One day, everyone’s reflections went on strike, and Chloe found out through her college roommate.
Janet popped her head out of the bathroom door and knocked twice on the wall, forcing Chloe to look away from her half-finished marketing project. She was about to remark on Janet’s wet hair dripping onto the wooden floorboards but held back when she saw her expression.
“Something up?”
Janet nodded. “The mirror broke.”
“You broke it?”
“No. It just broke.”
Chloe processed that for a second. “You’re telling me the mirror broke itself.”
“Yeah.” Janet said, her face a shade between confusion and amusement.
Chloe stood up from her swivel chair. “Okay, lemme see.”
She stepped past Janet into their bathroom and froze. For a few moments she couldn’t describe what was wrong with the mirror. Her mind couldn’t comprehend it. There was nothing in the mirror. Well, the room was still there, the counters and makeup palettes and towels and all that, but neither she nor Janet appeared. Chloe side-eyed her roommate.
“Damn, that screen is hyper realistic. How much did it cost?”
“I’m not pranking you!”
“Mhm, well, neat trick. Please get rid of it before I shower though, it’s—”
“I said, this isn’t a trick! I really have no idea how this happened.”
“You’re telling me that—” Chloe gestured at the mirror, a little angry now, “Our reflections have magically disappeared. And you had nothing to do with it?”
There was a pounding at their door. The two roommates exchanged a glance. Janet opened the door and there was their next-door neighbor, Sierra.
“Did your reflections disappear?” asked Sierra, panting.
With an I-told-you-so glance at Chloe, Janet responded, “You guys too?”
Sierra cursed in affirmation, and the two pulled up the news, their phone cameras, and social media. In the dorm halls, more students emerged, looking more awake at midnight than any dose of caffeine could’ve prompted.
Chloe zoned out all their voices, rising in hysteria, and touched a finger to the mirror. It felt just like it always had, except her reflection wasn’t there anymore. The mirror looked like a perfect, unpixelated photo of an empty bathroom.
***
The world descended into mayhem. It wasn’t just the reflections. Shadows too. Even photos or videos taken in the past turned up empty. It was almost as if humans simply didn’t appear on the light spectrum anymore—which also didn’t make sense, since each human being was just a conglomerate of atoms, no different from the tables or walls that the mirrors still reflected. There was a bug in reality.
Models and actors suddenly found themselves jobless. Animation studios shot to the top of the entertainment industry. News channel showed empty, almost ghostly newsrooms. Videos of presidential speeches featured a disembodied voice speaking from an empty podium to an empty auditorium. YouTube and Instagram became a graveyard of dreary landscapes—abandoned cities in their gray, cement splendor.
In the absence of entertainment, people began going out to parks, digging out old bikes or tennis racquets from storage. Bookstores saw a sharp increase in revenue. Nature documentaries surged in popularity.
Still, others turned to less savory means of busying themselves in their downtime. Criminal activity and drug usage peaked, since surveillance systems were handicapped. Each security camera was reduced to monitoring the opening and closing of doors. Photo IDs showed a blank, white background. Airports and border crossings were shut down with iron clamps. Ships were left stranded offshore. Military personnel scrambled to lock down their secret bases.
Internet platforms were flooded with conspiracy theories and newfound cults. Overseas, the Pope declared, in a written document, that the disappearance of human reflections was not an indication of the Second Coming, and demanded that the populace calm down. No one listened. Dozens of church branches formed overnight, each helmed by a self-proclaimed prophet preaching that they were visited by an angel on the night of the “Great Disappearance.”
***
Exactly a month after the reflections disappeared, they came back.
Chloe caught the precise moment hers did. She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth and staring idly into the mirror. Over the past couple weeks, she had been reading up on spiritualism and different philosophers, especially Nietzsche. He offered a glimmer of rationality and stability through the chaos, which was ironic, since he went clinically insane in the latter half of his life.
Then, the mirror warped. The head of the toothbrush, which had been floating in midair, suddenly disappeared, concealed by a pair of lips. The image elongated into a nose, a neckline, eyebrows, arms, like some invisible hand had reverse-erased the image back into existence. Chloe made eye contact with the figure in the mirror.
Her reflection blinked. Chloe’s breath lulled. Had she blinked? No, she hadn’t. Just to be sure, she held her eyes wide open. They had barely started watering when the reflection blinked again. It raised its hand and pressed on the glass. Like a greeting.
Chloe swore, stumbled out of the bathroom, and slammed the door.
***
Once again, the world upended itself.
Everyone agreed that what came back were not reflections. They were something else.
Many who had been standing in front of their mirrors when these “reflections” returned had vanished off the face of the earth. “Swallowed,” is how witnesses described it on social media sites and the news. There was no video evidence; people were swallowed by the cameras’ tiny mirrors too.
The event was widely acknowledged as the “First Swallowing.”
Online, people quoted Lovecraft and his works on cosmic horror, drawing parallels between fiction and reality. Eldritch or not, the reflections’ reappearance caused an arguably bigger disruption in society than their disappearance. It was one thing to suddenly lose your reflection, it was another for your reflection to kidnap you.
