The Mirror at Midnight
真夜中の鏡
The mirror in my bedroom was old, its silver failing at the edges, its glass the colour of standing water.
For weeks I had avoided it after dark, dressing by candlelight with my back deliberately turned.
But fear, indulged too long, becomes its own kind of , and one midnight I looked.
My own face met me first: tired, thinner than in summer, the face of a woman sleeping badly.
And then, behind my shoulder, where the dark of the room should have been, there was another.
A woman stood close behind me, so close her breath ought to have stirred my hair, and she was smiling.
I knew her at once, though I had only ever seen her seated, folded, and rendered in oil.
It was the woman from the portrait, and the nursery, and the letters, and the scratched-out grave.
Every instinct I owned told me to run, and for a long, frozen moment I could not.
I waited for , for the cold the dead are said to feel toward the living.
But her face held nothing of the kind, and this frightened me more than hatred would have done.
She was not smiling in ; she was smiling the way one smiles at someone finally understood.
Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembled, and she looked at me as if I could set something down.
I understood, with a certainty that arrived from nowhere, that she was not asking to take.
She was asking to be released, and she had waited a hundred years for a face that would listen.
The terror did not leave me, but it changed, the way night changes when you realise it will end.
What stood behind me was not a monster but a grief, wearing the only shape grief had left.
I did not turn around, for I knew the room behind me was empty and would stay so.
The mirror alone could hold her, as still water holds a reflection the air cannot.
Whatever her sin had been, or the sin done to her, she wanted not but a .
I spoke, though my voice shook, and I said the one word I had: I see you.
The smile deepened, and something in the glass loosened, like a knot patiently worked free.
She did not vanish; she simply grew fainter, the way a guest steps back to let you pass.
When I finally slept, it was the first dreamless sleep the house had granted me since my arrival.
In the morning the mirror showed only my own face, but it no longer frightened me to meet it.
Yet I knew the seeing was not enough, and that she would need me to learn the rest of her story.