As a child, I never knew the word or knew what a mirror was, as no one from the village would even whisper it; the existence of an object that could show you what’s behind the tip of the nose better than the wavy surface of the water was hidden. I wondered if my eyes were actually as blue as a cloudless sky or did my mother dream them up. When I cut my left cheek, the blood in the reflection was much colder and darker than what I felt on the tip of my fingertips. 

I also never knew the word reflection, as my little mountain village invented ways to speak around it, or cover it with blanket meanings during conversations. “The water’s copy”, as they tried to put it. The language they practiced and the one the kids used always struck odd to me; ours was so simple, with clutches of finger pointing or headbobbing to whatever an adult asked. “Does it hurt here, or here?” or “If pain keeps up, keep it to yourself. If the pain keeps up by tomorrow, keep it between us. Only when during the second rise of the sun are we to call the green mixer, understood?”

When I grew older, maybe 14-15, I felt the gaze of my villagers follow my every step, like they were keeping tabs on me. They might know what I yearned for, to learn why we do things we do, how we do it and why we aren’t doing it another way. In hindsight, my guess was that they went through a similar phase and were afraid of what rebellious teen actions we might take. I wasn’t part of the group, but one day I saw three boys in the middle of the square, with the mayor behind them, yelling from the top of his lungs, for everyone to hear how “ these criminals broke our laws and put the entire village in danger.  Their crime, you ask? They stalked the woodcutters and left the borders of our community.” 

I never saw those boys ever again.

The entire village lived away from the rest of the unknown world, stuck in its fears of reflections. I never understood them, until, again a few years later, when everyone who turned 20 was brought into the mayor’s cellar. There we stood, along with the captain of the guards, the priest and other figures I recognized. They started by congratulating us that we survived for this long, made some remarks about how we are the future and so on, until we got the part that really grabbed my attention. The mayor started talking about an object, called a mirror, that could reflect our true image. 

Alien words and phrases basically, as this was the first time we heard them, so we started asking basic questions, like what do they mean, what are they used for, and the most important of them all, why was this the first we were made aware of a mirror’s existence. The priest tried to go into a history rant, describing the “esoteric beyond, hidden by a veil, pierced only by the reflections of our world”, until the captain stopped him from going on for too long.

“Here, take these and take off their garments. Just tie the band around your eyes and don’t move”. We were unsure of the entire process, but this was our chance to enter the hidden circle of our village.

One by one, we undressed the objects little by little, revealing under it a smooth surface that showed a much shinier world than what the surface of the murky did. We couldn’t believe that such a thing was possible, so we experimented with it, ‌trying to dissect its can and can’t. By the time we uncovered half of it, some strange things became more and more obvious, strains of hair moving from gusts of winds, even though there was none, spots on our faces seemed like they were moving across our skin. The further we unraveled the cloth, the more we discovered about these reflections, whatever they actually were. The priest explained how reflections work for the rest of humanity, but just our village, our area is special because here, you don’t just look into a mirror reflection, but it stares back at you, waiting for you to act. To do something, anything to entertain it. 

One other, enamored by the sights in the mirror, took the rest of the cloth in a hurry and got caught in the silver’s game. It started first as a game: one by one, both the original and the reflection carried a small copy by the other. A head tilt led to a head tilt, a pinch of the nose meant the other did the same, until little by little the reflections started to gain the reigns. 

The mind emptied of all thoughts, and like a horse with blinders, the originals could only see the silvery universe and their copied inhabitants. We tried to let go of them, but our bodies were so numb that we couldn’t even tell when blood poured from our fingers. 

Right before the spell could capture us entirely, the captain took the mirror from our hands and quickly covered them up; a splash of cold water woke us up to reality, shuttering us back from the mire of the otherside. 

“ This is what the rest of the world is like”, murmured the priest. “ The land no longer belongs to us, but to them. In a few years, you will show the same to your children, who in turn will do the same to them. And that way, we will live- survive- and go on.”