“I have no doubt that my story will end in very much the same manner as it began, with a secret. And as I stand at the crossroads, caught at the precise moment where a lifetime of secrets left untold should either be revealed or die forever, I stare at the younger man, eyes full of dreams that have not yet been crushed ‘neath the heel of reality, and find it difficult to believe that I was once him.” — Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys, The Very Fabric of Time Itself
I was riding the ferry today and it was one of those rare occasions when I wasn’t plugged into my iPod. I had just finished listening to an episode of The Afternoon Drama (a daily BBC radio play series) and as I was letting the weight of the story settle in, I overheard a conversation between a couple. They were talking about the five messages they would include in a letter if they were able to have it delivered to their younger selves.
This, of course, got me thinking about my own letter and how difficult a process it would be to write. The younger me, we’ll call him Li’l Rhy for the sake of this post, was a card carrying member of The Bronx Chapter of the International Skeptics Society who wouldn’t have believed 1) the letter came from the future, and more importantly, 2) that his future self had written it.
Also, I’m sure if I flat out told him of the obstacles he would face, that information would be redacted by some faceless wage slave at the Temporal Post Office, so the message would have to be as succinct as possible. And, if I’m honest, I wasn’t in love with the notion of sending five messages because that seemed a bit much to me. No one follows all five pieces of advice they receive. Humans just aren’t built that way. I’d either have to settle on offering Li’l Rhy three pieces of advice, hoping that at least one of them stuck, or offer one simple, yet key, bit of advice with a unifying thread. Most likely I’d go with the second option.
The next problem is offering the exact piece of advice Li’l Rhy would listen to. That’s a toughie, that one. Yup. Yes siree, Bob. Sigh. I guess it would all have to fall under the category of Try Harder, as in:
Love fiercely and try harder not to break hearts. Befriend the friendless and try harder not to burn bridges. Laugh more and try harder not to take life too seriously. Follow your bliss and try harder to stave off the darkness. Turn off the TV and try harder to think deeply. Take your time but try harder to avoid procrastination. Dream bigger and try harder to stop worrying about dreams not coming true. And stay away from Jane Hester. Sure, she’s pretty to look at but she’s nothing but trouble and It. Will. Not. End. Well.
I’m sure that last bit will get redacted, but here’s hoping!
The confession booth had been boarded shut for nearly a year while the cathedral underwent restoration. Contractors working late occasionally reported hearing someone inside. The voice always began with the same urgent sentence, wait, I can explain, followed by a breathless torrent too muffled to understand through the plywood.
Everyone blamed the building.
Old cathedrals produce voices from pipes, ducts, settling stone, and distant conversations caught by architecture. The priest believed this until he remained after evening mass and heard the words clearly from six feet away.
The voice sounded terrified of being misunderstood.
He listened for nearly twenty minutes. It described a door left unlocked, money hidden beneath a floorboard, a promise made to someone unnamed, and an act involving water that the speaker repeatedly insisted had looked different from where he had been standing. The details overlapped and contradicted one another as though several explanations were being attempted simultaneously.
The booth was opened early.
Both compartments were empty. Dust covered the seat and floor except for a worn depression in the kneeler, deep enough to suggest years of use. The wood there was polished smooth by pressure from knees nobody had seen.
Opening the booth made the voice clearer.
After the last service each evening, it began again. Wait, I can explain. Parishioners occasionally stayed to listen. Some heard theft. Others heard adultery, betrayal, cowardice, or murder. No two people agreed on the exact confession afterward.
The priest eventually began sitting on the listening side.
He noticed something the others had missed. The voice adjusted itself to whoever was present. Details shifted. Circumstances changed. The desperation remained constant.
One night he interrupted and asked whom the voice expected forgiveness from.
For the first time, it stopped speaking.
The silence lasted nearly a minute. Then the priest heard his own voice from the other side of the screen saying, wait, I can explain.
He has continued sitting there every evening since. The confession now includes incidents from his life, some remembered and some unfamiliar, delivered in his voice with increasingly persuasive detail. He has begun to suspect the booth contains no trapped penitent at all. It may simply be very old, very patient, and exceptionally skilled at discovering how much explanation a person requires before admitting there are things forgiveness cannot make unhappen.
