Shots of Mocktales #1: A Wicked Reflection By Vinay

April 17, 2015

Short Stories

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Chaya was fiddling with her hair in front of her full size family heirloom antique mirror, before heading out to a dinner party. The mirror boasted of an intricate rosewood frame with skillfully crafted petals that seemed to cascade gracefully. She stood rooted looking at her reflection in the mirror for a few minutes. Soon, she noticed that her reflection was using her left hand while she had right hand threaded through her tresses. She smiled and winked her right eye and the reflection reciprocated with the left eye. She leaned over and touched her face to the icy surface of the mirror and her reflection did the same with her face at the exact same location. She wondered, for a moment, how cool it would be to be left-handed.

“How I wish I could be left-handed like you! I wonder if there is a way to trade places..”. She sighed at the reflection that was a mere mime and turned away from it partly dejected.

“Hey, hold on a second!” Chaya’s face paled and she faced the mirror with trepidation. She was scared out of her wits and yet curious at the same time to find out who had spoken to her. She saw her reflection imitating her in the mirror but no one else was in the room. Petrified, she tried to dash out of the room as fast as she could. “Hey Chaya, hold on!” Beads of sweat were forming on her forehead, ruining the makeup she had so painstakingly applied. “Listen to me! Come back to the mirror.” She froze at the door. Her mind was preoccupied with all the horrors associated with strange disembodied voices and cursed herself for having watched a horror movie earlier that day. But her over developed curiosity made her stay and listen to the voice. “Don’t be scared. Come here please, will you?” The voice was persistent and eventually convinced Chaya to inch closer to the mirror though she dragged her feet sensing real danger from the surreal voice.

“Who are you? Are you a spi…rit or a gh…ost?” As she struggled to muster up the courage to form her words, she looked around her room trying to spot the source of the voice that had rattled her.

“Stop right there. Don’t look into the mirror,” ordered the voice and Chaya came to a halt near the mirror. “At least tell me who you are?” Chaya insisted on getting to the bottom of the mystery, as her inquisitiveness slowly got stronger than her fear.

“I am your reflection and I live on the other side of the mirror. I am the lefty, the one you were admiring just moments ago.” Chaya was a little shaken and she was not sure about how to react to the voice.

“Are you still there, Chaya?” the reflection questioned. Chaya was hesitant to indulge in a conversation with her loquacious reflection until she figured out that it was perfectly harmless.

“Uh.. Ah Yes!”

“I was always right here in the other world.”

“Other world?”

“A mirrored replica of your world is our world. Everyone leads a life similar to your world in here.”

After a couple more minutes of interaction, she was partially convinced there was no immediate harm from her reflection. “Strange! I never even thought you lived there. It didn’t occur to me that there could be another world on the other side of the mirror.” She took a step forward and peeped towards the mirror to see her reflection mimic her actions. She waived her hand to the reflection and greeted her with the enthusiasm of receiving a delegate from other planet.

She slowly sat down leaning against the mirror and her mind settling down around the novel thought of another world within the mirror. Her interest was piqued and she decided she wanted to explore it. “I want to see your world. Is there a way to swap?” Her eagerness to witness something new masked even the slightest fear and uncertainty she would have had if she were normal. “Are you sure you want to see my world? Then do as I say. Walk right into the mirror and once we hit the mirror, you will enter my world and I will enter yours,” explained her reflection.

Chaya stood up and rubbed her hands in excitement at the threshold of embarking on an adventure. “Are you ready?” Her eyes beamed when she saw her reflection repeat the same. She closed her eyes and strutted right into the mirror like a woman on a mission.

After a few strides, she tripped and fell flat on her face. She craned her neck to see where she had arrived. At first, it looked exactly like her room. She got up and dusted herself off with her left hand. Pushing back a strand of hair from her face, she moved closer to her study table.

She recognized her belongings – a silvery ball pen, which was a graduation gift from her dad, a globe paperweight and a half filled glass water bottle. She felt like nothing had changed and she was hallucinating about the reflection, until the statue of liberty on the table caught her eye. But there was something peculiar about the statue she was holding now and she thought something did not fit right.

After a second, her throat dried out and her heart skipped a beat once she figured out why the statue seemed peculiar. The statue was holding the torch in its left hand, an exact depiction of how it would look when viewed through a mirror. She stared next at the poster above the table, which had her first crush, Rahul Dravid with his rock solid defensive pose and a bat in his left hand. A strange, indecipherable text was printed at the bottom of the poster.

