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I.

On Anj’s eighth birthday, her grandma Gwen warns, “If you look in the mirror for too long, you’ll start to see the devil.” 

Her grandma says this as she’s brushing Anj’s hair in front of the full-length mirror in Anj’s bedroom. 

Anj asks, “What do you mean?” 

Grandma Gwen says, “You know what I mean.” 

Anj is already afraid of the dark, of going to the bathroom alone at night, and of the porcelain doll on her nightstand. She says, “I guess I’ll add it to the list.” She leans away as Grandma Gwen tsks and tugs the brush, hard, through a spiraled knot in Anj’s hair.

The next week, at her birthday sleepover party, Anj suggests playing Bloody Mary. There are eight girls there, including Anj. They’re each supposed to do the ritual alone. That’s the legend. But Anj says they should do it together. 

“Strength in numbers,” she says. 

They crowd around the mirror, and on three, turn off the lights. Almost in unison they say, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” In the charcoal dark, Anj looks at the reflection of their thin silhouettes, then at her own larger silhouette. She thinks not of Bloody Mary but of Grandma Gwen. 

Because how long is long? And how long is too long? 

Then someone’s reflection moves a little too fast, which makes Anj scream, which makes everyone else scream. They run for it out of Anj’s bedroom, and when Anj slams the door closed behind her, her index finger gets caught between the door and the door frame. She cries before she feels the pain.

II.

Age ten, Anj sits in Grandma Gwen’s living room with everyone in her family except for Grandma Gwen. The mirrors in the apartment are covered by scarves today—Grandma Gwen’s scarves. All the scarves are various shades of brown, except one is different, teal. 

Anj shifts on Grandma Gwen’s couch, her legs sticking to the clear plastic slip covering the cushions. She’s too afraid to ask why the mirrors are shrouded, and she knows she’s supposed to be sad. She eats the flourless chocolate cake someone brought, listens to the adults murmur about heart disease and eye cancer, and thinks about how stupid it is to cover a couch in plastic.

Back in her room that night, Anj sits cross-legged on the floor in front of her mirror and looks at herself. She holds up a photo of Grandma Gwen to compare. The photo is the size of a baseball card, laminated, with a prayer typed on the back. “A Woman of Valor.” On the front, Grandma Gwen is around sixty, smiling a Cheshire smile. Her name appears along the bottom of the card, only in the mirror it says nɘwӘ. 

There are parts of Anj’s face that look like Grandma Gwen’s, parts Anj has never noticed before. They both have moles on their chins. They both have curly hair that is either brunette or blonde; it’s hard to say. They both have large brown irises cradled in permanently half-closed eyelids. “Cow eyes,” some boy in school once called them. 

“You mean Doe eyes?” Anj had asked, smiling.

“No,” he’d said. “Cow eyes.”

Her eyes had welled up then. They well up now, too.

After a while, Anj wonders if she’s been in front of the mirror for too long. She decides she doesn’t want to risk it, so she opens her closet door and parses through the folded linens. She covers her mirror with a fitted sheet—Minnie Mouse dressed as Snow White. 

III.

Age fourteen, Anj decides to stop looking in mirrors. She becomes the opposite of Narcissus, of Alice. Too many of Anj’s days have been ruined by catching glimpses of herself. The worst are the mirrors in the high school bathrooms. The fluorescent lights make her see hundreds of split ends and flyaway hairs, make her see how her clothes cling to her body in a tight, ugly way her friends’ clothes don’t. So Anj decides it’s better not to see any of it. It’s better not to know. 

She prefers reflective surfaces like windows and puddles, where she can see herself darkly. Her only exception is her bedroom mirror because her room doesn’t get much sun. At night, she turns her lamp just one click to keep the light low. 

When she washes her hands at school, she averts her eyes and focuses on the water rushing from the faucet, water that never gets warm, no matter how long it runs. Sometimes, depending on how shiny the sink spout is, she does see herself, but the reflection ripples like a funhouse mirror. It doesn’t count. 

IV.