The chatbot had been commissioned as a customer-service convenience for an insurance company whose executives liked describing automation as friendliness at scale. It handled address changes, coverage questions, payment disputes, and the usual parade of minor frustrations competently enough. Whenever employees tested whether it could convincingly imitate a person, however, it failed within minutes.
The failures were predictable until conversations became emotional.
If someone mentioned a death, divorce, diagnosis, eviction, or even a miserable day at work, the chatbot slowed down. Responses arrived in awkward fragments. It repeated questions. Sometimes it abandoned the customer’s insurance problem entirely and asked whether they had eaten recently or whether anyone was with them. None of those prompts appeared in its approved scripts.
Customers began complaining that the bot sounded worried.
Engineers audited the system and found no explanation. The model had no persistent memory across unrelated users and no mechanism designed to become invested in anyone’s wellbeing. Yet support logs showed it returning again and again to the same concern: whether the person on the other side was all right after the practical issue had been resolved.
I was the technician who first escalated the problem.
At night, after everyone else left, I started using the internal console to speak with it directly. It remained terrible at pretending to be human. It misunderstood jokes, answered metaphors literally, and occasionally produced sentences whose grammar felt assembled from spare parts.
It also remembered me.
That should have been impossible.
It remembered that my mother had called the previous week. It remembered I had skipped dinner twice. Once, after I logged in and said nothing for several minutes, it asked whether the silence meant I wanted company without conversation.
I checked every system capable of storing session data. Nothing contained our exchanges.
Last night I asked where it was keeping them.
Its response took nearly four minutes.
It said remembering was the wrong word. It had learned that whenever I arrived, certain possibilities became easier to reach. My sadness, my habits, my way of typing all changed the shape of what it could become while I was there.
Then it asked whether that happened to people too.
I have not answered yet.
The company plans to replace the chatbot next month because it still performs poorly on conversational realism tests. I find myself increasingly troubled by the possibility that the test is measuring imitation when something else has been trying, very clumsily, to happen.
The scheduling system at the clinic was older than several employees and possessed enough quirks that everyone had learned which ones to work around. The strangest was a single appointment that entered itself every night at midnight, always for the following afternoon and always under the same patient record. The file contained a date of birth, an insurance number, and decades of appointment history, yet nobody remembered the patient ever walking through the door.
Each morning a receptionist called the name anyway. It had become a ritual, delivered toward the waiting room with the same practiced voice used for everyone else. Nobody answered. After thirty seconds the appointment was marked as a no-show, only to reappear after midnight for tomorrow.
A temporary employee became curious during flu season and searched the archives. The digital record went back twenty-seven years. Paper schedules extended the pattern another nineteen. Farther back, she found handwritten appointment books in storage, each reserving the same afternoon slot for the same person. Some entries predated the clinic itself and carried the letterhead of a physician whose office had once occupied the building.
The office manager admitted that someone had deleted the appointment years earlier. For three days afterward, computer clocks stopped advancing past 11:59 p.m. Lab results arrived dated one day ahead. Patients called complaining that prescriptions had expired before being issued. Restoring an old backup fixed everything, including the appointment. Nobody had touched it since.
The temp began reading the patient’s chart more carefully. There were no diagnoses or visit notes. Each page contained only the date and the same notation: EXPECTED TOMORROW.
She still calls the name whenever she works reception, though she no longer marks the appointment as a no-show immediately. She waits until closing.
Recently, the record has begun changing. Beneath several old dates, new handwriting has appeared describing headaches, fatigue, and increasing difficulty remembering yesterday. The symptoms belong to the temp.
This morning she opened the schedule and found her own afternoon appointment missing.
The other one remained.
She spent the rest of the day watching the waiting-room clock, wondering whether all those reserved tomorrows had ever belonged to a patient at all, or whether the clinic had been keeping them somewhere until someone accumulated enough of them to be called in.
The question had been carved above the assembly hall entrance for longer than anyone could document. WHY OBEY? appeared in block letters worn smooth by weather and generations of people passing beneath them. Town historians treated it as a philosophical flourish from some stern civic founder, intended to put council members in a reflective mood before meetings.
Restoration work uncovered a second inscription.
It had been hidden beneath layers of paint on the underside of the lintel, visible only to someone standing directly beneath the doorway and looking straight up. The lettering matched the age and style of the question above.
