The Other Eva

# The Other Eva

## By Daisy Agnes Jones

*‌“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.”*

— Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy

## The Cold Key

The apartment opened like a mouth that had forgotten how to speak—stale breath caught in its throat, curtains half-closed like eyelids too tired to lift. Eva stepped inside, the floor moaning beneath her soles, and the door sighed shut behind her.

Here it was: her childhood, preserved like something pickled in vinegar. The air was thick with the sour tang of old lavender, scorched tea leaves, and the faint, acidic trace of skin that had long since stopped sweating. Light fell in pale, chalky bands through the window slats. Everything was the colour of forgetting.

She passed through each room like a ghost with no grievance, touching objects not to remember them, but to see if they remembered her. A threadbare armchair slumped in the corner like a collapsed lung. Her mother’s writing desk—still stained with ink—held a coffee cup ring older than Liv. Even now, years after her mother’s voice had turned to ash, Eva half-expected to hear it rising from the walls: sharp, exacting, wearing perfume like armour.

Liv had told her—gently, but with that firm undertone she’d inherited from somewhere untraceable—don’t take too long.

“It’s just a place, Mum,” she’d said, voice clipped. “Get someone to clear it, list it. Let it go.”

Let it go. As if the walls didn’t still echo with all the things that had never been said.

In the bedroom, a drawer stuck as she pulled it open. Inside: dull spools of thread, a brittle packet of needles, and beneath them, nestled like a relic, an iron key. Cold, weighty, inexplicably private. Its teeth were oddly shaped, as if meant for a lock that didn’t want to be opened.

She held it tightly, not knowing why. The metal was a small moon in her palm.

The house pressed closer the longer she stayed, as if the silence itself had a pulse. Drawn by instinct more than memory, Eva made her way to the stairwell—steep, narrow, the rail smoothed down by decades of hesitant hands. At the top, a door she hadn’t seen since girlhood crouched like a secret: nailed shut, she remembered, with a mother’s flat voice saying, “There’s nothing up there but dust and dead air.”

The door was smaller than she recalled, shamed into shrinking. The iron key trembled slightly between her fingers as she fitted it into the rust-stiff lock.

It turned too easily.

The attic breathed open, exhaling air so dry it felt scorched. The light here was slanted, grey, bruised. The ceiling pitched downward like the roof of a mouth ready to swallow. Her footsteps disturbed nothing—just the hush of particles shifting in their long sleep.

And there, leaned silently against the far wall, stood a mirror.

Tall, dust-veiled, its edges scalloped with tarnish. The glass was dark, like pond water at dusk—reflective, but unwilling. Eva didn’t move closer. Her body froze in the doorway, her gaze pinned by the shape of that silent object. There was something familiar curled deep inside it, like a girl hidden in reeds, or a breath held for years.

Her fingers closed around the key.

Somewhere behind her, the door whispered back into its frame.

## The Pale Twin

The attic breathed around her like a sleeping lung—dry, tight, and holding its breath. Light pooled at her feet in a dusty spill from the stairwell, fading before it could reach the corners. The walls leaned inward, sloped and uneven, as though the room were trying to close itself again.

Eva stepped softly, her footsteps swallowed by the wooden floor, which felt thin beneath her—planks worn to the bone. The air had the texture of paper ash. Each breath scratched her throat.

She was not sure what she had expected. A trunk of secrets, perhaps, or something as ordinary as mouse droppings. Instead, there was only stillness—faintly accusatory—and the quiet click of her coat hem brushing past an old crate.

Then she saw it.

The mirror leaned against the far wall like a tall, sleeping woman. Its frame was carved from some dark, varnished wood, thick with dust, as if it had not been touched in decades. The glass itself was tarnished—mottled silver with bruised edges, like a moon half-drowned in a puddle. Its face offered no welcome, only waiting.

She did not mean to look into it. It was a reflex, like glancing into a window at night and mistaking yourself for a stranger.

But the reflection was not hers.

The girl stood small and upright in the centre of the glass. Her cotton dress clung to her knees, pale as soap left in the rain. Her shoes were black and sensible. A blue ribbon held her hair in a tight little tail, like the kind tied to packages too neatly wrapped to open.

Eva stared.

The girl did not smile. Her arms hung slack by her sides. Her eyes—if they were eyes—were just dark marks behind the fogged surface of the mirror. But they were looking. Through her. Past her.

She was ten, perhaps. Maybe nine. A slim, silent age.

Eva’s heart pressed lightly against her ribs, like a moth inside a drawer. She took a step closer, then stopped. The attic gave nothing away. The child in the mirror remained motionless, but the air between them had thickened, as if a thin sheet of glass now stood in the room itself.