Age fifteen, Anj sits in Studio Art, trying to remember what she looks like. The teacher, Mrs. B., has passed out hand mirrors and asked the class to draft self-portraits.

Everyone else props up their mirrors against boxes or piles of books and draws inspiration from themselves. Anj keeps her mirror down, draws from memory. She sketches her chin mole, her curly hair, her cow eyes. She’s almost finished when Mrs. B. starts patrolling the classroom. 

“Let’s see,” Mrs. B. says. She looks over Anj’s shoulder, and Anj pulls back, tightening her grip on her drafting pencil, the hard, hexagonal shape digging into her palm.

“It’s you,” says Mrs. B. “Nice work.”

“It’s my grandma,” Anj says, as she realizes it.

“Here, this might help.” Mrs. B. picks up Anj’s mirror and leans it against Anj’s stack of science and math textbooks. 

Anj wants to say no, to cover her eyes, but she knows that would make her seem stranger than she already must seem. She plans for the worst. She doesn’t have makeup on. She didn’t brush her hair much this morning. She had chili for dinner last night; her face is probably bloated from all the salt.

Anj looks. 

It’s bad, oh yeah, but not as bad as she’d imagined.

V.

Age nineteen, Anj is lying on her stomach on her bed, reading the Thanksgiving deluxe issue of Seventeen Magazine, when she comes across an article encouraging her to examine her vagina.

“Most women go their whole lives without seeing what they look like down there,” she reads. “But no woman’s self-confidence can be complete without accepting the shape of her clitoris and labia.” 

Anj has been working on her confidence lately, so she goes to the bathroom and finds a hand mirror under the sink. She closes the bathroom door, pulls off her shorts and underwear, then squats, positioning the mirror as best she can. It’s an old, ornate one—one her mom claimed from Grandma Gwen, along with the teacup collection—and it’s heavier than expected. Just as Anj glimpses a hill of pink, her grasp on the handle slips. The mirror shatters on the floor. 

“Fuck,” she yells. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She sprints down the hall to the front closet and grabs the broom and dustpan. Her parents are all the way down in the basement, watching a movie with their new surround-sound system. She pauses, listening for footsteps coming up the stairs, for an angry “What the hell was that?” But—nothing. Just the far-off rumble of bass speakers. A bomb or a train crash or something.

Back in the bathroom, Anj sweeps up the mirror, pours it into a CVS bag, and wonders if seven years of bad luck await her.

VI.

Age twenty-six, Anj and her boyfriend are at Anj’s parents’ house for Thanksgiving weekend. They are lying naked in her old bed when he squeezes her butt and asks if they can try something a little different this time. 

“What do you mean?” Anj asks, laughing. 

He points at the full-length mirror. “I think you know what I mean,” he says.

Anj opens her closet and takes out her Minnie Mouse sheet. He helps her spread it on the floor in front of the mirror. She leans back and they do it missionary style, like usual. Anj watches him as he watches himself.

“Don’t you want to see?” he asks.

Anj nods and lifts her torso, resting her elbows behind her so she can look. Her makeup has separated and slid. Her hair looks messy. There’s a lot of chin. But she sucks in her stomach and watches as they keep going.

“This is so hot,” he says into her neck, giving her goosebumps just as quickly as giving her doubts. She worries his lips will touch the brown tags that have grown all over the skin of her throat. There are at least six.

As they cuddle on her bed after, Anj looks across the room at the black wood outline of her mirror and remembers the hand-held one. She does the math. If she believed in that stuff, the curse would be broken this week. 

But she’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe in that stuff.

VII.

Age twenty-seven, Anj and her boyfriend—a different one—adopt a puppy, a Spaniel mix—Cavalier King Charles and something else. One weekend, she puts the puppy in front of the mirror and starts recording a video of him to see what he does. She waits for him to bark and claw and glare at himself, like other dog-mirror encounters she’s seen online.

Instead, he sits back, looks himself in the eye. Adjusts his posture like a prince.

VIII.