Most times they behaved as regular reflections, passive and subdued. But when they didn’t, it was run or die. Some idiots tried to fight their reflections and still disappeared, just into a shattered mirror instead of a smooth one.
Highways and roads around the globe went out of commission. Hundreds and thousands of cars had crashed when the First Swallowing occurred, and the unmanned machines kept piling up. No one was willing to clear out the debris.
Theists, especially those of the Abrahamic religions, declared the reflections were “indirect angels,” meant to judge humanity and purge sinners. That theory quickly fell apart when the upper echelons of those religions disappeared as they attempted to prove their holiness.
Other spiritualists believed that conquering one’s eldritch counterpart was key, so they would host “staring sessions” where people would sit in a room, one mirror each, and stare at their reflection for hours upon hours. Many disappeared, many didn’t, but no one knew if the ones who didn’t were simply lucky or had developed immunity through their practiced staring. There was no pattern to it. Cryptologists, sociologists, and psychologists huddled together in meeting rooms, scratching their head over data charts.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Within a week, the world’s population decreased by 23 percent. Everyone lost a relative or a friend. It was almost better to have been lonely in the first place. The worst hit were the teens and the middle-aged, who tended to face periods of existential volatility and emotional vulnerability. Those who isolated themselves in their homes drowned in their own paranoia. The more extreme cases of mental collapse involved shouting into mirrors, praying for a sign, a response. Some broke the glass in violent fits and it shattered against their fists, the fragments drilling into their skin, the pain a comforting, lucid proof of existence.
***
On the university campus, the new mirages were an unavoidable curse. It was easy to forget just how many surfaces could act as mirrors when reflections disappeared for a while.
Chloe watched the world keep spinning, holing herself up in the library with her books as a shield. Forget her marketing major, forget Nietzsche, she had returned to the fantasy section, binging several of her childhood-favorites each day and constantly discovering more. The world was ending, why not indulge a bit?
Her friends disappeared, one by one. Some were swallowed. Others lost themselves to drugs, and returned to haunt the walkways, the smell of weed trailing after them. Yet, it was Chloe who found herself feeling more and more like a ghost. The “normal” person amongst a paranoid, hysterical crowd had become the abnormal one instead.
Chloe still scrolled through social media, now considerably emptier and featuring a lot more pretty flowers and panda cubs tumbling around their playground. Walking back to her dorm, she had memorized a path of where to safely direct her eyes, tracing brick and mortar lines, tree shadows, cracks in the cement; anything not reflective. She had adapted. What else was there to do?
There were others like Chloe, who still tried to maintain a composed air, but not many. They would nod at each other when they crossed paths, strangers united by the common factor of alienation.
Her dorm hadn’t changed much, except for all the reflective surfaces being covered with thick black cloth, passed out for free by the government. For now, everyone had to keep their mirrors and glass where they were until the government could coordinate a plan to dispose of an entire nation’s worth of mirrors without utterly wrecking the environment. From what Chloe heard, they were looking to establish scientific guidelines and safety protocols before initiating transportation.
She was fine with the status quo for now, but her roommate…
“You’re back,” a voice rasped from the darkness. Everyone had their method of feeling safe and Janet’s was simply refraining from turning on the lights. If there was no light, there would be no reflection. Problem solved.
It was, in Chloe’s opinion, a stupid solution. How was she supposed to live like that? Chloe flipped on the light switch, and the ceiling lamp sputtered to life. Janet shrank further into her bed. She had cocooned herself in a blanket, huddled as she had been for the last two weeks, leaving only her two eyes and an inch of her forehead visible.
“Turn them off,” Janet protested in a small voice. “They could come back.”
“You’re being childish.”
Janet didn’t answer, so Chloe kept the lights on. She wanted to read, and it’s not like she hadn’t been triple checking all the mirror cloaks, at Janet’s request, every morning and night.
Janet’s condition hadn’t been this bad when the reflections first returned. The first week, she tried to keep a sense of normalcy like Chloe, but she was jumpscared by a reflection from a spilled pool of water on the bathroom floor and became skittish. Soon, she began to see hallucinations: “mirrors and faces everywhere,” she claimed. Now, a month after The First Swallowing, Janet had become her own ghost.
Chloe flopped down on her bed and took out a new book. The concept of studying no longer existed. Her professor was one of the first to be taken and the college administration overall had experienced a breakdown in operations and had not yet recovered.
The food delivery guy arrived at 6:30 PM sharp. Chloe grabbed a jacket and trekked outside.
A scrawny man, around the same age as her, sat on a bicycle at her dormitory gate holding a plastic takeout bag.
“Thanks.” She took the plastic bag from the delivery man, hooking her finger through the tied knot. She caught a whiff of the Chinese takeout inside, still hot and steaming, a welcome contrast to the chilly weather. Her mouth watered as she handed him a ten dollar bill.
The delivery man didn’t hesitate to take the money. “Appreciate it.”
Chloe nodded. “How’s downtown?”
“Doing alright. People are adapting.”
“Yeah?”
