Oculi
The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. It happened the first time a couple of days ago at the restaurant, and I’d hardly caught it during a brief glance while I quickly washed my hands. It was in the eyes, something about the eyes. Not the normal brown I’d been so accustomed to seeing myself with, instead they were a glassed over opalescence that seemed to change the contour of my entire appearance in an instant. I was taken aback, splashing water up on my shirt, only to realize it was, in fact, still me that I was looking at the moment I glanced back up. I wrote that off in a way that had my gut intuitively twisting, but figured it was the high amount of stress building up from too many long hours spent working. I went home early to recuperate. A few days later it happened again. Except this time I was on my way back to work, crossing the busy city street and making my way through the intricate maze of reflective buildings. I glanced up from the middle of the crosswalk amidst a swarm of other pedestrians. My reflection was caught briefly in the side paneling of a building, my eyes more focused on my clothing at first, but as my glance drifted upwards towards my face I noticed my reflection had changed again. The first shock came when I saw how sallow I looked, with those same piercing opalescent eyes. The second was when I noticed the shadow hovering directly behind me, pitch black. My heart sank into my stomach and my legs instinctively stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. In my confusion I froze. I couldn’t take my eyes off of my own warped reflection, the entirety of my gaze was stuck like a deer in the headlights no matter how badly I wanted to check behind me. The crowd of people around me thickened, their own reflections starting to blur into a haze of grey in the window as my panic grew and grew. I tried to move my legs forward and convince myself that the shadow was just an illusion, but time seemed to slow down. I became dizzy. I felt the claw of terror start to make its way up my throat, my lips starting to tremble, but the call for help never did come out. Nobody around me seemed to notice. It wasn’t until I heard the loud honk of a car horn coming from my left that I snapped out of it. In that moment I noticed the entire walkway had been cleared, the four or so lanes of cars starting to inch closer to the green light while the pedestrian icon flashed its warning. I had been the only one still standing there in the middle of the street. The crowd had entirely dissipated, even the walkways ahead were relatively empty. The driver in the window shook his fists in a fit of rage as I glanced back in front of me just to see my reflection had, once again, already switched back to normal. 3/31/22 7:47pm I kept my head down at work today, as I have been a lot lately, but I started to notice a tremble to my fingers and a sort of breathlessness I can’t quite figure out. Every now and then my vision will go blurry for a moment and I’ll see things that aren’t actually there. Or things that other people aren’t seeing. It happens a lot on the elevator, or really anywhere lined in mirrors. Today I saw the shadow of my coworker diving in front of oncoming traffic from one of the rearview mirrors of my taxi. I turned around to scream for him to stop, but he was still standing there hailing his own ride home when I turned to glance back over my shoulder. You’ve got to be quick to catch it, observant. I… don’t know how to explain what without sounding absolutely insane. They’re like murky shadows that contort over other people and then vanish. Sometimes they even… alter their faces. To put it bluntly, I was rather perturbed by what I saw today at work, the anxiety from this morning has stuck with me like a fly to a glue trap. 4/1/22 6:52pm They have begun speaking. They have begun…sending things to me. They do it with your mind, they find ways to pull you in with them. They are constantly reminding me of the ways in which I can be taken. It is like the fragility of the human body has become so inherently obvious in every facet of our reality. Unreality? I cannot be so sure that where I am all of the time is real anymore. In the instance of a blink the people seem odd, different. Their demeanors shift. They remind me that the world we live in has a very real danger at every turn. The cars, the glasses I drink from, the knives on my kitchen counter, the electrical outlets… they continuously point out the fatality that could occur in every instance. In fact, they worship it. The process of death. They all seem to carry on as if that is completely normal. My brain feels like it’s metastasizing under their mental affliction. It took everything in my power to try and get into a taxi this evening, but I had to be quick in order to get away from one of them, because every step I took on my way home I’d only seen myself walking on broken legs. The bone in my shin was fully exposed every time I made my way past a shop window, or heaven forbid a puddle. It started when one of them followed me down the staircase, reminding me from behind with every misstep that the cold concrete could very well seal my fate. There are too many reflective surfaces in our world and they know that. They own them. Sometimes when I pass a crowd of people, some of the sallow-skins are intermingled, hidden. When I anxiously ran up to the back passenger seat, I nearly fell backwards in terror. Through my own broken reflection, my bloodied and bruised face, I saw the shadow of a figure already looming in the backseat. There were no features on it, but its height seemed to take up the majority of the space, its neck was craning down from the ceiling of the cab in order to fit. I only saw the back of the drivers head for a brief moment before he turned to face me, his own features now contorting into those same reflective eyes and greyish skin. He took a moment to let out a long, raspy cough, and when I reacted, he grinned. I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction, my joints aching and my skull throbbing all the way home. I have been coughing ever since. Even now I am so frightened to think about it. What if he remembers me and shows up here tonight? They can do that, you know. They can just materialize wherever they want, whenever they want. They say you call on them unwillingly every time you even think about it. And nobody else will be able to tell any different. 