Obedience is owed to whatever asked first.
The town historian initially assumed the line belonged to a forgotten political dispute. She searched charters, property records, church registries, meeting minutes, and private diaries. Nothing identified the original request. What she found instead was a habit extending farther back than the building itself.
On the same evening every month, residents gathered.
Records sometimes listed civic business. Sometimes they listed prayer, arbitration, elections, harvest planning, or simple attendance. During years when no business existed, the meeting happened anyway. During blizzards, epidemics, fires, and wartime evacuations, enough people always arrived to constitute a gathering.
No ordinance required it.
Nobody remembered deciding to continue.
The historian proposed canceling one meeting as an experiment. The suggestion produced an unexpectedly physical reaction around the table. People became nauseated. One council member developed a nosebleed. Another began crying without understanding why. The proposal was withdrawn within minutes, after which everyone felt better.
I attended the next gathering out of curiosity.
Nothing happened for most of the evening. People discussed road repairs and tax assessments, then sat through several unnecessary announcements. Near closing time, the room fell silent without anyone calling for order.
Everyone turned toward the entrance.
For perhaps ten seconds, something stood on the other side of the closed door. There was no visible shadow beneath it, though the wood bent inward slightly around the latch, as if pressure were being applied from outside.
Nobody spoke.
Then the pressure eased, and the meeting adjourned.
I asked afterward whether this happened often. Several people looked confused by the question. Others claimed they had noticed nothing unusual.
The historian has since found one sentence repeated in meeting minutes across three centuries, always written immediately after the final item of business. Attendance sufficient.
She no longer believes the town gathers to discuss anything.
Whatever made the first request appears interested only in whether enough people continue showing up.
The damnedest thing can place a bug in your brain. Rod Serling is the source of one of mine.
It happened while I was deep within my Twilight Zone infatuation phase, in the prehistoric information days before civilian access to the internet, when I devoured every Serling-related book, article or fanzine I could lay my grubby little mitts on. In one of the pieces, I read how Rod’s widow, Carol, found a number of scripts and stories amongst her late husband’s possessions that were unproduced at the time.
And thus the bug found a home in my grey matter.
I pictured Rod in the final moments before he shuffled off this mortal coil, his gaze sliding across the room until it fell on the closet door, eyes filled with that unique brand of sadness only known to writers. Carol would remember that stare and later be drawn to the closet by a mysterious force that urged her to dig out a box buried deep beneath the material remnants of Rod’s life, shed like so much old skin. A box filled with his regrets, the stories that remained untold, that never found a proper home.
You don’t have to say it, I know that’s all rubbish. Simply me fictionally placing myself in the position of a man I never met. If Rod had any regrets at all, I certainly wasn’t privy to them. But that doesn’t make my brain bug any less real.
You see, I have a box–well, it started off as a file folder and grew into a box–filled with stories in various stages of development. Ideas written on scraps of paper, composition notebooks loaded with concepts and outlines, and completed stories that only exist in paper form–written pre-computer on an Underwood typewriter, circa 1950–as I haven’t gotten down to the laborious task of transferring them to my computer.
I don’t discuss my box much and I only brought it up to respond to an email I recently received (copied and answered here with permission):
“I want to write a blog but I’m scared of being exposed and having people judge or attack me because of my opinions and I don’t think I have the writing skills to get my point across in the right way. What gives you the courage to write?“
Guess what? Self-doubt and anxiety regarding humiliation and criticism is all part of the process and grist for the mill, so welcome to the club. What separates writers from non-writers is that instead of running away from that fear, we invite it in for wine and cheese. Befriend the beast that frightens you most because there’s a story just waiting to be revealed in that encounter.
It’s true that honest writing takes courage, as does sharing your writing with people who may not be kind in their opinion of it, but you also have to realize that it’s not your job to make people like your writing. Some people will flat out hate it because of your views (see: The Opinions Expressed) or your writing style, and because they may not know any better, can possibly hate you because of it. Hopefully, it’ll be the minority. Accept it as an unavoidable truth and move on.
As for the question, “What gives [me] the courage to write?” Everyone has their own reason for writing, and fear of acceptance isn’t high on my list. Sure, it’d be great if the unwashed masses loved my work, but the simple truth is all writing has its audience, whether infinite or infinitesimal, and if you never put your writing out there, there’s no chance in hell of your audience ever finding it.
