. Small betrayals, private cruelties, the silent agreements
that make one complicit. I tasted all apologies in the air,
and the metallic town of fear in the glass. I
saw a version of myself reach into a pocket and
draw out a piece of some one else's trust. I
saw ham let go where holding might have matted, a
small concession and easier wrote taken so as not to
be inconveniently brave. Each recollection carried its own precise of consequence,
the soreness of a withheld compliment that would have rebuilt
a day, the dryer warmth of a moment I stole
to myself at someone else's expense. Each more private thing
I had gilded into being a nott 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. I lifted con a smooth light,
the decision that felt merciful in the narrower moment, yet
hypocritical in the larmarch. Then it graduated to the patterns.
My reflections did not simply show actions. They revealed habits.
In one pain, the maze booridered on tenderness, as it
showed the eyre by eye of stitching that made me
who I was. How often I chose comfort over courage,
How often I looked away. It was infuriating the accurate
in its smallness. When the fishes around them, I have
crawled up into 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 hungered for acknowledgment. To
confess was not merely to admit, but to release the
shape of the action from the way to trunk inside me,
the space inside the chest where gilt had been folded
and layered, would not be as sharp afterward. The edge
is might dull. I felt both the terror and the
relief of that possibility. I did not step forward, but
I could not step away. The memory of what I
had done uncoiled 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
as 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 fine 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 names, partial apologies, descriptions that
made the recollection breed with an honesty I had avoided.
Saying them aloud in that seal place did not cause
thunder or punishment. It altered the quality of the air.
The perfect pain deld instead of exploding. The fissures around
its mouth took in the sound like a throat swallowing.
I had not counted on the subtlety of being heard.
The refusal did not exalt, it made notes. His patient
appetite seemed less rapacious for the moment, as if it
cataloged a new item. I marked it as processed. Afterward,
there was an oddness to motion. I walked past the
shod that kept only a 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 uncracked pain had also the mazeesqu grammar.
The corridor was sluckened a degree. In my shoulders, which
had been onund too tight for too long, unfurled a fraction.
My steps felt a hair different, not lighter, so much
as less liable to ricochet. The maze did not relent entirely.
It had become something quieter and more patient, like a
room leftical. The exsit limited uncertainly 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 cataloging what I had given and what remained
a read My hand smelled of cold glass and old perfume.
The locket around my throat felt lighter and heavy beer
at once, lighter because a tiny hinch had been opened,
heavier because whatever had been locked inside was now in motion.
An af image of guilt followed me like an animal
kept on a leash. Klaus's restless impossible to ignore. The
maze had not forgiven me, It had only altered its tactics.
There would be other pains, other shods, 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 pained 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 book. I
was both reading and writing in the last pain. I
passed my hand across the glass and left the print.
It did not immediately fade. The reflex of gesture felt
like a pact. I would not run any longer from
each more truth that had been piling up in the
angles of my life. Leaving its mudge was not declaration
of innocence, but a small, defiant mocking. I have been here,
I will return, I will speak. The corridors hailed 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 the knowledge 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, in the world would
proceed in its own kellless. Supply of the corridor remembers
the shape of my hesitation before I do. My boots
and kinter, thin oily fog that curls around my ankles
like a memory reluctant to leave. Light is neither day
nor night. Here it is a teal sand that breeze
cold against the skin, and a thin red rind that
cuts like a warning. Mirrors rise on both sides, taller
than a person stitched together with all frames and new cracks,
each pain keeping a place reserved from me. The entry
smells of wet metal and all perfume, a tang that
belongs to a lot room, and rain that has not
fallen in years. I know this place because I left
it once. I remember, thinking I had stepped out for good.
The memory of departure is as smige it refuses to hold.
I do remember the locket at my throat, a small
brass thing 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 weight. It shines
briefly in a corridor's strange light, and the shine answered
by the glass. A hand print appears when none existed before,
A pale fresh as if a pon It just slammed
into the surface to stop someone on the other side.
The print is not mine. My palms are narrower, scurred
along the left eye brow, a line like a penstroke
on skin. The print raises a question too heavy to voice.
What followed me in the mirrors do not wait for answers.
Theory arranges. I watch angles subtly shifting a path that
was straight, bending inward, a doorway closing. When the eye
turns away, I should backtrack, should trust the rab 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 straffle action I passed does
not quite match my movement. It lacks a fraction, a
delay that leaves a ghosty 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 show, takes through a private film, a box kitchen,
a throne, smile that was really a shutter closing, the
metallic clig of a pan. Another pain replaced, the way
door was left unlocked, 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 frame show not just to what happened,
but the distance I put between those movements and accountability.
I keep my eyes low, my fingers trail along the
cold finish of the glass because the gesture is a
tether to something real. The touch makes the air taste
of ozen and olv rot. Reflection shift to meet my
palm with the softness of practice mocking. A reflected hand
taps thin side of the pain, as if testing for weakness.
Exploring the room from the wrong side of the world,
one reflections miles a smile too slow and patient, and
fishes 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 locker 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 theata pains
framing a pivotal iro in one continuous reel. There, I
am a small argument in a cramped hallway, my reflection
in a window, absorbing my hand as I closed it
around the door an inch two lay. The locket's light
makes the memory vivid. The colors colder. The red in
the scene at tunny Bright's meal like dried paint. The
memory is not loud, it is precise. I did something
then that I have told myself was an accident and
omission that would never demand payment. The corridor insists it
was not an accident at all. Fast sloop corridors split
and then stitch themselves back together. Behind me, mirrors anticipate
my steps for delay them, rendering a rout into a
puzzle that falls inward. A passage ahead becomes two, then free.
