Reverence of fatigue prevailed over curiosity. I scraped the end of the box cutter between the layers of thick tapes, cutting through the tougher glue. No less than ten minutes of grunting and tugging at the heavy object until the blanket peeled back.
My breath choked in my throat. My fingers stuck to the cloth.
The frame was cast iron, beaten into monstrous, flowing designs which seemed nearly to resemble mouths of agony or curling smoke. But it was not the frame that gave my heart its throbbing in my ribs.
It was the glass.
It was not a monitors. It was no frosted window. It was a spotless, much polished, perfect sheet of silvered glass.
A mirror.
A real, contravened, most very criminal reflection. It would take me ten years to have a stint in a federal prison just by possessing such. In the belongings of my dad was this hidden item, Why?
I sat long and gazed at the corners of the frame, and dared not venture to see the center. It is instilled in your mind by society as a child: Don't look. When you look at yourself like that you will be crazy. It cultivates vanity, narcissism, psychotic breaks, etc. The stories of horror were interminable.
But I was alone. And my chest ached with the sudden, abstract setting desire to see myself. It was seven years since I last saw my own face, when the ban was rigorously imposed on amateur photography.
My hands trembling, I leaned forward slowly, with my eyes facing the middle of the glass.
I hoped I would find Olivia Baker Andrew. I expected to see the untidy orange hair with which Tori was accustomed to teasing me about. The weary eyes, the fair complexion, I expected the small birthmark, just above the left of my lower lip.
And I did. Sort of.
The face looking out of it had red, dishevelled hair. It had pale skin. It bore the very same hazel eyes, with the same dark lashes. It even had the pinprick type of birthmark next to the mouth.
However, it was not ME in the mirror.
The jaw was too defined and flattened in a fashion mine was not. The neck was thicker. My eyes leapt down, and this time there was a stirring of bile up my throat, I noticed that the shoulders were wide, bracing a dark grey t-shirt. The chest was quite flat.
"Surely my breasts weren't flat", I thought to myself. "i take pride in being well endowed"
I gave a gulp, and threw my hand across my mouth.
The person in the mirror shuddered. His big hand clenched over his mouth. In the exact same motion.
It was a man. A boy, really. Around my age. He was a perfect image of me, as though somebody had cloned my DNA and had simply switched the chromosomal switch, changing XX to XY.
What the hell I whispered. My voice trembled and resonated a little in the dark basement.
The boy in the mirror put down his hand. His lips moved. I heard not a sound out of the glass, but I could read his lips well. They constituted the same words.
What the Fuck.
Crab-walking over the cement, I scrambled back till my back was rested against one of the support pillars of wood. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had a psychotic breakdown. The warnings by the government were correct. I gazed into the mirror and my head immediately thumped. I was delusionally seeing myself as a male.
I stood there, puffing and puffing, counting, counting. I wished that as I opened my eyes the glass would testify that I wasn't insane. I needed my own reflection.
But there he still was. HIM
Nor was he imitating me any longer.
I was sitting against the pillar when the boy in the mirror had bent forward. He had his eyes staring at me with a puzzled expression. Then he put up his hand and touched his palm on his side of the glass.
I couldn't breathe. My lungs no longer knew how to work. This was no reflection. It was a window.
Up slowly, and under a compulsion to which I could not give way or resist, I crawled back towards the heavy frame. I matched his gesture, and clenched my own stiff, rough hand. I stretched out, where I knew I would meet cold and hard glass.
Rather my fingertips touched his.
The surface of the mirror wasn't solid. It was like rubbing a everyday hustle-bustle of thawing ice. Violent shock of electricity went up my arm and grabbed my muscles. I screamed, endeavoured to withdraw, but what I was feeling was too great.
The eyes of the boy flew open. His hand grabbed a hold of mine--it really grabbed my hand, body to body, prehension and warmth, things just became real.
The room spun. The moist odor of the cellar had been abruptly changed by the odor of ozone and smouldering copper. I was pulled with an enormous power, which plunged my face into the silver.
It was as though I were falling, a roaring in my ears, the utterly dreadful sense of my own body turning inside out, being pulled out, like a rubber band.
After the utterly dreadful experience, I struck a solid, wooden floor.
I groaned, and coughed for dust to escape my lungs. I scrambled to my hands and knees, with my head whirling. It was different air here. Drier. Hotter.
"Hey! What are you so excited about?"
It was low-pitched and certainly a manly voice.
With a stumbling rise I scrambled to my feet. I found myself in a bedroom. An unkempt, untidy bedroom that I was unfamiliar with. Bands that I have never heard pasted on the walls.
There was a guy standing before me. He was a big fellow with dark hair, and an enraged guardian stare. Swively familiar, he really looks like... but the context was all out of place. He was like Tori. Had Tori been a bad-attitude linebacker.
"Who are you?" I pleaded, heart souring. "How did I get here?"
Then there was another realisation, the voice that I heard coming out of my mouth was not mine.
It was lower. Deeper. I felt it banging in my chest in a manner that I had never experienced.
I looked down. I was clothed in a dark grey t-shirt. My shoulders were set wide. My hands were bigger, the knuckles fatter.
I spun around. The Mirror frame was leaning against the wall, standing behind me. But there was no glass in it. Simple empty space with background of wall.
At one point I fell backwards and hit a desk. There was a small mirror, hand-held, on it. I snatched it up and stared at the reflection.
The messy red hair. The hazel eyes. The sharp jaw. The birthmark.
"Oliver."
"I asked you a question man," the dark-haired one interrupted my gazing and he walked towards me. "You going deaf?"
I mishandled the hand mirror. With a sharp crash it crashed against the wooden floor and the ringing in my ears was intensified by the shattering.
"Oh my God", I said with a deep, strange voice that tore itself out of my new throat. "I'm a guy."