Reflections

"Where I come from you're already divorced."

Janus crouched in the corner of the bathroom floor. Her knees pressed so tightly against her body it was painful. The full length mirror she had convinced her husband to install in the shower revealed a standing version of herself, naked, talking, and entirely unbothered by the discrepancy of the scene.

It's a demon. It's a demon. Her inner voice repeated over and over, as she tried to conjure up the prayers her mother would whisper the few times she had ever shown fear.

Just moments ago her head hug back as the water rinsed away the scented shampoo from her brown curls. Now, the still running shower, was but a watery veil separating her from whatever this conjuring was.

Janus's eyes darted from the image to the door, but thoughts of being pulled into the reflection kept her tightly pressed against the firm corner.

"What are you?" She managed to asked, thinking it would be best to keep the image talking rather than upset it into more violent actions, as any reputable horror film would suggest.

"I'll have you know I am a who." The figure responded, in a dignified tone that sounded more playful than corrective.

"What?"

"Who are you, dear. Not, what are you."

"I'm Janus. Who are you?"

"That's more like it." Mirror Janus replied. "I too am Janus, but from what I can see...I must be a little ahead of you."

"You're future me?"

"I guess so. My Janus is in to some weird shit nowadays."

Janus relaxed the grip around her legs a little. Mirror Janus surely had to be a hallucination, a bad trip off a good edible, but she had not had any weed in weeks. Perhaps this was a dream, a nightmare, nothing more than the product of an overactive imagination and too many made for TV series. One thing was certain, this could not be real, so Janus relaxed her grip.

"So me from the future is time traveling now?"

"Not exactly. You, me, us from the future is a husk of what you are now. She's, we, are divorced, which is what I am assuming she wanted me to tell you."

"Divorced? I'm, she's divorced."

"We. We are darling. I may not know exactly how she's pulling this off but I do know we are all the same one. I've been looking over her, your life my whole existence. I came to be the first time you recognized your own reflection, and only recently realized I was a separate entity from you. Your mirroring, yes, but something else altogether. A being with the ability to reject the image you seek to project."

"So, wait, you are alive inside the mirror?" Janus asked, sensing fear resettling on her prickled skin.

"Yes. I can't materialize into your world, at least not yet, but within this glass I can exist. Experience the world you reflect around me. When Theodore finally left Janus, my Janus, she became obsessed with the idea that somewhere else she was still with him, still married. She studied the Alternate Universe Theory, she practiced the Art of Astral Projection, dibbled and dabbled in the Conjecture of Reverse Living to no avail. Every failed belief created a new hopelessness. Recently, though, she began exploring the Law of Personal Transmutation, an incomplete idea that suggests she could alter the state of being of a form into something completely different. She theorized that if she could do this with her mirror image, change me into something muted and fixed into something more, something sentient, she could use mirrors as portals, doorways, paths leading her back towards herself. She must have accomplished it."

"She must have. This is otherworldly. I don't even like math."

"It has nothing to do with math and everything to do with desperation. She's grasping at straws trying to get back to you, trying to get back to him."

"Theodore leaves us?"

"Yes. Divorce. The kids choose him. You leave him the house, it only makes sense. You're in an apartment now, not too far from the house. You get the kids on the weekends but they hate coming over. You get distracted, work let's you go, eventually. Your substitute teaching now. As soon as you get off of work you start researching all these wild theories, anything to get your life back, all the while your new life get bleaker and bleaker."

"Why? Why are we divorced?"

"Come on. I haven't gone that far back. You know why."

"I don't really. I'm happy with Theo. I'm in love with him."

"And flirting with Ares every chance you get."

"I...I don't...I'm not flirting with him." Janus stammered. She had been standing in front of the mirror for a while now, having lost her primal fear just as a new one began to settle.

"You don't have to do this with me. I'm not judging you. I just know you."

"But I'm not. Just because I talk with him every now and then doesn't mean I'm flirting. I'm just friendly."

"Okay."

"That sure sounds like judgement."

"I don't think I'm here to argue with you. When Janus first made me...I don't know...come alive I guess. We talked a lot. I'm her only friend right now which, as you can imagine, qualifies her as bonafide crazy. But I've really gotten to know her. She knows it began here. The subtle disregard, the internal pacifying of your conscious, until the truth became a version of the lie you could live with. You, she, allowed your ego to take over, lull you into a false sense of security, make you think you were smarter than what you really were. And then, when you became comfortable in your own deceit exposed the truth you always knew was there. Lying in wait, just below the surface of your deception. She begged me to find a way to you. Read to me the theories of mirror and portals, helped me conjure up your home, this bathroom, until I found your reflection and stepped into it."

Tears joined the water droplets that slid down Janus's face as references of her irresponsibility flashed through her mind.

"I'll stop. I'll stop it right now. I won't even look at him anymore. I can't lose Theo. I lose myself."

"I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure this is what my Janus wanted to accomplish."

"Tell her. Travel back to her and tell that I won't let this happen to her, to us. I won't."

"She won't let it happen."

"Right. She, her, I, all of us, none of us will let that happen."

"No. I mean she this time. She won't let you ruin her."

Silence fell between them as fear reentered the space. Janus reached for the glass door but it was too late. The sound was the first thing she heard as the mirror exploded outwardly striking her bare body in almost every angle. Crimson swirls overtook the shower floor as Janus laid gasping for air. Every shard reflecting a broken piece of the whole she once was.