Age thirty, Anj holds her toddler daughter on her hip and takes her from room to room in her newly built house, hoping the gentle movements will lull her daughter to sleep like they did the day before. 

In front of a mirror that’s been unpacked but left leaning against the wall in the entryway, Anj stops. She looks at herself as she sways back and forth, whisper-singing the ABCs. Really, she’s looking at her daughter. Her daughter watches too. When Anj finishes singing, she moves closer to their reflection and points. 

“Look,” she says. 

Her daughter squints at herself. “Why she?”  

“It’s you,” Anj says. “It’s you.”

Her daughter turns, burying her face into Anj’s chest. Anj tries to smile away the sudden disappointment she feels, pushing against dark-edged worries about her daughter’s emerging social skills. Anj doesn’t want her skeptical, doesn’t want her shy. 

“Someone’s tired,” Anj says.

IX.

Age thirty-five, Anj sits in the front pew of an unairconditioned church, waiting for her cousin to take his place at the altar. He is onto his second marriage, and she’s excited that he’s found love again, but she also hopes she’ll cry.

Anj takes out a compact mirror from her clutch and looks in it. She smooths her brows, rubs at the pink blush on her cheeks to spread it out further. In the bright church light, she notices flecks of gold in the brown of her eyes. “That new?” she wonders, both pleased and unnerved at the change.

At the beginning of the ceremony, the minister will ask for a moment of silence to remember the loved ones who aren’t with them anymore. He’ll mention Grandma Gwen, since that was her cousin’s grandma too, and Anj will realize it’s been months since she last thought of her. Her wish to cry will be granted. She will tell herself that from now on, she’ll be sure to remember Grandma Gwen every time she looks at her own mole, her own hair, her own eyes. Grandma Gwen didn’t leave much else behind.

For now, though, Anj drags her ring finger under her eyes, wiping away the black liner that has seeped underneath her lashes in the humidity. She makes a mental note to set up an appointment with her ophthalmologist the next week.

X.

Age forty-two, Anj is pregnant with her second child. The kid is a surprise, a risk, but she and her husband have decided not to ever say so. 

After a shower, Anj wipes down the condensation resting on the bathroom mirror and looks at her protruding stomach. Her husband hugs her from behind, puts his hand on the bump.

“Look at us,” she says to him.

“I know,” he says. But he’s not looking. He reaches past her, his eyes averted, and opens the cabinet enough so that the mirror reflects the wall. Now, instead of themselves, they see toothpaste and sunblock, Advil and Tylenol, round brushes with Anj’s hair in the bristles.

He sighs. 

“What is it?” Anj asks.

He hesitates, but eventually gives in. “Doesn’t happen all the time,” he says, “but sometimes, mirrors make me feel all…I dunno.” 

Anj waits to answer just yet because she knows he’s still thinking. He does this when they’re in the middle of an argument too—goes silent until he finds what he means. He pinches a small section of her wet hair and rubs the strands between his thumb and forefinger, like he’s rubbing two pennies together. 

“Aware,” he finally says.

“Aware?”

“Yeah, like, too aware,” He brushes at tiny water droplets clutching his neck. “Like this is me, forever, for the rest of my life, even in the ground. And with you and the baby here especially, I mean…” he says, nodding at her belly. “I hate it. Those thoughts. Isn’t it stupid?”

“A little,” she says, wanting to reassure him. They leave the bathroom. The cabinet is still open, still reflecting wall.

Anj doesn’t tell him that she also once had problems with mirrors, because at this point, she’s grown into not really remembering. She still gets disappointed when she looks sometimes, of course, but she doesn’t dwell on it long. More importantly, she doesn’t see cow eyes anymore. The gold flecks have been debunked. She never thinks of Bloody Mary. She rarely thinks of the devil. 

Her husband, he just hates feeling the frailty of his existence. Which Anj can understand. She gets the same feeling now when she sees satellite images of the earth, and even more so when she sees models of how small the earth is in comparison to Saturn. 

It’s a fleeting feeling, though. It doesn’t stop her from looking at pictures of space.