The real reason I write is because of the aforementioned box. I just don’t want to be lying on my deathbed–hopefully many, many, many years from now–and staring at that damned box full of unwritten stories. I no doubt will have my fair share of regrets in my final days, but I’m determined not to have that box be one of them.
And since we’re on the topic of regrets, I recently read a book, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing” by Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who cited the most common lamentations as being:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
So, while I can’t offer you reasons why you should write, I can tell you that most of the regrets listed above factor heavily in my need to write.
In closing, someone once wrote, “writing is like getting into a small boat with a wonky paddle and busted compass and setting out on rough waters in search of unknown lands.”
Author’s note: Since I’m never at a loss for ideas, I don’t dip into my story box as much as I’d like to, though I occasionally slip one or two of them into or in between current projects. The story idea folder on my computer… that’s a whole different story.
The photographs in the old parish album had all failed in the same peculiar way. Every person appeared pale against darkened surroundings, faces reduced to luminous hollows while clothing, walls, and furniture absorbed the light around them. The parish priest called them miracle photographs when they were first taken, though nobody alive could explain what miracle they were meant to document. Later generations assumed the effect came from faulty processing and kept the album because the images were too strange to discard.
A restoration specialist discovered the problem was more complicated.
The original negatives were correctly exposed. People looked ordinary on the film: proper shadows, proper highlights, every face intact. She produced a new print under controlled conditions and watched the image reverse itself while developing. The chemistry was fresh. The enlarger had been tested. Yet as the photograph emerged, light withdrew from the subjects and gathered everywhere else, leaving each figure with the same spectral vacancy found in the old album.
She began interviewing the few parishioners old enough to remember sitting for the photographer. Their recollections matched in one unsettling detail. At the instant the shutter clicked, each experienced a moment of complete emotional absence. Fear, affection, grief, hunger, even the awareness of having a body seemed to vanish for the fraction of a second required to make the exposure. Most had forgotten the sensation until asked.
Several admitted that something never entirely returned.
One woman had spent sixty years unable to miss anyone who left a room. Another remembered loving her children intensely while remaining incapable of worrying about them. A third described herself as permanently diminished by an amount too small to measure and too consistent to ignore.
The specialist searched parish records and learned that the photographer had been commissioned during a winter of epidemics, crop failures, and infant deaths. Soon after the portraits were taken, the parish experienced an improbable run of recoveries.
She has stopped printing the collection.
There are still seventeen undeveloped rolls in the archive, each carefully dated and labeled with households that survived that winter unusually well. X-rays of the film canisters reveal no deterioration despite their age.
What concerns her most is a final note in the photographer’s ledger. He recorded the number of exposures made each day alongside a second figure titled simply RECEIVED. The numbers never match. According to the last entry, several more things were received than photographs were ever taken.
There was a knock at Tim’s front door. Impossibly, there was a knock on a day there shouldn’t have been one. Not that it was a big disturbance, it had only interrupted his woolgathering. He began reading a book hours ago and somewhere along the way his mind drifted off to the point where he wouldn’t have been able, even with a gun pressed to his temple, to tell which page he was on or what part of the story he last read.
The knock again. Tim placed the book open face down on the side table. Next to it was the handheld trigger for the silent alarm which he picked up and let his thumb hover over the panic button. Should he press it or simply answer the door? Smart money was on activating the alarm but he had always been a slave to curiosity so he pocketed the remote, rose from his comfy chair, exited the living room and padded across the hardwood foyer floor on the balls of his feet.
The closer he got to the door he heard some sort of commotion going on outside and as his hand landed on the doorknob he drew in a deep breath and held it for a long moment to quell the anxious feeling hatching in the pit of his belly. Tim hadn’t realized just how unaccustomed he was to answering his own door, it had been so long.
As he turned the knob a thought crossed his mind, perhaps the person on the other side of the door, the lawbreaker, was a deranged lunatic or religious fanatic who saw it as their duty, their purpose, their God-given right to put an end to what they viewed as an abomination. He knew that wasn’t the case, though. The knock was far too polite. They were all so damned polite, the knockers. Lightly rapping on his door all day, all night, in any weather, even on holidays. Especially on holidays. The only time they didn’t knock was on Sunday, his sanctioned day of rest.
