The Mirror’s Countdown

My wife and I had just finished scrubbing the last of our faded affirmations off the bathroom mirror, leaving only the bold red countdown to our move to the coast. The number twelve stared back at us, a promise of salt air and new beginnings. We had lived in this old farmhouse for three years, ever since we inherited it from my wife’s aunt, who had passed away in the very room across the hall. We had always felt her presence, but it was a gentle, comforting thing, like a familiar scent in the air. We chalked it up to memory, to the house’s old bones.

Two days ago, before I left for my shift at the grain mill, I picked up the dry-erase marker and scrawled a line from our wedding song on the glass, “You’re the first one I see when the sun hits my eyes,” splitting it across two lines, slightly tilted, as was my habit. When I got home that evening, the house was quiet, and I noticed the mirror was fogged from my wife’s shower, but there was a clear, dry patch right in the center, as if something had breathed on it and wiped it away. I dismissed it as a quirk of the old plumbing, the steam not quite reaching that spot.

But then I looked closer. The last letter of each of my lines, the ‘s’ in ‘eyes’ and the ‘e’ in ‘my’, had been altered, turned just a few degrees, making them look like they were leaning toward each other, as if the words were sharing a secret. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the draft from the window. I called out to my wife, but she was in the living room, humming along to the radio. I traced the letters with my finger, and for a moment, I could have sworn the glass was colder there.

That night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were not alone. The floorboards creaked in the hallway, but that was old house music. The wind rattled the gutters, but that was the weather. I tried to sleep, but my mind kept returning to the mirror, to the letters that had been moved. I remembered stories my wife told me about her aunt, how she would write little notes in the steam of the bathroom window for her husband, who had died years before. They were always short, loving messages: “Wait for me,” or “I’ll be there soon.” My wife said her aunt never really got over it.

The next morning, I went to check the mirror. The countdown still said twelve. My lyric was still there, but now the ‘s’ and the ‘e’ were even more turned, almost perpendicular to the rest of the text. I wrote a question mark below it, half in jest. When I came back from work, there was an answer, in handwriting that was not mine or my wife’s, small and shaky: “She is.”

My wife noticed the message first. She turned pale, her hand trembling as she touched the glass. “She’s here,” she whispered. “My aunt, she’s here.” I tried to rationalize it, said I must have written it in my sleep, but she shook her head. “Her handwriting, I would know it anywhere.” She pulled out an old recipe card from a drawer, a butterscotch pie recipe, and compared the writing. It matched, the same slant, the same loops. I felt the room grow heavier.

Over the next few days, the messages multiplied. On the tenth, there was a drawing of a sunflower, her aunt’s favorite. On the eighth, the words “I’m sorry” appeared in the steam. My wife was becoming obsessed, spending hours in the bathroom, speaking to the empty air, asking questions. I was scared, not of a ghost, but of what it was doing to her. We argued, and I suggested we erase the messages, but she wouldn’t let me. She said her aunt was trying to tell her something.

On the fifth day, the countdown was changed. It no longer read five. It read zero. I was sure we had written five, but there it was, zero, in bright red. And beneath it, in that same shaky script, the words: “Don’t go.”

My wife broke down. She sobbed that we couldn’t leave, that her aunt was calling her, that she had died alone and was waiting for her. I held her, trying to calm her, but I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and the room grew dark. The mirror pulsed with a sickly light, and I saw my aunt’s face, not her dying face, but her face as it was in the photo on the wall, young and smiling, but with hollow black eyes. She opened her mouth, and a sound like rushing water filled my ears, and I saw the future: my wife, walking into the sea, her hand outstretched, her eyes glassy. I saw myself, alone, weeping on the shore.

I grabbed my wife, dragged her out of the bathroom, slammed the door. She was limp, mumbling, “She needs me.” I shook her. “Snap out of it!” She blinked, looked at me, and the fog seemed to lift from her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, her voice trembling. I told her we were leaving, today. She nodded weakly.

I packed the car, ignoring the thuds from the bathroom door, the scratching of fingernails on wood. As we drove away, the house shrank in the rearview mirror. I didn’t look back. But on the hood of the car, in condensation from the morning dew, someone had written: “You’ll be back.”

We’ve been at the beach for three days now. The countdown in my head says twelve. But every morning, when I look in the mirror, I see a number scratched into the glass, not on the surface, but inside, like a crack. It’s always one less. Today, it’s nine. And my wife, she keeps talking to herself, saying, “Soon, Auntie, soon.”