Dreamer

They call her Dreamer. Dream: a nicer word for Nightmare, a shiny little word to sugar glaze all the ugly dreams she dreams about when the curtains over her mirrors shimmy after dark. She has always hated mirrors. Maybe it’s in her blood. Or her mother’s, or the mother before her mother. She mothers the mirrors in her home like a moth would shy from a flame if it knew it could burn, like the roads cover the sewers below them, shrouding them in black tar, muffling the sounds of rushing water. 

The mother before her mother told a story about mirrors, different every time. She said there’s something in there, behind that glass, long and lurking with nails made of all those clippings that you lose track of before you can sweep them into the trash, and eyes like rocks and hands that never learned how to hold—spindly little things, sagging skin and bone. She said the Mirror Man was unspeakably beautiful; willow tree hair and a mouth that could swallow you whole. And he only appears after dark, don’t you know, when there’s nothing to be reflected back, when the glass doesn’t show you another version of yourself and dark reflects dark and the gaps between the glass and the world disappear. His hair crosses the threshold first, haven’t you heard, like a shadow upon a shadow, and then the rest of him follows. 

She avoids buying mirrors; instead, settles for looking at herself in the sudsy dish water, catching glimpses in the metal sink spout, the showerhead, the dimmed television screen. House guests murmur over their difficulty reapplying lipstick or checking for food in their teeth in the bathroom, but get over it. This is only at first, though. Don’t you know people always jump at the chance to label a woman crazy?

The first mirror is a gift, wrapped in ribbons and thick paper, so pretty she tries to stop the grimace at the corners of her mouth. She hurriedly hangs it on the bathroom wall, whispers her thanks with a soured tongue, and ushers her guests out of the house, draping a towel over it before the sun sinks below the ground. Her trepidation gets out, as stories do: twisted. She is afraid to look at herself, they say. Don’t you know a woman can’t stand to be anything less than pretty? 

The town boys leave jagged dreams (nightmares) on the woman’s porch, in her bedroom, through her windows. They smash broken beer bottles onto her deck, spreading the bits of glass around so she has to stoop on her knees to clean them all before dark. They dump old mirrors with heavy frames just inside the back door of her house. When she buys heavy padlocks and closes her windows, they pierce the glass anyways, slipping mirrors into her bedroom, her mailbox, her chimney. They send packages from unknown addresses that pile around her house. She stops going outside. They call her crazy. 

She buys curtains, then sheets, nailing the fabric into each frame so it can’t come loose. The mirrors pile up in the corners of each room, tacked against each wall—all shapes and sizes; round and long and small handhelds, collecting dust and fear. Some mornings, when new ones have been tucked into her cabinets or just outside her front door, she wakes to nail clippings scattered across her floor, and shivers. He is so close some nights she dreams about him, stretched out in bed next to her with his sagging limbs. He trails his fingertips across her eyelids, and she tosses and turns and falls out of bed, only to wake with slivers of his nails digging into her back. She scrolls and scrolls through flight bookings and does not know where to go. She doesn’t understand why he has chosen her; all the other mirrors in town appear untouched, uncovered, perfectly ordinary reflections of perfectly human monsters. She knows that this is why they do not believe her.

One night she dreams she is in a long maze of mirrors. Everywhere she turns, she catches a glimpse of him. A flash of willow, a spindly finger a hair away from her throat. When she opens her mouth it turns into his and she is swallowing everything, gaping, gaping, and the mirrors are shattering and pouring themselves into her, and she hurts like her body has never known how to before. 

The neighbors come to check on her when they see the lights on. They knock and knock, and when she doesn’t immediately open the door, they turn with little reluctance and head for home. Shame we don’t get a glimpse of that house, they mutter. I hear it’s all sewn up, sheets on all the walls like a madwoman. They ought to take her somewhere. 

It happens, eventually, that they dial for an asylum with white walls where there are no extra sheets to hide under. There’s this woman, they say over the phone. She’s gone crazy. Do you have a room?

One night, two boys sneak into the woman’s house and cut away fabric until all that remains are mirrors upon mirrors with metal nails cracking their frames, all her dreams naked before them—dark reflecting dark reflecting glints of light on sharp teeth—scraps discarded in heaps on the floor. As the boys’ limbs tumble through her open windows, she is waking in a coffin of sheets and too cold air. As they scamper home, the Mirror Man is stretching in his skin, sharpening his fingernails against the curve of his ribs. As they climb into bed, he is climbing into hers and reaching for her eyes, for her mouth, for any soft part of her he cannot bear. As they sleep she almost screams, only she doesn’t want the neighbors to come back, and she doesn’t want a white room with a stiff cot and dreams for company. She prays she is dreaming and she prays that the mother before her mother never got to see the hands splayed across her eyelids and she prays and prays it will end. 

It does end. The neighbors come by in the morning to bid her a goodbye (to see the inside of her house, to marvel at her crazy); a van from the asylum will be here within the month. When she opens the door they do not know where to look. Her face is covered in scratches that will someday be scars, the color of a broken promise. The floor behind her is caked in fabric bits and glass. Her walls are barely visible behind the mirrors. She opens her mouth to tell them about the Mirror Man, but their ears are closed because they decided to stop believing her long before, the day they put a mirror in a box with packing paper and her address on the front. She is so ugly, they whisper to each other. How can she stand to look at herself? 

They put all her mirrors in boxes and cart them away. 

When she sleeps, the house is still full of fragmented shadows and fingernails pooling on the floorboards. When she wakes, the ground is bare below her, swept clean. This was not a ghost story, she tells herself. He was here. By the time the asylum van arrives at her stoop, Dreamer and her mirrors have disappeared into moving trucks into apartments into antique shops; into a hazy recollection of goosebumps and scars. The holes in the walls have been filled and painted over cheaply, but on the whole, the place remains bare—empty. Scrubbed clean of Dreamer and all her ugly dreams.

Michela Rowland

(CW: General violence/gore/bodily fluids, Sexism, Verbal/Emotional/ Psychological abuse)