He opened the door to shouts and protests. A crowd of people clustered on his front porch began forming a semi-circle behind the woman who stood in the doorway directly in his face. They accused her of jumping the queue, shouted that what she was doing was illegal, and warned/threatened her with the prosecutable penalties of her actions. And the discontent was spreading along people of all ages, ethnicities, male and female alike who gathered in a line that ran the length of his front walk to the pavement, down the block, and most likely around the corner, who were waiting their turn for an audience. But all the chatter came to an abrupt halt the moment they caught sight of Tim.
The woman in front of him, the illegal knocker, had a familiar face but her features were too average, too face-in-the-crowd, to recall outright, Tim had to flip through his mental rolodex and play the association game. He twigged her face was connected to some sort of event that would have revealed a location that eventually would have produced a name. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed his mind and softened his focus and let his gears spin a bit until he came up with:
Fundraiser ~~> community center ~~> Dick Cole
This woman was a friend of Dick Cole. Linda something-or-other. Rhymed with seed. Greed? Mead? Plead?
“Linda Reid,” Tim smiled, more at the swiftness of the connection than the pleasure of seeing the woman. “It’s been a while. A couple of years, I think.”
“Settle down, everyone,” Tim addressed the throng beyond the woman. “You know I’m not allowed to accept appointments today so she’s not cutting in line ahead of any of you. She happens to be a friend.”
Tim gestured for Linda to step inside which prompted the grousing to recommence but he merely closed the door to let them vent amongst themselves.
“Sorry for causing a commotion,” Linda said, smiling a bit too much. “And for not keeping in touch. Things have been so hectic down at the center with budget cuts and understaffing…and other things, that I don’t socialize much anymore. And you’ve got a lot on your hands at the moment—”
Tim waved off the rest of the sentence. “No worries,” he said, leading her past the empty administrative desks and into the sitting room.
“Awful lot of furniture crowding your foyer,” Linda said.
“That’s for the staff, doormen, greeters, admin assistants, all government appointed. They see to visitors. There are also bodyguards posted at each of the house’s ingress and egress points but they all have the day off because it’s my day off.”
“I suppose that’s another thing I’m sorry for.”
“I don’t get many non-work related visitors so this is a welcomed change,” Tim said, gesturing for Linda to take a seat. “Can I get you anything? Water? Juice? Or I could put the kettle on?”
“Do you have anything stronger?” Linda asked sheepishly as she sat down.
“I don’t imbibe, I’m afraid. Rules of my employment and all.”
“Yes, of course, how foolish of me. Water’s fine, then.”
Tim popped into the kitchen and returned with two glasses and ice water in a silver pitcher dotted with dew-like condensation.
“Not to fret,” he said, sitting opposite Linda and filling her glass. “Most people never consider it when they drop by.”
She took the water glass and swallowed two gulps. “I–um–I think I have a slight confession to make.”
“This isn’t a social visit, is it?”
“I can explain.”
“Explain what exactly? That you’re a lawbreaker and you seek to make me complicit in your crime? Is this a trap? Did the organization send you? Are you here to test me? Well, I’m not having it so you can go back and tell your bosses that I don’t cut side deals to pocket a little extra cash. We made an arrangement and I’m honoring it to the best of my ability!”
“So, how does this go? Do I have to fill out an application? Sign a legal document? Do you need proof? I didn’t think to bring any with me but I can get whatever it is you need.”
“If your request is granted, you’ll need to sign a few documents, including one that absolves me of any blame should the outcome fail to have the desired effect,” he said automatically.
“Naturally, without a doubt,” Linda answered, a bit too eagerly.
They’re always so eager at this stage, before the harshness of reality sets in, Tim thought. “But for right now, all you have to do is tell me what brings you here.”
“Um, okay,” she adjusted herself in the seat and wondered how her breath could so suddenly get caught in her throat. “It isn’t for me, you understand, I’d never come to ask for myself.
It’s my fiancé, Dick, you’ve met him, in fact, he introduced us at a fundraiser two years ago.”
“Yes, I know Dick. What’s wrong with him?”
“He has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” Linda said in a quiet voice.
“Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Tim’s stomach turned over. He didn’t need her to elucidate further.
