The Threshold

When a face came too close, you lifted the mirror and held it there until the glass became the world. But the face beyond it always belonged to a stranger. Their eyes hold weather you did not live. Laughter you never heard carved the lines around their mouth; grief beyond your reach hollowed their cheeks. One day the glass catches a face it cannot keep. The mirror slips. The sound is too small for what it ends: the last word of the only world you knew. The floor fills with bright refusals. In the ruin: a face that is not yours.

The Way

The mirror breaks; the old habit does not. Broken glass still catches light at your feet, and you reach for what is left of the world. Your fingers close on nothing. You kneel to press the pieces together. The edges cut exactly where they refuse to join. Your hands surrender before you do. When even the light will not be held, the stranger remains: grief moving where you cannot follow; joy that does not need you. The hand learns a quieter reach. Their eyes find yours and expect nothing.

The Shadow

The Astute held someone once – all her weight, all her unguessed substance. His arms learnt her shape, the slope of her shoulder in the dark, the weight of her sleep. But the weather behind her eyes passed him by. When he finally looked up, she had already turned away. He counted a year; she had lived only a season. Faces exhaust him now. He meets the farewell before he meets the face. Behind his eyes, the stage is lit before anyone enters. He casts each stranger on sight: one as prop, one as adversary, the rest as audience. He gives them lines before they have breath, then narrows the stage until no face can surprise him. He craved witnesses. He made them all too small to witness. ❖ The Adoring finds the mirror empty and fills it with a stranger. She looked into the glass once and found no one looking back. Only a shape waiting to be told what it was. Her hand met her own face and could not feel it. Now she angles every mirror towards him. She studies his reflection as she never studied her own. Every stroke laid on him is one withheld from her own face. Beneath the gilt, her own face goes quietly out. When the gilt flakes away, she screams betrayal at the face she covered. The brush is still wet in her hand.

The Cut