Her eyes restlessly searched for more peculiar items in the room. Her gaze fell on a newspaper lying on the table. She picked up the newspaper and tried to read it, but the contents seemed to be printed in an alien language. Then she observed that even her books on the table had the exact same alien language.

“You there?” shouted Chaya hoping to get a response from the world she had just left behind. When she did not receive any response, she shouted again, “Hey there! Are you listening? Hello!”

Before she could utter a word, she was dragged forcefully towards the mirror by a powerful, invisible force. She stood in front of the mirror and faced her reflection beaming with joy. She had a lot to say but strangely she seemed incapable of uttering even one coherent word.

“How are you holding up so far? Oh sorry, I forgot. You are just a mime now and you can’t reply.” The room was filled with laughter and Chaya involuntarily mimed her reflection.

“I will now go and check out my new room and leave you to do the same.” Once her reflection left the mirror, Chaya came back to the same spot she had been near the table without even realizing. Dejected at being betrayed by her own reflection, she sat on the chair thinking about her next move.

She buried her face in her hands, feeling frustrated for her seemingly innocuous folly. She looked at her hands in despair as she realized that it was her wish to be left-handed which had led to all this. She started to sob and it soon turned into a rant about the absurdity of the situation and the conniving nature of her reflection, who had now taken her place in the real world. She began cursing her reflection, calling her names, demanding to be put back where she belonged.

Suddenly, she was facing her reflection once again in the mirror and the reflection looked angry. “What is your problem, Chaya? I have lived in that world my entire life and never complained even once. I was dragged to the mirror every single time you wanted to see yourself and followed your movements without throwing tantrums. Why are you ranting that it is unfair? Who was the one who wanted to be me? Did I ever force you to swap?”

It was a one sided argument and Chaya could only answer to those questions in her mind. The reflection continued, “How can you be so dumb, Chaya? Why do you think I asked you not to look into the mirror when I spoke to you earlier? Because I would have been dragged to the mirror and be just a mime. Now, I am much more than a mere mime and look at what your dumbness cost you! Everything is mirrored! And a life of a slave! How is that for a living?”

After staring down at Chaya for a moment, the reflection left the mirror. Chaya had decided in her mind that she would get her world back and for that she was ready to do anything. One good thing about being a mime is that you can think cogently while your body follows actions blindly. Chaya’s mind was busy figuring out how she could win her old life back while in front of the mirror and it struck her that her reflection was clearly annoyed about hearing her rant. She thought of using that as a weapon against her reflection.

She started shouting and crying to go back to her world. Her reflection yelled a few times to shut her down but in vain. Eventually, her reflection gave in and came to the mirror for one final settlement, “Great job. Your trick to annoy me really worked.” Chaya was jumping with happiness in her mind but her face was expressing the anger. “All I need is peace and I will give you back your world. I do not mind going back to my world and staying there in peace. I will be back in a minute.”

Chaya was pulled again to the mirror and she thought the moment to get back to her real world had arrived. “Are you ready to swap? Why wouldn’t you be?” said the reflection with a smirk. She noticed another mirror placed a couple of steps away from the mirror. She tried desperately to grab on to something even as she was forced to proceed further towards the mirror following her reflection’s actions. She figured out the danger of getting back to her world and the plan her reflection had in store for her. She continued walking for a while on what seemed to be a never-ending path, and turned around to a sea of her reflections.

The reflection’s voice echoed from a distance, “Do you like your new world, Chaya? I placed a mirror in front of your mirror and you walked right into it. Now you are stuck in a limbo of infinity mirrors. You will not be able to go back to your world ever again. Enjoy eternity out there!”

A helpless Chaya could see the reflections laughing and she joined them waving with the very same left hand.

Recipe of Shots of Mocktale #1: A Wicked Reflection

Ingredients:

- You

- A mirror

- Your reflection

Method:

It all started with me looking in the mirror and thinking about a left-handed reflection imitating me. At that very moment, Chaya my first character waltzed into my head.

The name Chaya means a shadow or a reflection in Sanskrit.

Credits

Reviewed By:

- Prajna Shetty

- Vikram Krishnamurthy

Edited By:

- Amulya Prabhakar