In a small country village was a mirror factory. A man worked there, sweeping up shards of broken mirrors. He poured the collected shards into a chute that led to a furnace. In the furnace, the shards melted to make mirrors again. Often the man would pocket certain clean-edged shards to take home to his wife.
At first his wife would tie these shards to string and dangle them from the ceiling to catch light and glimmer like prisms. Then there were too many for suncatchers, so she began making a large mirror.
Every night the man came home and saw the progress his wife was making on the mirror. Somehow she found just the right place for each shard, the right edges to slide alongside one another.
Soon the mirror was nearly her height from the floor up.
The man began to study the mirror mosaic in the mornings before work. He sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, newspaper untouched, trying to memorize what shapes the puzzle lacked. Then, at the factory, he’d conjure the shapes in his mind, watching light spark off the shards as he swept, pocketing only the pieces he thought would fit best in his wife’s mirror. In the evenings he watched her afix the new pieces. When they lined up exactly as he’d envisioned, he was very pleased with himself.
As the mirror grew larger and more intricate, the man noticed growing piles of unwashed dishes. The cupboard was nearly empty; cobwebs and crumbs seemed to sprout in every corner. But his wife was almost done with her project, so the man said nothing, even when he had to make the coffee himself, or make dinner from what scraps he could find, while his wife sat staring at the mirror’s emerging shape.
The day eventually came for the man to return with the final shard in his pocket. He handed it to his wife, whom he’d found sitting before the mirror just as she’d been that morning when he’d left. His wife took the shard with both hands and tenderly placed it in the mirror’s very center, completing its body-length shape.
That very moment, their modest cottage began rippling like water. All the suncatchers sparkled and spun. The ripples disappeared the edges of the mirror shards; the length of it looked smooth and whole. And from the surface of this rippling mirror sprang his wife anew.
She stepped from surface to shape, a secret that thrilled him. As the room stopped its trembling, the mirror’s surface stilled as smooth. The shards she’d used were no longer visible; it was one sheet of luminous glass. The man turned to his wife, who was reaching out to touch her double’s hair in astonishment.
At work the next day, the man couldn’t help but think of all the cobwebs and crumbs cleaned, all the dishes washed and dried and stacked, all the cupboards stocked full with oats and flour and sugar and beans. He daydreamed while he swept and emptied the dustpan, swept and emptied.
When the man came home that night, he saw his wife and her double both at the mirror, playing with their hair, laughing. More dirty dishes overflowed the sink. A spider brazenly lazed across the kitchen table. He opened cupboard door after door, but they were all empty. The man didn’t mean to slam the door on his way to the pub, but after he heard it slam, he smiled at the way their laughter choked on its wooden sound.
On the fourth day of returning home to empty cupboards, the man grabbed his wife by the shoulders and roared at her. She smiled. “I am not your wife,” she said.
He turned to his wife, who was sitting before the mirror. He spun her chair to face him, and roared again. She smiled. “I am not your wife,” she said. The women laughed and laughed.
The man, wanting to break something, yelled, “I’m going to sell this mirror.” The women stopped laughing. “You heard me,” he said. “It’s my mirror. The glass is mine. It’s mine to sell. I’m going to sell it and you two will stop—”
As he was roaring and raving, the women walked toward one another in the center of the room. They began to hold hands, their hands at the center of the two of them.
“Please,” one said. “Don’t,” the other said. “Please don’t sell it,” the first one said. “Please,” the second one echoed.
At the pub that night, the man bragged to the other patrons about his mirror. As more beers were served, the man even told them about his wife’s double. Offers were made to buy the mirror. Offers were made to buy the woman. Laughing, the men all walked from the pub toward his modest cottage. They joked about what a man might do with two wives, or a mirror that would give a man two wives. They laughed.
The man opened his front door. The crumbs were gone. The cobwebs were gone. The sink was empty and sparkling. His wife and her double stood before the mirror, holding hands.The men pushed through the doorway for a better look, a closer look. The men kept pushing. They were reaching for the women. They were laughing.
Long-legged, the women leapt together toward the mirror. They disappeared through its surface. The glass rippled behind them like water. The men fell silent. The mirror’s rippled surface went rigid, went shards. Its pieces emerged, then fell to the floor. The suncatchers in every corner twirled slowly, empty-handed in the dark.
Katherine Indermaur is the author of the chapbooks Facing the Mirror: An Essay (Coast|noCoast, 2021) and Pulse (Ghost City Press, 2018), winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, and editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared in Colorado Review, the Cortland Review, Entropy, Frontier Poetry, Ghost Proposal, the Journal, New Delta Review, Oxidant|Engine, and elsewhere. Katherine holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Salt Lake City. Twitter: @kgindermaur Instagram: @kgindermaur
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