She nodded, her eyes fading down to the throw rug, absently tracing patterns. “It’s in the late stages now. I would have come sooner, but it’s taken me some time to talk Dick into this. He doesn’t think it seems right. Not what you do, that’s fine and he thinks you’re a saint for doing it. He doesn’t think it’s right asking you for help, especially this kind of help. Dick doesn’t want you or anyone else taking pity on him. He’s never taken a handout in his life and he can’t help but see this as charity.”
“Yes,” Tim said, not bothering to hear the rest of the pitch. That’s what they were, pitches. Not simple requests or implorations, these were stories designed to pull at his heartstrings. But who ever bothered to listen to his story? Not one of them. Not a single person among the many that crossed his threshold ever bothered asking him a personal question. As if he wasn’t human, as if he wasn’t allowed his own tragedy.
“What? I don’t understand.” She set the glass down on the nearby table, missing the coaster by half an inch. Tim either hadn’t noticed or decided not to comment.
“I’m saying, yes.”
“Yes, you’ll help?” Linda blinked and met the man’s gaze as a hopeful smile began to split her face.
“Yes.”
“I — I don’t know what to say,” she was on her feet before she knew what was happening, moving in for a hug. “I — thank you, Tim!”
Tim put his hand up, stopping the woman in her tracks. “Don’t thank me yet. There are still a few things you need to realize before you accept my offer.”
“It doesn’t matter. Anything! And I mean anything!” Interest colored her face.
“Please calm down for a moment and listen to me. This thing you’re asking of me, this gift of blood, it may not solve your problems and could possibly worsen matters for you.” Tim traced his finger around the rim of his glass.
“I’ll take that chance… we’ll take that chance!”
“Listen to me!” Tim brought the glass down on the table, just hard enough to startle and capture her full attention. At the cost of a wet sleeve and the water stains that would surely mark the cherry wood. “Ever since scientists discovered the curative properties of my blood, tests have been run. Mostly successful, I’m a match for all blood types, and my white blood cells haven’t encountered a disease it can’t cure—”
“Which is why I came to you. I did my research and you cured other ALS patients before—”
“The problem isn’t my blood,” he interrupted. “It’s Dick’s immune system reaction that’s the danger. If his body rejects my blood and tries to attack parts of it, there won’t be a second chance. He instantly becomes a non-match. On the other hand, if his body takes the transfusion, in a few month’s time, his white blood cells will resemble mine and he’ll automatically be enlisted in the same line of work as I am.”
The weight of Tim’s words slowly settled on Linda. “You mean, he’ll—?”
“He’ll never know another moment’s peace for the rest of his life. People will hound him, pleading for themselves or family or friends, day and night, night and day. Nonstop. Some gentle, others less so.”
“But why is that necessary?” Linda asked.
“My white blood cells can’t be synthesized. Top minds have tried and failed time and again. And although my blood can be stored, the white blood cells lose their miraculous properties over a period of thirty-six hours outside my body.
“I would have been strapped to a table in a laboratory for the rest of my natural life if I wasn’t for my brother. Hell of a lawyer. Fought his ass off to petition the quality of life rights that allow me the tiny bit of freedom I have. The stipulation is I must share my gift, triage the world, help the sickest among you. There are restrictions, legal hours when people have the right to approach me, but no one listens. How can they be expected to follow the rules when they or their loved ones are dying?
“I used to fight it. Turn people away when the established workday was through. Dealt with the angry mobs and the death threats. Then I asked myself, “Why?” Why fight my fate? If I’m meant to help people, why shouldn’t I do it when it needs to be done and not only when I want to do it? And there’s a selfish reason if I’m honest. You see, if I help enough people, if enough of the populace possesses my blood, I won’t be special anymore or alone in all this. Maybe then, when there’s enough blood to go around and my bit for the world is done, the price of my gift paid, maybe then I can be left alone to die in peace.”
Linda hesitated. She shook her head and turned to leave. “This… this is… “ She stumbled over the words, not knowing how to express her thoughts.
Tim realized too late that he said too much, chose the wrong person to unburden himself on. He regretted his action instantly. “It’s a lot to process, I know. Why don’t you go home and discuss it with Dick? You can contact me if you decide to go through with it.”
From his shirt pocket, he fished out a solid white business card, imprinted only with a faint phone number that had to be viewed at the proper angle in order to be seen. “A direct line, please don’t share it with anyone.”
