The Mirror

The silver moon was astounding, he thought. The cold light made everything appear as if belonging to a recurrent dream from his childhood. But ever since that night he couldn’t dream anymore. He would often lie there, on his bed, head sinking in the pillows, and he would imagine how it felt like to dream…

This evening such thoughts made his mind blurry, his mouth bitter, and his limbs shaking with what he could only describe as anger. He started pacing nervously around the room. Swiftly and with a brisk move he opened the window. Moonlight flooded the room, an absolute eerie it was, almost as bright as daylight. The corner of his eye caught the reflection of those shimmery rays bouncing off the surface of the old mirror, the family heirloom. Its gold frame covered with years of dust, it lay there as a reminder of what was before.

He stepped towards the mirror slowly, hypnotized. His body shivering, he stopped, facing that portal to his past, not knowing whether what he saw was real or merely a figment of his imagination.  His hair cascading over his cheekbones gently brushed the collar of his white shirt; his mother liked his hair like that, a rebel, she used to call him. His cheeks once flushed with youth’s blood now had the pallor of marble. His fiery eyes betrayed the fever of his mind and stood like two ambers beneath the broad forehead unmarred by the passing of time.

What had he become? He tried to shout but the words would not pass his lips. He looked again in the mirror but this time only saw the empty room behind him. He cast no reflection. The light passed undeviated through the hollow space where his soul used to be.

Tags: creative writing, writing contest finalist

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 12:29 am and is filed under Monthly Finalists, Weekly Finalist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.