#271 A Mirror’s Just a Bad Approximation

by Mark Alvarez

You know how you feel that shiver? It's because the mirror stores every soul that has ever looked in it.

On the first day God made light, so that he could diffuse the rest of the world. A medium were he could diffuse his actions through heaven and earth. It’s a plane. A pinhole that inverts.

When you look into a mirror, the light from your eyes shoots out to the surface. The mirror’s own light reaches out. Where the two meet, an image forms.

You leave the mirror but you do not leave. Your soul is stuck there with the thousands who came before.

Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.

I’m drowning.

Don’t kill me.

The mirror’s light is a hand; when you approach it reaches to embrace you. Your eyes reach back. A mirror’s like an eye that’s always searching.

If you look at a fountain sideways, you can see that the water is really light. When it flows from one level to the next, when it whirls and eddies warps and whorls, it’s just white; it’s just white and an absence of white. It’s the slipperiest mirror.

When you enter the water, it sees into your soul. The light passes through you skin to attach to all those little things. Your genetic code, your history, your fears.

When you step into the water, you have given it to me.

The mirror’s just a bad approximation.



In the past, a superteam made up of the history’s most famous philosophers (and Shakespeare, since the Renaissance didn’t have famous philosophers) band together to help the Allies stop World War Two in its tracks. In the present, a private detective is hot on the trail of a man cloned by aliens; a man who’s clones are serial killers. In the future, a man and a woman drink champagne in Barcelona, unaware that they’re the key to everything.

In Paris, a black cloud hovers, waiting to consume the world.


Click on the cover to visit the book's Amazon page.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Really interesting premise!