It was not memory, Eva told herself. It was light, exhaustion, the trick of a mirror grown senile with age. She blinked—once, twice—and when her eyes opened again, the child had vanished.

Only her own face remained. Slightly too pale. The jaw more drawn than she remembered. Her coat, buttoned wrong. The hair at her temples thinned by time.

She left quickly, the key still in her pocket, the stairs groaning beneath her as if they disliked being stepped on. She did not shut the attic door.

In the kitchen, she filled the kettle and forgot to turn it on. The mug sat in silence, clouding slightly at the bottom. Outside, the bare trees clicked their branches against the glass like fingernails trying to get in.

That evening, as dusk bruised the apartment in slow, violet tones, Eva lay on the old sofa and stared at the ceiling. The mirror did not follow her—but the girl did. Small, pale, unrippled by time. She had curled herself into the folds of Eva’s mind like a pressed flower: faded, yes, but uncrushed. And still, somehow, breathing.

## Through the Silver Skin

The day unfurled without shape, like milk spilled on linoleum—white, formless, slightly sour. Eva moved through the rooms like a thought that had lost its sentence. The kettle hissed and was silenced. Toast grew rigid, uneaten. Her fingertips, as she wiped the counter, felt far away from her hands.

By afternoon, the attic called again—not in words, but in a hush, a pressure behind the eyes. She climbed the stairs slowly, each one sounding like a clock striking time that didn’t belong to her.

The door was ajar.

The air inside had a brittle weight to it, as though it had been breathed once, and then held. The sloped ceiling bowed over her like a parent bending too close. Shadows clung to the corners, unswept, untouched. She could hear her own pulse.

The mirror waited in its place.

It had not moved, but it felt nearer, somehow. Its surface was cloudy, weathered with the patina of years and someone else’s grief. Eva stepped forward and watched the dim outline of herself rise in the glass—only it wasn’t her.

The girl had returned.

She stood calmly, hands by her sides, the pale dress clinging to her knees like fog to gravestones. The ribbon in her hair hung limp and wet-looking, as though pulled from a well. Her face was still, but not blank. There was something there now—a curiousness, a trace of understanding, like she’d been waiting for the air to clear.

Their eyes met. Not quite recognition, but something adjacent—an ache, a twin pain gently knocking from the inside out.

Eva spoke before she meant to.

“Who are you?”

Her voice, small and dry, dissolved into the wood and dust.

The girl didn’t speak. But her silence had shape. She watched, and in the watching, there was a kind of listening. A mirrored breathing.

Eva felt herself folding in on something old and unnamed. Something that smelled like mothballs and the back of drawers.

She left.

In the living room, she opened the boxes again, her hands diving through layers of old papers as if the past were buried there, breathing shallowly beneath the yellowed pages. She wasn’t looking for anything. Or rather, she was always looking for something.

At the bottom of a soft-collapsed box, she found a small diary. Red cover, her name written in uneven letters. A child’s name. Hers.

She opened it carefully, as if it might bleed.

Most pages were blank. A few held stick drawings—faces without mouths, birds with no wings. But one page had writing. Just one.

“I dreamed about the girl in the mirror upstairs.

She has my eyes. I think she knows things I don’t.”

Her stomach pulled tight, as if a string had been drawn from her spine to her throat. The words vibrated inside her. She had no memory of the dream, no memory of writing it—but there it was, in her own uneven hand. That same girl. That same mirror. Before time had given her reasons to forget.

Evening descended like a bruise across the apartment walls. She made tea, then poured it down the sink. Her thoughts circled, restless. The attic above her was quiet, but not still.

Later, standing at the foot of the stairs, she placed one hand on the banister.

She did not climb.

But something in her turned upward, like a flower leaning toward a window. Something remembered her name.

## The Soft Undoing

The days passed like moths—silent, grey-winged, disintegrating at the edges. Eva moved through the apartment as one moves through fog: slowly, carefully, never quite touching anything. Light filtered in through the curtains but failed to land. Tea cooled in cups that never reached her lips. The smell of her mother’s old clothes clung to the air, faint and stale as pressed flowers.

She did not answer Liv’s calls. The phone lit up and went dark like a pulse she no longer claimed. Her voice, if summoned, might crack open something she had worked hard to seal.

At night, she climbed the attic stairs. It was no longer a decision—it was a drift, a tide pulling her upward. The door greeted her with its usual whimper, and the attic air wrapped around her like damp wool. Time felt thin here, like the attic stood slightly outside of it, pulsing at a slower rhythm.

