Mirror
by P. Henry
My mother used to tell me about a mirror on the moon that would show one’s true self in the reflection. The mirror was as big as a lake and was cratered into the ground from metric tons of heat and pressure. She said we never saw the mirror because it was on the side of the moon that’s never visible from Earth. If the mirror were to point towards us, it would become a giant spotlight that would bathe the world in silver.
Those nights I laid awake and stared at the glow-in-the-dark decals of the stars on my ceiling and let thoughts of the moon mirror pull me to sleep. My skin would be smoother and my face would clear of all the acne and blemishes that appeared every morning. I would have longer legs that didn’t bend inward at the knee, and silky, long hair that was not cropped short every time I left the barber.
One night after I saw the light disappear from under my bedroom door, I heard a latch unlock and my window squeak open. A breeze tickled my cheek and gently tugged the sheets off my bed. My feet hung suspended above the carpeted floor after I tried to jump out of bed to close the window. I was pushed outward into the air as streaks of light flared against my naked eyes. The moon was closer than I had ever seen it and brighter than the sun on the solstice.
I didn’t realize I had traveled to the mirror until I was standing outside a crater on an ashen dune, angled towards the perfectly flat surface. My mother had heard the wrong details as the story was passed down to her. It wasn’t that the mirror looked like a glass lake, but it was a glass lake—permanently frozen over by the atmosphere. Schools of silver iridescent fish flew below, though it didn’t look like there was water underneath. In place of liquid was a void of empty space just like the sky above. No air bubbles came up against the lake’s surface, and the fish disappeared as soon as they came into view—like they were in a constant rotation, spinning around an infinite vortex.
The dune began to slowly give under my weight. I fell down the slope as my knees buckled and I pushed my hands out in front of me to break my fall. As I touched the surface of the lake on all fours, a figure drifted towards me on the opposite side and broke her own fall directly across from me. Her hair extended out in every direction like the tendrils of an octopus. Her skin was smooth and glossy, but her pupils were what I couldn’t look away from. They seemed to grow with longing as we stared into each other’s eyes. Behind me, the lights of interconnected cities flowed through the Earth as blood flowed through veins.
P. Henry (they/them) is a current student of the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Informational Sciences. Their dream is to one day work in an archive or fiction center, but they'll settle for a house in the country with three dogs and a loving spouse.