4/3/22 3:45am Tonight I woke up several times. I distinctly remember one of the dreams that plagued me the most, I’m going to try to write it down before it disappears entirely into the chaos that has become my life. I’m so tired from all of this. In the dream, I was checking into the hospital. They kept murmuring that I needed to see ‘the specialist’. The city outside was under a severe weather alert. The flooding had nearly engulfed the entirety of the streets, and the people were clearly in danger, some even dying, but everyone just seemed to carry on as if there was nothing happening. For some reason the receptionist urged me to stay the night because of this. She was far too chipper for comfort. She walked me past several full exam rooms, some with the doors still cracked open. In them I could see the state of the patients. They all seemed extremely sick, gaunt, and hysteric. The doctors had even begun to drape some white sheets over a few of them as they sat motionless, others were screaming out in pain. The nurse mentioned, with a smile, that because of ‘the wait’ I would be eligible for a ‘premium room’. I did not, and for some reason could not, protest this, so I followed her into a master suite that looked more like a bedroom at first than any hospital I’d ever seen. The king size bed was lined in white, and even had a few flower stands surrounding it. I didn’t notice the screen door to my right near the room’s entrance at first. I’d made my way directly to the bed and had fallen asleep relatively quickly due to the level of exhaustion I felt. My headache continued even after I awoke. When I did, I noticed that the screen door separating my room from the other one was now cracked open. As I went to make my way to the entrance I got a glimpse of what was inside. It was entirely lined with bodies being prepared for their mortuary services. Nearly a couple hundred laid there with tags on their feet, lined in neat rows side by side, not a single one had been placed into the respective coolers. All of them had already started to form greyed skin and dark patches where their arms and legs rested. Their features were so very blue. I was mortified. I backed away slowly into the opposite wall before the clank of metal caught my attention towards my own bed. That was when I realized what it had been being used for. That was ‘the showing bed’ as they suddenly referred to it in my head. How I knew this I cannot articulate, I can only tell that they send it to you. That same shadowed figure had appeared, blacking out the entire left corner of the room, the silhouette of its arm directing back down towards the sheets. I felt my skin crawl and my feet being forced to move towards it despite every protest. I tried to turn in the opposite direction, to run away, but directly in front of me was a full length mirror. And in it I caught the state of my own reflection. The blued lips, the drained skin, and those same reflective dead eyes that whitened over my own irises. That is when, by my own sheer terror, I woke up again. This time in my own apartment. I didn’t sleep for the remainder of the night. I cannot get that image of my own distorted reflection out of my head. 4/10/22 12:22am Every mirror in my apartment has been disposed of and I have not stepped outside in several days. But the images themselves have not gone away and I cannot think straight enough to articulate anything I’ve endured let alone hold a conversation anymore. They seem to be following me everywhere now. In fact, they have only seemed to grow increasingly more real as the long days have trekked on. They’ve put the loudest noises in my head to make sure I stay lucid. Bells and whistles and hissing. I feel my sanity slipping away every time I’m forced to look at my own hands, my own veins, my own skin. It is changing, or…decomposing. One or the other, or both. I have hardly slept due to the routine of nightmares they induce upon me. I have already called the ambulance, despite all of their protests. 4/11/22 3:00am It’s in the eyes, in the eyes. 4/18/22 5:15pm Hello Doctor,I’m reaching out to you specifically to see if I can get any idea of what those tests showed. I don’t know what my case number is but I’m hoping you can still find me in your system. As far as I know I am still admitted, but I do not know where I currently am. When I saw you last week the nurses mentioned looking into ‘special services’, but how much time has passed since then I am not sure. Who am I supposed to be calling on again? I don’t trust your staff. They just kept screaming for me to stay quiet about it.My head feels like it’s full of liquid now, every joint in my body feels like it’s grinding away. I feel slower, stiff. Thirsty. I feel there is truly, deeply, something very wrong with me. When I do manage to see outside it is always night. Or it is always grey, darkened. I saw the sallow-skins again just a bit ago, wandering the hallways. When I try to eat they protest it, tell me to lay back down in my bed. Their joints click and their gait is really rigid. I don’t think the nurses have been taking care of me as they should. When I say it hurts, they tell me to hold my breath. They were mumbling that it was almost time for my own transition.Does this mean that I am dying? I ask because the shadows are now taking up the majority of my vision. I hope somebody comes to get me soon. Nobody in here likes it. Just the other day my neighbor was begging for it all to stop for hours on end. Please come to my room immediately. Because when I ask them if this is real they just repeat, ‘faster, faster,’ and the shadow figure is all too blinding. Credit: H.A. 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