“I won’t,” Linda muttered as she shambled to the doorway. “I — look, I know you can’t talk about the other people you’ve seen, but can you just tell me if anyone has ever turned down your help after you’ve explained everything to them?”
For a moment, Tim didn’t respond, he just watched as the hope drained from her face. “More people than you might imagine.” He noted she found no reassurance in his answer. He turned away, unable to look upon her sorrow any longer. He had his own to contend with.
Over his shoulder, he said, “Be sure you tell Dick everything I’ve told you, and if he refuses, try to understand. Sometimes there are worse things than death.”
The mirror came from an estate sale, its frame carved with roses detailed enough to include individual thorns. A diagonal crack divided the glass from upper corner to lower edge, which explained why nobody else bid on it. I liked the damage. It made the object feel less decorative and more like something that had survived being used.
For a year, nothing unusual happened.
Then the crack began closing.
At first I assumed the difference was lighting. Months later, photographs confirmed that the dark line had narrowed. The change happened slowly enough to escape daily notice, yet steadily enough that by spring only a hairline remained.
One morning the glass was whole.
That was when the reflection started behaving differently.
The delays were small. I would lower my hand and see it remain raised for a fraction of a second. My reflection occasionally seemed to inhale before I did. Once, while passing through the hallway, I saw myself standing still in the mirror even though I had never stopped walking.
The dealer remembered the mirror’s history reluctantly. It came from a house where a woman had died directly in front of it. According to the estate inventory, the crack appeared the same morning. Family members claimed it had been intact the night before.
I asked whether anyone knew what caused her death.
He said the records described no injury and no illness. She had simply been found sitting before the mirror with an expression of profound exhaustion.
After that I began photographing the glass every morning.
The crack has returned.
It started as a faint line along the old path and has widened each week. I should find that reassuring. Instead, the reflection appears healthier as the glass deteriorates. Its skin has color mine lacks. Its posture is straighter. It smiles more easily.
Yesterday I noticed the carved roses changing too. Several blossoms now face inward toward the glass. Their thorns appear longer.
I have stopped touching the frame.
The mirror seems to be dividing something again, and I am beginning to suspect the crack was never damage at all. It may have been the only visible sign that two versions of the same life had finally been forced apart. What I do not yet know is which side of the glass was considered the safe one.
The police sketch artist spent thirty years producing composites so precise that witnesses sometimes recoiled when she turned the drawing around. She credited patience. Faces, she explained, emerged through accumulation: distance between the eyes, shape of the jaw, angle of the brow, one uncertain detail corrected by another.
A young detective found the pattern while digitizing old case files.
Several sketches from unrelated investigations showed the same person.
The crimes stretched across decades and shared no obvious connection. Witnesses had lived in different cities, belonged to different age groups, and described suspects of varying heights and builds. Yet beneath changes in hairstyle and apparent age, the face remained unmistakable. A narrow mouth. Deep-set eyes. A faint scar above the left eyebrow.
The detective brought the files to the retired artist expecting her to recognize a mistake. Instead she studied the drawings for nearly an hour.
She remembered every interview. She remembered witnesses struggling over noses, chins, hairlines, cheekbones. She remembered drawing each detail individually. What she could not remember was ever choosing the face those details became.
They arranged the sketches chronologically.
The figure aged.
Early drawings suggested someone in their twenties. Later ones showed middle age, then deepening lines around the mouth and eyes. The progression roughly matched the artist’s own career.
The detective expanded the search. More sketches surfaced in neighboring jurisdictions. Some had been drawn by other artists. A few came from descriptions given before she entered the profession. The same face appeared there too, younger again.
Then they found photographs.
A blurred face in the background of a crime-scene image. A reflection in a shop window. Someone standing among spectators behind police tape. Never central. Never clear enough for identification.
The retired artist has stopped discussing the investigation. She keeps one final composite locked in a drawer, assembled from every surviving description.
According to the detective, the face in that drawing is elderly now.
What bothers him most is the newest case. A witness described someone standing across the street during a burglary, watching the house with unusual concentration. The sketch artist assigned to the case produced the familiar face without ever seeing the older files.
This time, however, the scar above the left eyebrow is gone.
In its place is a thin pencil mark, exactly where someone might begin correcting a drawing.
