The Mirror Showed You
Remember the tales about vampires? And those about mirrors?
His room was dark, with almost black walls, yet majestic, and almost empty. As he said it would be. Befitting a vampire, he said with a smile in his eyes, back in the club where they met for the first time.
Octavia laughed.
She dropped her shirt on a lone wooden chair, and walked in front of the large mirror hung opposite the huge, black bed.
She smiled at her own reflection.
“Why do you have a mirror if you’re a vampire?” she shouted to him. “Is it for us girls you take home?”
“Yeah,” he replied from the kitchen. “Can you see yourself in it? Maybe you’re a vampire too!”
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh, no longer shouting. She didn’t care if he heard him. “Like I believed in fairytales.”
She stepped closer to the wall, lifted her hand, and pressed her index finger against the cold glass of the mirror.
“Tell me, glass! Tell me true,” she whispered. “Of all the beautiful girls in this city tonight, who’s the most beautiful? Tell me, who?”
She winked at her reflection.
And her reflection disappeared.
She jumped back a little, gasping.
“What!” she hissed. Then, loudly, so that he could hear her, “Is this mirror a flat screen smart TV?”
“Does it look like one?” he asked from behind her.
“It certainly behaves like one,” she said, turning around to look at him. “See, it stopped showing me, which mirrors can’t, but tricky devices with cameras can do. It scared me a little, but it’s fun.”
She smiled at him, and he smiled back at her, placing a silver plate full of food on the jet black bedspread.
“It’s stopped showing you?” he asked. “Really?”
“A glitch in your setup, my dear vampire,” Olivia said, nodding. “You should reset it. And maybe set it not to react to everyone? Voice activation is cool, but it’s not a good idea to let anyone use it.”
“You did say you worked in digital security or something,” he said, walking up to her, and looking in the glass screen which showed the room reflected, only without the two of them. “What did you say to it?”
“I thought of vampires and fairytales and asked it to show me… someone,” Octavia said. “Like Snow White does in the old Grimm story, you know.”
“What are the chances,” he said, grinning. “And you disappeared right then!”
“Not a second later!” Octavia laughed, turning to face him, raising her head.
“Well, that’s bad news,” he said, looking past her, into the glass. “We have to cancel tonight.”
“What?” Octavia asked, taken aback.
“You’re right, the mirror needs fixing,” he said. “See, it sees everything, and if it’s not working well, it may have been hacked, and if it was, we’re… not safe here.”
“You’re joking, right?” Octavia said, but she saw that he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Octavia wanted to feel angry at him, disappointed and furious. She couldn’t, though. She felt calm, and it shocked her, because that wasn’t her, not in a situation like this, ever. But then the shock was gone too, and she was calm again. And he seemed sorry, really sorry.
“Okay, I understand,” Octavia said, even though she didn’t understand any of this. She didn’t even want to understand anything, she felt perplexed and betrayed, yet impossibly relaxed as well. As if he put a spell on him simply by saying he was sorry.
She found herself asking him, “Tomorrow, maybe?”
“Yeah, sure, be there in the club,” he said. “Now though, let me just call you a taxi.”
And he went for his phone, and she put on her shirt, and five minutes later she was saying goodbye to him, standing in the front door, the lights of the night city awaiting her.
“I’m not sure what happened, truth be told,” she murmured. “To you, to me, to your device, and why I’m taking it like this. Maybe you really are a vampire.”
“You don’t believe in that,” he said, waving to the taxi that just stopped in front of his house.
“What if I did?”
“Then you’d have to believe that that mirror is not a screen, but the magic mirror from that tale. And that when you asked it to show you someone, you disappeared, because it did. Only who it showed you was a vampire, and they cast no reflection even in magic mirrors. So the mirror seemed empty. And, because I’m a vampire, I just need, what’s more, I must find out who this vampire is. Because I’m a vampire too, remember? And I haven’t met another of my kind in a long, long time. But I’m interested in you, because the mirror showed you to me yesterday, when I told it to show me the most beautiful lady in the city. Yeah, you’d have to believe all that.”
Octavia nodded.
“Well, I don’t. It’s not a mirror, it’s a smart device and you got hacked, and maybe I’ll be there again tomorrow, and maybe I won’t,” she said.
She kissed him quickly, then turned around, and was on her way, back to the city, trying to forget him already.