A seam in a glass lines up with a shadow,
and I turned to find the way I came swallowed
by another reflection. The maze requires that I confront not
only what I hid, but how I spent my time
hiding it. Each diat reveals a scene hands I smoothed
away from a child's shoulder. Instead of holding tight, I
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 flip and replay. This
reflection presses its palm flat to the inside of the glass,
and the glass presses back like an answer. Prayer. Fishers
spread outward 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 of stop looking back. I run then, because the
nursia says moved before the glass can turn to another face.
And because a movement I think there may be safety.
But movement is punished. Mirrors split the steps so that
my foot fill arrives late in one pain sane and
early in another. The corridor distorts rhythm into stack your time.
A familiar alcove becomes a hole of shots that cough
out images the lockets slipping from my fingers one night,
a single stoop of clinkers a hit wood, and the
weight of the thing afterwards, the knowledge that a secret
can sit like a small stone in uchesta and never dissolve.
The refusal rides the periphery of every piece of glass
until it is no longer peripheral. It knows the exact
tremble of my throat. When it finally stands center, its
posture exaggerated. It is a walk twin a mirror, warm
thin by having performed my life too often. It wears
my cut, but freed at the collar. The blouse is
stained in a place only I know, still tender. Its
eyes have a faint sand flare that suggests not warmth,
but the logic of a machine determined to complete a task.
The fissure at its mouth widens when its 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 in verdict.
The refusal taps a rhythm on the inside of the pane,
and the sound is 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 robes like a second heartbeat.
I feel its tiny warmth and cold at 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 bodies. My
memory is stubbornly partial. I can name the edges a
night rain on the windshield, some one left on the
other side of a door. I can recall a 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 that cosmore than I
let myself calculates like terroring 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 in a spooling. I confess with that theater, listing
the small movements that added up into a rom There
is no thunderclap of absolution. The refusal tilts its face
as if tasting what I offer. For a moment, I
imagine the glass of soor being the words like grain
into stone, and the maze softening in gratitude. The pains
around me grow still, images freeze in mid action, like
a film stock that has been stopped for the first time.
In the maze, something quite, but stillness is not surrender shards.
I had not looked at shift and hellline crack travels
across a pane, not from the refusal's mouth, but from
the edges of a reflection. I thought in it it
is a tiny, bright betrayal. My admission settles like dust
and reveals the confession was partial. Some truths are palliative,
others are incisions. The reflections that fall to fall into
a fragile calm, but fishers map themselves elsewhere, indicating cost.
The maze accepts the tribute, yet keeps tolly. There is
at the end, one narrow shod that gleams, with the
surface marred by crack. It holds a parallel corridor, an
empty distance that suggests an exit. The shard is small
enough that when I raise it, it trembles in my palm,
like a life not fully lived in its polish. Another
face hovers, not quite mine, an echo, a second possibility.
I step toward the opening at frames air beyond is
not free, but thin air, like breath exhaled after running.
The refusal smile remains magnified and patient, reflected in every
pain along the way. I stepped through the showerd and
the corridor re arranges itself into something less literal and
more domestic. The fod proceeds to ankle level, The tea
like grows muted, and the red accents become only flex
Even as I move, the sense of being partially unburdened
warps into a new weight. The locket is heavier now.
My skin remembers its scar beneath the left eyebrow, and
how it ages at the memory of the night. The
mace 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 a shad. The
corridor arrows to a point well 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 seat of knowledge. I can still feel
the refusal in the stack of mirrors. When I glance back,
a none resolves smile lodged at the corner of my vision.
The corridor shifts, a final, quiet, rear ringement that suggests
the maze is 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 tastes of
rain that may yet fall, the city keeps moving in
oblivious rotations. I fold the locket into my palm and
listen in the distance to hollow echo of latter to
human till lay. A carrier is like a wind that
does not wholly die. I imagine the refusal still at
its glass, palms pressed to the inside, counting all the
unnamed things its surfaces have defired. 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 dust in my mouth. I will find
myself checking doors I have locked, mending small cracks, and
routine that refuses grand acts. 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 view of a memory I
both own and continue to owe. The refusal remain. It
is a quite critic a behind glass that observes the
life has steppened. The shame and the relief co exists,
braided like the chain of the locket. I move forward
with them, aware that the nightmare will return in some
other forms, should I again try to substitute silence for repair.
The whole way of mirrors did not punish me with spectacle.
It demanded an accounting. I paid as much as I could,
in 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
axe I have cataloged the laughter I heard in the corridor.
Lay it metallic. Patient follows me as memory follows conscience.
It is a ecker that refuses to be entirely muffled.
Each time it comes. It reminds me that the admission
is never a single transaction. It is a habit. I
walk into what passes for my life now, paying attention
to the way my hands move, in the way I
closed doors. The maze taught me that confession can open
doors when it is given pliny, but that some doors
will require more than speech. They will require repair and labor.
In time, I carry a shard of the corridor with me.
Sometimes I catch my reflection in a shop window and
foot of the way it waits. Sometimes I place the
locket against a pocket and feel it small and quiet weight.
The refusal smile is a ghost that has made an
unlucky 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 nearest and most
honest thing I can offer. The major treats in distored memory,
like a closed door that still hums. The corridor will
open again if I ever thinks silence will suffice, and
when it does, I will return differently, not to flee,
but answer. The end of this chapter is not an
end to the requirement. I leave the mirrors behind with
the knowledge that the dead will call again. The corridors
exit as a thin mercy, partial relief, a palpable warning.
I step into ordinary, with 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
page left and turned. That page is a promise I
cannot yet keep, And so the nightmare persists as a
companion and a teacher.