Self-Reflection

              Raising a delicate hand to the mirror, the prince stepped through the filaments with the witch’s spell still warming his mouth.

              The journey did not go as advertised.

              Prince Alexander expected to see the world he had seen on the other side of the mirror. A world where the people looked peaceful, and the leaves looked green, lush, and exotic. The world had looked like a better version of his own—a quiet version without the magical beasts or power-hungry magic-workers.

              Instead, Xander felt himself falter, his fine shoes balancing on a woven mat of world-fibers. He was in a seeming forest of the threads usually woven together into reality. A vaguely brown haze colored everything the prince saw—it seemed to disperse the light, wherever the light was coming from. He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear his mind. Perhaps this was an illusion, perhaps he just needed to look more closely to find the path out.

              Standing taller, he started with his feet. His polished boots looked the same, but they were balanced at odd angles on a thickly braided rope, perhaps two feet in diameter, that was tangled in several similarly twisted ropes, but there was nothing beneath them except that brown haze. Xander quickly looked up, reaching out his arms for balance. He guessed that the next jumble of “ground” was about three feet away, also brown-pink-yellow in color. It seemed an oasis compared to where he currently stood. Uneven as it seemed from his current vantage point, that bit of “ground” was, perhaps, ten or fifteen feet wide—he had never been good at guessing distances, even in the version of reality he knew.

              One deep breath later, Xander launched himself. He regretted the impetuous decision as he was mid-air, feeling suspended in that brown mist. He regretted it as he scrapped his hands and face against the scratchy strings of his oasis. But when he looked at his hands, he forgot to regret anything.

              His hands were thick, rough. Not only were they covered in calluses, they seemed to have an intricate pattern of interlacing scars. Perhaps a second later, perhaps a minute later, he eventually looked at the arms attached to these foreign hands. They two were thick, strong, scarred. He had never seen such up close. Both morning and evening had consisted of carefully coordinated skin care routines while he still lived in his palace. 

              Worse than the collision of his body on the ropes, he felt run over by the realization that if the witch had lied about the spell to travel through the mirror, she may have lied about other things. He leapt to his feet, searching for the opening through which he had come. There was nothing but brown haze and patches of horizontal weaving like the patch he was standing on and vertical weaving, like the stand of what he had thought were trees at the far end of his current oasis. He strained his eyes, he turned his head one way and then the other, but no matter what he tried, he could not see the doorway the spell had opened. 

              Before he could think better of it, he spoke the words of the spell again, reaching his hand (he was pretty sure it was still his hand despite the fact that it looked nothing like his hand) out into the air as though there was a mirror before him.

              There was no mirror before him, but he felt the warmth of the spell spill through his fingertips all the same. 

              After a moment of disorientation, he found himself mirrored, not by a mirror, but by himself—

              “What are—”

              “Who are—”

              Both versions of the prince began speaking at the same time. Their voices cut of with the same snatch of air.

              Xander looked at his own scarred hands and then the smoother hands of the newly appeared him. The Xander who had just appeared began to look around and smoothed his hair back to cover his panic.

              “Where are we? Who are you? Is this the witch’s doing?”

              “Obviously I’m Prince Alexander, Son of Queen Anne. Who are you? Which witch are you talking about?” Xander rubbed at his hands, the callouses were unfamiliar, but the shape was the same as they had always been, including his embarrassingly knobby knuckles on his pinky fingers. He knew he should be more concerned with this double showing up out of thin air, but he kept getting distracted by his hands. They seemed so…so capable.

              “Witch Hazelveld, who gave me the spell to step through the magic mirror. She swore it would take me to a land free of magic where I could relax.” To change things up, he ran his hand down his neck. “My younger brother is a bit young to take the crown, but what was I going to do with it?”

              Xander stared. It sounded so lame coming out of his mouth. It was true—what would he do with the crown? He didn’t know how to run a kingdom; sure, he’d had tutors and he’d sat in on his mother’s council. But what did he really know? He knew how to have silky smooth hands. He traced the scars along his new palms.

