The Glass Between Us

When I was twelve, my family moved into a house that had stood empty for years, a tall, narrow Victorian on a street where the elms had grown so thick they blocked out the sun. My mother called it ‘a fixer-upper with good bones,’ but I never liked it. There was a smell, like old dust and damp plaster, and a feeling that we were not the first to live there. My older brother, Marcus, had just turned nineteen and was about to ship out for basic training. He’d always been the calm one, the one who saw things in the corners of rooms and just shrugged. But I was the one who felt them, a cold prickle on my skin, a whisper just out of hearing.

The night it happened was a Tuesday in late September. My father was on the night shift, my mother was in the kitchen cleaning, and my little sister, Amy, and I were in the living room watching a rerun of a sitcom. Marcus was in his bedroom, packing his duffel bag for the morning. The television flickered, and I saw my mother walk past the hallway mirror, pause, and then sit back down on the couch next to me. She didn’t say anything, just sat with her hands folded. I looked up at her, but the light from the TV made her face look wrong—too smooth, maybe. And then I heard my brother’s voice from the hallway, a harsh whisper that cut through the laugh track: ‘Get away from her.’

I turned to see Marcus standing in the doorway, his face white as the moon. He wasn’t looking at me or Amy; he was staring at my mother. No, not at her—at the mirror behind her. I followed his gaze. The mirror was an old, gold-leafed thing that had come with the house, too heavy to move. In it, I saw my mother’s reflection. But she wasn’t sitting down. She was standing at the hall table, brushing her hair, just as she had done a minute ago. And behind her, in the mirror, stood another woman—a woman with dark, hollow eyes and a mouth open too wide, as if she were trying to swallow the air.

The reflection of my mother turned around, slowly, and looked directly at me. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. The woman behind her placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, and my mother flinched. Then, in the mirror, my mother’s reflection began to smile, a terrible, knowing smile, while the real mother on the couch beside me stayed frozen, her hands folded, her eyes blank.

Marcus grabbed my arm and pulled me up. ‘Don’t look,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘Cover your eyes and walk to the kitchen.’ He shoved Amy ahead of us. I did as he said, but I couldn’t resist one last glance over my shoulder. The mirror was empty now, except for the flyspecked glass and a faint, greasy smear that looked like a handprint. My mother was still on the couch, but now she was blinking, confused, as if she had just woken from a trance.

Later that night, after my mother had gone to bed, Marcus sat with me in my room. ‘It was the other one,’ he said. ‘The woman in the mirror. She was wearing Mama’s face. I’ve seen spirits before, but that thing… it wasn’t a spirit. It was something older, something that lives in glass.’ He told me that since he was little, he’d been able to see the dead—our grandad, our great-grandmother—but they were always faded, like old photographs. The woman in the mirror was solid, as real as you or me. ‘She was trying to step out. And she was using Mama’s reflection to do it.’

We moved out two weeks later, but the mirror stayed. My father wanted to take it, but my mother said she never wanted to see it again. We left it leaning against the wall in the dining room, facing the window. I still think about it sometimes, especially when I walk past a mirror and see my own reflection moving just a beat too slow. And I wonder if the woman in the glass is still waiting, patient as dust, for another house with a family who stays too long. There’s a glass between us and them, but it’s not as thick as they’d have you believe.