by Dori Lumpkin
Araminta grew up with a mirror in her room. Only, it wasn’t a mirror, and she knew that, she did, but she wanted to believe that it was so badly that she almost let herself forget what it really was. Almost. And when something, one day, reached out and took her by the hand and told her to step through, it’s fine, just trust me, who was she to disagree? She was only a child, and her father had never quite cared enough about her to tell her not to trust strangers, so of course she did. Of course. Anything to get away from the house where her mother died, which was growing colder and emptier as the years passed. Anything to get away from her screaming baby brother, who was just about two now and didn’t know how to shut his stupid face. Father always let him scream, and always told her to shut up or she’d face the consequences when she said that his screaming made her head hurt. There was no screaming in the mirror. It was all quiet. It was lovely.
What Araminta didn’t know was that things liked to watch her through the mirror-that-wasn’t, and they had been for a while. Watching and waiting. Taking careful stock as she tried on new dresses, twirling around gracefully. They had been planning. They had constructed the world to be absolutely perfect in every way, just for her. They had engineered every moment so that when the Thing (it called itself Vesper) reached through the not-a-mirror-but-a-window and asked the young girl if she would like to come somewhere safe for a while, Araminta would see no other option than to accept. And with that, they could truly begin.
And the world was everything she would have dreamt, of course it was, like the ice cream sundaes her mother used to make, so when she wasn’t there, she was watching it through that window-mirror, just waiting for the next chance she would get to take Vesper’s hand and step through.
She always called Vesper her imaginary friend, but that wasn’t quite right. After all, Vesper was only half-imaginary at worst and fully, truly real at the absolute best. Originally, Araminta thought that Vesper was her reflection, but that wasn’t quite right either. When Vesper’s hand reached out that first time, stretching the glass to bend and break around it, it wasn’t a hand but instead was something cold and tense. It hurt to touch and had a sharpness to it, like the swords her father used to make her grab by the blade because he said doing so would make her stronger.
But Vesper called her Minty, just like her mother had, and so she kept going back. And every time she passed back through, every time she returned to her home with the screaming and the loneliness and all of the creature discomforts she usually attributed to Hallewelle Manor, she left a piece of herself behind. But was it such a bad thing, to leave pieces of yourself in a world that was built to cater to your exact needs?
After several months of the back and forth, Vesper finally decided to tell Araminta the truth. It was one of the few times Vesper had almost entirely entered Araminta’s room, which meant that it had to be a very, very important conversation. Araminta had asked her a few times in the past why she couldn’t come all the way through and play with her, or maybe attend one of the many tea parties she hosted and attended alone with her dolls. Vesper told her that if she left the other world, if she ever crossed back through the window completely, she would die. And that was that.
That day was different, though. Vesper slipped through the mirror silently, resting her back against it. At least one part of her body had to be touching the window at all times, of course. She couldn’t risk losing that connection.
“There’s someone who wants to meet you, Minty.” Vesper’s voice was like metal on glass, and filled the entire space. It was a wonder that no one ever heard them talking. But then again, who was bothering to pay attention to Araminta?
“Who?” Minty’s voice was small in comparison, and she hated how quiet she sounded. Her father would have called her pathetic, weak, and any number of larger words she hadn’t yet taught herself to understand.
“Someone you know,” Vesper responded, choosing her words carefully. “Remember how I was telling you that where I’m from, there’s a matching version of each person?”
Araminta nodded.
“Is it me? Do I get to meet myself?” Vesper laughed at Araminta’s enthusiasm.
“Not quite, darling. It’s a man.” There was a moment of pained silence. Araminta tried to be optimistic, really, she did.
“It’s my father.”
“Well,” Vesper sighed. “Not quite. Remember, we might have the same faces, but that doesn’t mean we’re the same people.”
“Will he like me?” There was a glimpse of hope from the young girl. Vesper just laughed, a sound that made Araminta flinch.
“He wants to, very much.”
Araminta took Vesper’s hand eagerly after that, and didn’t even flinch when her nail beds started bleeding from the contact. Sometimes the way the world-through-the-window interacted with her world was just like that, and she could accept a little bit of blood if it meant a few hours of peace.
Vesper took her deeper into the other world than she had ever gone before. It was, of course, a perfect mirror of her home, but there were some parts of Hallewelle Manor that Araminta had not dared explore.