              “Are you even listening to me? Why do you keep staring at your hands like that?” He reached out and took Xander’s hand, pulling it open. His lip curled as the used hand opened into his soft ones. “Oh. Oh. I thought we were the same, but…”

              For the first time, the two Prince Alexanders looked each other over—and themselves. For all that they were wearing the same clothes, and were clearly the same person, their bodies bore their differences. One stood with both feet planted beneath his hips, balanced. Shoulders broad, but loose, arms hanging at the ready. Though his mind was racing, he stood at ease, no longer awkward with the fibrous ground. The other stood with feet at odd angles, his left hip clearly dropped. His shoulders were tense, knotted into his neck. His hands fluttered, less like a graceful bird and more like the frantic bugs bouncing off the lantern’s glass.

              Xander saw, for the first time really saw, how he was when he stepped through the mirror. No wonder he thought it was better to desert his kingdom than stick them with such a monarch. He wondered how it could be that someone so sensible as his mother could have let him turn out this way. 

              “How did we end up like this?” The soft Xander had wandered over to the “trees,” squinting out into the brown haze.

              Xander was startled at how clearly even their thoughts mirrored each other—were the same but not. He suppressed the urge to make a flippant reply; he could feel the habit rising up from his chest, entering his throat. Words he wasn’t consciously aware of until they had already come out of his lips. He cleared his throat instead, coughing them away. Perhaps his mother hadn’t let him turn out this way. 

              Turning his back on the second Xander, he reached out his hand and spoke the spell.

              After another moment of disorientation, Xander felt the warmth of another hand against his. This Xander looked shocked to see him, but the one who spoke the spell studied every twitch of the other’s eyes, every shift of weight. This third Xander had rough hands, but there were no easily visible scars. He stood at ready, but was clearly unbalanced by the ground. He looked around much more quickly than either of the first two. He seemed to recover more quickly.

              “Why did you bring me here?”

              “Did I bring you here? Did you try to enter the mirror yourself?”

              The second Xander walked over, “What did you do? How is there another one of us? Isn’t two enough?”

              The newest Xander flicked his eyes between the other two. “The mirror was a temptation. An easy way to allow my responsibilities slide. Perhaps I would have taken the option a few years ago, but after my youngest brother’s illness…” He cleared his throat.

              Xander walked away, ashamed. He could have stepped into a more responsible version of himself after the youngest son had died. But instead, he allowed the middle boy to become the pillar of stability for the family. He had retreated into ever more elaborate rituals of care for his body as a way to neglect the care for his self.

              “What do your hands look like?” The Xander with soft hands captured the newest Xander’s hands, much to his bemusement. 

              The frustration roiled through Xander. He grabbed the threaded tree and shook it.  

              At most he expected to feel a few strings to allow his fingers to slip into the twining. 

              He did not expect to shake the full rope.

              He did not expect to feel the reverberations within the ground of the oasis.

              He did not expect to hear the high-pitched screech behind him.

              Swinging around, he saw the newest Xander helping up the second. His anger at his own avoidance of himself had somehow landed some other version of himself on his butt in a realty made of fog and string. 

              He laughed. The irony was just too much. He thought the witch was helping him escape the weight of the world that was too much for him. Instead, he was trapped with the one thing he had actually been trying to escape: himself.

              The other two watched him with care. It was clear that they were waiting for him because he was the first. He was here when each of them had arrived. But they were both him, and he always waited for someone else to take the lead. He looked down at his hands again. They looked so competent. They had seen hard work and suffering, but standing in this body, he felt the calm that he had searched for in all his pampering. 

              Too many thoughts. Too many feelings. He couldn’t untangle the years in these few… minutes? hours? Time had always been something he knew existed but had never bothered trying to measure.  With a skip of his heart though, it began to seem relevant. How long had he been away? Had the witch done anything untoward while he’d been gone?

              He took a deep breath.

              He looked across the divide and jumped, the spell words streaming out of his mouth backwards, parting the threads, landing him on the polished tile of the private meeting chamber that contained the mirror.