What Breaks Between Us

Anwar wasn’t a superstitious man. 

“I’m not a superstitious man,” he told Tami as they were moving into their new home. Just three roads back from the beachfront. Tami couldn’t wait to go on long coastal runs and cool off with an Atlantic dip on hot summer evenings. Anwar was just happy she was happy. 

He didn’t care where they lived, as long as he could walk to a good coffee shop. 

“If you’re not superstitious, why are you so anal about this mirror? It’s all wrapped up!”

“Just… I can’t afford for it to break,” urged Anwar, biting his bottom lip as they carried it up the stairs to his office. 

“Besides,” Tami continued, “what’s another seven years of bad sex?”

“Oh, touché.”

# 

With Tami gently snoring, Anwar stared at the time on his phone. 11:59… 12:00 am. He slipped out of bed like he’d done every night for the past year. Every night except last night, that is. 

In the mania of their big move, he’d simply forgotten. Today, though, he did nothing but remember, and he felt the guilt fester like an open wound.  

With scissors in hand, he headed to his office. The door creaked open and he took a second to absorb the new space by the moonlight before softly closing it behind him.

The mirror had been a gift. Or rather, an inheritance from his mother. He’d never actually met her, only seen pictures when he was a young boy.

She was dark and wild, like him, and his father told him that she’d had taken a piece of him when she left. Some nights, Anwar would press his ear to his father’s bedroom door and hear him weeping. He would still hear it in the ambience of his own silent bedroom. 

He began cautiously snipping the tape and bubble wrap away from his mirror. Snip by precarious snip. The anticipation scorched like reflux in his sternum. Careful not to accidentally scrape the metal blades of the scissors against the glass, he peeled away the bubble wrap with such delicacy and focus that not a single bubble popped.

He unsheathed it to reveal full-length glass perfectly cut to fill a gold, Moroccan style frame. Anwar’s exact height, 184 cm tall, at the tip of its topmost arch. 

He placed the scissors on the carpeted floor, secured the mirror against the street-facing wall, and stood in front of it. Surrounded by unopened boxes and discarded bubble wrap, he held his own stare before closing his eyes and counting down from ten… 

Two, one. He opened his eyes and, maintaining eye contact, sat down cross legged on the mottled grey carpet Tami couldn’t wait to lift. 

“Good evening, Anwar,” said a voice from the mirror.

“Hello brother,” said Anwar.

“What happened last night,” said Anwar’s brother.

“We had to pack.”

“I waited…”

“I’m sorry.” said Anwar, feeling the heat of his brother’s gaze. 

“You made a promise.”

“Life gets in the way,” said Anwar, “I can’t keep sneaking out of bed to see you every night.”

His brother never responded, but kept an unblinking stare that raised the hairs on the back of Anwar’s neck.

“How is Tami?” His brother asked. Something he’d never asked before. It was always Anwar who brought Tami up when he had to keep a visit short. She was a convenient excuse for brevity, but never absence. 

Anwar’s mind leapt to his new bedroom where his wife slumbered. He heard her stirring and began to sweat. A bead ran from his armpit down to the waistband of his underwear. His eyes never wavered from the mirror. 

He and his brother were the same. Identical. Only he lived in the real world. As if reading his mind, his brother spoke suddenly.

“You must not look away.”

“I won’t. I… I just thought Tami might hear us.”

“She is sleeping.”

“How do you know that?”

“We would hear her calling, Anwar. She always calls for you first. Focus.” 

Anwar forced himself to take a deep breath and remain present. Whenever he blinked, he wondered if his brother was blinking, too. If for a sacred moment, they were both forced to believe the other was still there. This thought collided with his brother’s iron stare before he began again.

“We have been meeting like this for a long time now, Anwar.”

“Almost a year,” affirmed Anwar. 

“Exactly one year,” Anwar’s brother spoke with a sudden sternness, “yet you haven’t made good on your promise.”

“I know,” Anwar began, shame coursing through him like so many white blood cells, “I just, I have no idea how to do it yet, and we’ve been busy with the move…” He watched his brother’s eyes grow sorrowful. 

Anwar watched as his brother’s chest rose with his before they both let out a deep sigh.

“I want to show you something,” said Anwar’s brother, “stand with me.” Anwar stood once again to encompass the entire height of the mirror. They stared at one another. Breathing their hot breath onto the glass, peering into the fissures of their dark green eyes. 

After a few seconds, they sat down again and a woman appeared behind Anwar’s brother, suddenly illuminated in the moonlight as they sat. Exactly like his dear wife in every way, her fine blond hair wrapping around her fair-skinned neck as she placed a hand on Anwar’s brother’s shoulder. 

Anwar felt his bones grow frigid spikes. He could feel the hand on his own shoulder, but Tami in the mirror just stared at him, blankly. He tried to turn out of instinct, and realised that he couldn’t.

“How is this… possible?”

“She is my wife, Anwar,” said his brother. Before he could say anything, his brother continued, “yes, she is Tami. My Tami.” 

Anwar wanted more than anything to look away. To stand up, kick a hole through this mirror, and return to bed with his wife.

How had he let this get so out of hand? How was he meant to get him out of a mirror? What was he thinking?

He’d always been in way over his head. And now he was their prisoner. Forced into a statuesque surrender.

“Anwar,” his brother started again, “are you ready to save me?”

“Brother, please, I don’t…” and Anwar began to weep in an instant that crystallised his mistakes over the past 365 days. 

His brother’s eyes started swirling with a smoky greyness. First light and wispy, then concentrating into a marbled void.

“Place your hand against the glass.” Anwar felt a wave of cold crash over him, like a waterfall keeping him rooted. As much as he willed it, he could not force his gaze away. Even as his eyes burned with exertion and tears, he could not close them.

“Your hand, Anwar.” His brother insisted, his voice now a whirring siren of sound, filling every atom in the room with heat and pressure. He thought the paint might melt off the walls. 

As his brother lifted his hand up, so did Anwar. His palm pressed onto the glass. Anwar saw his brother’s eyes pouring liquid from their bottomless black.

“You can’t! Cried Anwar, feeling the muscles in his throat rippling and shredding to force the words out.

“I must.” And Anwar felt his eyes begin to close. His eyelashes drew blurred curtains over his vision until all was black and silent. No sounds from the outside world. No light from the room. No sense of touch from the mirror.

When he could finally open his eyes, his brother and Tami were both standing, looking down at him through the mirror. Tami, standing behind his brother with Anwar’s scissors in her hand, shuffling her bare feet to pop the bubble wrap strewn across his office floor. 

Anwar looked out and into his brother’s eyes. Into the swirling void that stared back at him, as his brother’s foot came crashing into the mirror.

In falling, fractal images, Anwar watched his brother and Tami open his office door and turn left into his bedroom.