The Eradication of Mirrors

Multilayered human potential which recognizes the window that opens the heart which opens another heart inside the first which opens another inside the second, and so on...

The Eradication of Mirrors

The man came home and spoke aloud to an echoed empty house. He spoke about a man who came home empty handed, sat in his kitchen, and dictated a story into an empty machine about an empty man who came home and whispered into his own ear.

Each story mirrored into the next, which mirrored into the next, and so on, until all the storied mirrors of the universe collapsed into themselves, a collapse so intense that the man who came home went back out again, caught the #18 bus into the city, laid down next to river, and cried.

When his tears had raised the river to the rippling edge of the concrete walkway upon which he lay, he stood and extended his arms above the heads of lunch breakers who had been ordered by clocks to return to their pens.

My name is Silas, the man said.

A young woman stopped. My name is Alice, she said, and their conversation began to mirror itself. Silas said: I’m tired of repeating myself, and Alice said the same thing, reversed left to right.

A mirror reflects a person’s sentiment. And this undersized fact reached out from its hiding place between words and touched both Silas and Alice in the hollow of their throats. They both coughed a blackish coal of embarrassment.

Terribly sorry, said Silas. Should have… completed my thoughts in private.

The sorrow is mine, said Alice. My feet go slower than my mouth.

But the moment passed and they laughed. The day ripened the city, which lay upon a land that reflected the story that both Silas and Alice, as well as a hundred thousand other persons of the same race, had heard many times before.

A race not of insignificant colored flesh by the way, but of multilayered human potential which recognizes the window that opens the heart which opens another heart inside the first which opens another inside the second, and so on, until the universe expands, and confiscates one’s limitations.

Alice and Silas, now reversed in their roles, left the city to find an apple tree under which they could languish until all cows, who drink their own milk from quiet pools of milky rain, returned to dream the secret knowledge of animals.

None of this is true. None of this is false, either.

Silas and Alice, reversed to their original roles, left the cows to slumber, and climbed back to the city by way of a highway lined with windows to other possibilities of their lives.

His sat on the right, hers on the left. The windows showed what might have been had they taken the train that day instead of the bus, or had said no to the bong hit, or said yes to it, or had crossed the footbridge over the river on celebration day, or had waited outside with the apple, or had done any number of things differently than they had done on this side of the windows along which they walked. And while in a state of walk, they spoke of their commitments to one path or the other, or their lack of promise to a path that appeared when the road forked.

Back in the city, buses bloomed and spread their petalous routes over the streets.

Silas and Alice passed a shop window. They stopped to gaze through the glass at a simple display of wooden figures, which told a tale of a man and a woman who found shelter from a tyrant’s wrath. The wooden couple had a baby on the way, who kicked the woman’s wooden belly twice, climbed down from the woman’s womb onto a bed of straw, and told a baby’s story of another man and woman who in turn reflected all the light through the windows of the world onto their own faces, from where it then illuminated the spaces between one moment and another.

We should marry, said Silas, and Alice reflected her assent.

As Alice and Silas grew old, they rarely spoke to each other or to the world at large, and as such, the windows they held in front of their personas carried no fog. They had no illusions to shatter.

They realized that truths too were illusions, one after the another in a universe that spun one moment between moments one way, and another moment between moments another way. There wasn’t any use for artificial moments in the long run. Artificial moments were reserved for short term gossip of who ate who for lunch and which way the sentiments ran when the boss announced that Dostoevsky was forbidden.

Still, Alice and Silas did kiss on the lips when a sorrow ran deep or a bus failed to stop. They created their own story of two people alive and celebrated in a world of reflection, who together created a story of three people lost in a mirrored world of glass, who in turn created a story within a story of four people who prospered in an expansive, reflective universe.

And so on, story within story, love within love, year within year, until Silas and Alice, and all souls from Grand Haven to Laingsburg and beyond to New Delhi took mallets to their expectations and hammered them flat.

Only then could they look up. Only then were they free. A sense  of story that no external force had urged expanded within them. They became transparent and flowing when all the mirrors they used to compare themselves to others lay crushed and scattered.

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Thanks for reading Dynamic Creed, home of oddified stories outside the designs of our times. This piece is from a little while back and was suggested by Jeanne S. over at It’s Just Jeanne. Her word was mirrors. Give her a shout for the idea. I hope you enjoyed it.

How about you? Want to suggest something? Let me know in the comments.

Victor David

All my stories are free but if you’d like to do a paid subscription, you’d not only be supporting me but helping veteran and animal causes. I donate 25% of all proceeds. Thanks for considering it, and stay blessed.