They moved past the library, filled with all of her favorite books. Past her workshop room, which she would spend hours at a time stringing small metal beads onto a chain, making lovely pieces of delicate gold jewelry that she would never wear. They moved deeper into the house, to a place that she knew well but tried her best to avoid. A place that only ever meant darkness and pain and all the bad things she had spent her whole short life learning to be smart enough to stay away from.
Vesper approached the door at the end of the hallway and knocked twice, more polite and more careful than she had ever been in Araminta’s company. The door swung open under her fist, and the two of them stepped into what was supposed to be Archibald Hallewelle’s bedroom together.
Not-Archibald-Hallewelle sat on a massive throne made of impossibly sharp glass. It was once a bed, Araminta could tell that much, but it had shattered, fractured, and dissolved into a million pieces that scattered across the room and built up the sides of the walls into a wave. It was almost a beautiful scene, the way the light reflected across the shards, covering the room in delicate rainbows. It would have stayed beautiful too, had Araminta never taken notice of the thing that was Not her father.
He was in the corner of the room, resting (if you could call it resting) on a collection of shards that formed what might’ve been some sort of chair. It took Araminta too long to realize why the glass surrounding his body was a deep scarlet color. It wasn’t because the glass had any actual color to it. No, it was the beads of blood that rolled down it, leaving trails behind that almost looked like rain. The blood originated from Archibald himself, from his arms, his legs, his neck— anywhere the glass made contact with his body, propping him up like a sort of tortured puppet.
It took everything Araminta had not to gasp, or turn and run away. On the way here, Vesper had told her to be brave, and she was trying so hard. He looked like her father, he really did, which was what made her anxious in the first place. And the blood, and the glass, and the way he was looking at her— he looked hungry.
She glanced over at Vesper, who did nothing other than nudge her forward. Archibald leaned forward as well, reaching a hand out towards her. His skin stuck in the places the glass was puncturing him, creating long, sinewy strings of blood and skin and muscle. Minty was frozen in place. Archibald opened his mouth, revealing a maw of not teeth, of course not, but more shards of glass, stuck carelessly across empty, bloody gums. He smiled, brushing his hand across Araminta’s cheek. Where he touched, a trail of blood bloomed, and her cheek split open.
She couldn’t help herself. Araminta screamed. And then she turned and bolted.
Vesper’s hand grazed her arm as she darted past, causing bright white spots of pain to appear behind Araminta’s eyes. She felt more, as if now that she had seen him, everything was too much. She ran through the halls of Not Her Home, trying her best to remember the backwards, reflected way they had come.
Vesper was behind her, she could tell. Minty could hear her screaming, like a thousand windows shattering all at once, telling her to come back, don’t be afraid, we need you.
They didn’t need her. They couldn’t need her. No one needed her. But she didn’t want people like them to need her, anyway.
She made it to Not Her Room, finally, thank god, and dove headfirst through the mirror, letting it pull against her skin and resist, just like it had every time before. She had always assumed that the resistance was because of her own lack of desire to go home, but not this time. It wanted her to stay behind.
Grabbing the edge of the Not A Mirror, No, A Window, she pulled herself the rest of the way through, tumbling out onto her actual real bedroom floor. Araminta promptly burst into tears.
She did not allow herself respite for long. She sobbed for no longer than a minute before moving over to the large standing mirror that had always occupied that specific corner of her room. She could already see Vesper in the corner of the reflection, pushing the door open recklessly, barreling towards the glass with intent to dive through it, just as Araminta had done.
But she wouldn’t succeed.
Araminta grabbed the back edge of the gilded frame and pushed, letting the mirror fall on her hard, cold tile floor. It shattered. It was beautiful.
She didn’t think about how her father, her Real Father, would react, once he discovered the mess and realized what she had done. The mirror was probably expensive, which meant it was more valuable than anything Araminta could imagine. She didn’t care.
She busied herself with cleaning up the shards— trying her best not to cut herself on them, though she was still bleeding everywhere else. In the morning, her father would ask her how her cheek was split. She would not have an answer for him. Instead, she would think of the single piece of glass she had selected carefully from the mess and placed in the drawer of her bedside table. She would return to her room after breakfast, staring into it, hoping to see Vesper’s eyes again and wondering exactly what it was that she left behind.
Dori Lumpkin is a queer writer and graduate student from South Alabama. Their work has appeared in Susurrus and Diet Milk Magazines, and is forthcoming in many other places. They love all things speculative and weird, and strive to make fiction writing a more inclusive place. You can find them @whimsyqueen on most social media websites.