“Sort of. There’s this trend in my area where people just don’t make eye contact with one another, you know, ‘cause you can see your reflection in them. Seems like it hasn’t caught on with your university yet.”
“Huh. That’s pretty smart.”
“Yeah but it feels weird, you know? At least things are starting to settle down.”
Chloe pursed her lips. “Some of my friends in the city have been talking about a rise in crime.”
He shrugged. “There’s always been crime. Most people don’t want to go outside anymore. It’s only the desperate ones who think they have nothing to lose that cause a ruckus.”
“Have you been robbed?”
“Not really. I found a way to take advantage of the whole mirror thing. Look.” He fumbled in his pouch and took out a covered hand mirror, the kind commonly found in makeup shops. “When someone approaches me menacingly, I’ll just take this out and face it in their direction. Scares them off real quick. Kinda like a gun, if you think about it.”
“Whoa, I never thought of weaponizing mirrors before. That’s pretty genius.”
“I know, right?” He smirked.
“You seem to be holding up pretty well despite the apocalypse.”
“I mean, an apocalypse ain’t taking away the need for food or sleep or a roof over your head. I still gotta make a living.” The delivery man smiled, but Chloe could tell it was forced. How many people had he lost? The online death toll was nearing 3 billion, but no census could be truly accurate, given the peculiar state of the global security and communications system.
“You’re right. Have a safe trip back.”
“Yeah. Thanks, miss.”
Chloe returned to her dorm and got out some paper plates, using the chopsticks that came with the takeout bag to eat. As always, she set aside a portion for Janet.
While Chloe’s entire marketing career path was circling the drain, Janet’s childhood dream of becoming an artist was more than feasible now that animations were the only source of moving picture entertainment and portraits the only way to capture images. Artists could still make it big.
As for Chloe? She was still searching for an alternative path. Maybe she would turn to other business related majors. Maybe she would try her shot at art. All that time she spent doodling in her notebooks had to count for something. Maybe she would go home first and check on her mother, who has dementia. Oddly, Chloe’s future held more possibilities and freedom in the apocalypse. What was her time worth in this new world?
“Chloe.”
“Hm?”
Chloe looked up, slightly annoyed at the interruption to her dinner.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Janet whispered, still huddled in her blanket. “I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Then don’t. Act like you did that first week. You were strong.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I think you were. You’re stronger than your reflection. It’s just a mirror, no big deal. ”
“Don’t say that. It gives me chills.” Janet shifted, wrapping herself tighter in her cocoon. “Stop talking to me.”
Chloe didn’t bother to point out the fact that Janet had started the conversation and went back to her dinner.
That night, as she was trying to fall asleep, Chloe could feel Janet’s gaze boring into her side. It was a crawling feeling that she had learned to stomach. When Janet first started watching her sleep, two weeks before, Chloe turned around to confront her roommate and made a snarky comment. But the eyes that stared back at her held an abyssal quality, so unfathomable and empty that Chloe had instantly clamped her lips together and turned back around.
She didn’t know when she fell asleep, only that she suddenly jolted awake, feet clammy and hands cold. A noise came from the bathroom. She twisted around to see the bathroom door slightly ajar, light streaming from the crack. Janet wasn’t in her bed.
Chloe’s heart dropped. From where she lay, she should be seeing the black cover over the bathroom mirror through the door crack. But there was none. Instead, the mirror’s naked surface reflected the hand towels on a rack. Chloe edged in closer, careful not to expose herself to the mirror.
Janet’s reflection came into view, then her torso. She was leaning against the counter, making direct eye contact with herself, unblinking. What was she doing? Had she finally lost it? Chloe’s gaze darted back and forth between Janet and the mirror. Janet’s reflection was unmoving as it stared back, very normal, very Janet. It looked even more like the Janet that Chloe knew than the real, physical Janet.
Her roommate raised her hand and pressed it against the glass, as if trying to touch the entity on the other side. Her reflection followed.
“Take me,” Janet whispered. “Please just take me.”
And the mirror answered.
The skin between her hand and the mirror hand merged, the two Janets uniting. Chloe watched the glass swirl, revealing, for the briefest of moments, the abyss that lay beyond its borders. Janet’s hand distorted too, followed by her arm and body, sucked into the maws of the gaping void like a drop of bright paint into pitch black tar. The mirror paused, as if digesting its meal, then unswirled, returning to normal display. It did not return Janet.
Half an hour passed before Chloe found the courage to move. She got up from her bed and approached the bathroom, closing her eyes and grasping along the floor until she found the black cloth that Janet had ripped off. She draped it tightly over the mirror.
When she stumbled back into bed, her eyelids felt heavier than ever. Her mind refused to acknowledge the loss. Or maybe it already had, the event processed emotionlessly like any other fragment of information. Maybe, Chloe thought as she drifted off, maybe, when she woke up in the morning, the world would’ve flipped upside down to become right side up again. And if not the next morning, then the morning after that. She will wait for the grief and the relief to come. She will survive to feel it.
Like this, Chloe fell back into a dreamless, unsubstantial sleep.