The mirror waited.

She no longer startled at the girl. She was always there now, standing with the stillness of someone too tired to move. The dress hung from her like a remembered hymn. The blue ribbon trailed like smoke down her back.

Tonight, she smiled.

Not fully—not with teeth or lips. Just the faintest curl at the edge of her mouth, like the ghost of a secret. It was worse than if she’d screamed.

Eva stood still, breath held. Her body, in the reflection, did not quite move in time with her. Her hand twitched, and the girl did not mirror it. Instead, after a moment, the child lifted her own hand—deliberately—and pressed it to the glass.

A gesture, not a reflection. A greeting. A dare.

Eva swallowed the dryness in her throat.

She whispered her name, quietly: Eva.

The girl blinked, almost imperceptibly, as if the name stirred something forgotten but not gone. Her silence was not passive. It had weight. Intention.

That evening, downstairs, the house leaned into shadows. She pulled out the old photo albums, the plastic sleeves sticking together with the hush of age. Her hands trembled slightly as she turned the pages. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Proof, perhaps. Permission.

She found it at the back.

A photograph—undated, unlabeled. She was ten. The same blue ribbon. The same blunt haircut. But her face had a hollow brightness to it, a gaze aimed just past the camera, as though she were seeing something that no one else had noticed.

She carried it upstairs like an offering.

The mirror was darker than usual, rimmed in shadow like a closed eye. Eva stepped close, pressing the photo to the glass. The girl did not flinch. Her gaze moved to the image, and then—softly, shatteringly—met Eva’s.

A bloom of breath fogged the glass between them. Pale. Slow. Like the mirror had finally remembered how to breathe.

Eva didn’t speak at first. The attic seemed too reverent for sound.

Then, barely above a whisper: “Were you always here?”

The girl tilted her head. A delicate, aching motion. Not a yes. Not a no. Something older than either.

And the attic held them both—woman and girl—like two lines from the same forgotten poem, waiting to rhyme.

## The Watching Girl

Liv arrived without calling, a pale suitcase in one hand and silence in the other. The sky hung low, stitched in grey, and the street smelled of coal and old leaves. As she climbed the stairs to the apartment, a part of her already knew. Some silences begin long before they are spoken.

Inside, the air was still and sour, like old apples left too long in a drawer. Light slid along the floorboards in a thin, reluctant line. The rooms had not been opened to the day. Curtains sagged like closed eyes. A mug of tea, untouched, sat where breath had once warmed it. The radiator ticked faintly, as if trying to recall the rhythm of warmth.

Her mother was not there. And yet she was.

Her coat, soft with age, hung by the door. Her shoes stood like loyal dogs beside the mat. Nothing out of place. Nothing alive. The kind of emptiness that hums.

Liv moved through the rooms gently, as if not to wake the walls. “Mom?” she said, but the word came out dry, too late. The silence took it in and gave nothing back.

She climbed the attic stairs on instinct, one hand trailing the rail. The higher she went, the more the air felt different—thinner, veined with something that couldn’t be named. Memory? Dust? A kind of listening?

The door at the top was open.

The attic had not changed, though she did not remember it well. It felt too small for a person, too large for a thought. The ceiling sloped like a shoulder, and the corners held their shadows close. There was almost nothing inside.

Except the mirror.

It stood against the far wall, tall and old, its frame carved with soft vines or maybe cracks. The glass was not clear but bruised, dream-coloured. It looked as though it had swallowed something long ago and never digested it.

Liv stepped toward it.

Her reflection met her—dim, a little warped. For a heartbeat, she saw only herself, the way a pond returns your gaze before it swallows your shape.

Then came the shift.

The child appeared slowly, as if rising through water. A small girl in a pale dress, her hair pulled back by a limp ribbon. She stood motionless, hands at her sides, looking out from some far and frostbitten place. Her eyes, black with stillness, fastened to Liv’s as if fastening something else—something older, something buried.

She raised her hand.

A slow wave, soft as breath on glass.

Liv didn’t move. Her ribs tightened around her heart, which beat carefully now, as if it, too, were listening. She turned to look behind her—nothing. Only the dry hush of the attic and the faint scent of cold wood.

When she turned back, the girl was gone.

The mirror offered only Liv again, alone and blurred at the edges.

She stood in the quiet a moment longer. The room felt unchanged, but the world had shifted slightly, like furniture moved a fraction in the night.

Something had passed through her.

She stepped back, not sure what she had seen. Or if she had seen it at all. The air still tasted faintly of breath.

And then, into the hush—almost a question, almost a prayer—she whispered:

“Mother?”