The Antique Mirror That Showed the Room a Second Too Late

I found the mirror at an estate sale, a tall old thing in a dark carved frame, spotted with age, beautiful in a heavy sad way. It was cheap, far too cheap for what it was, and the woman running the sale seemed relieved when I took it, which I noticed and ignored, the way you do when you want a thing.

I hung it in my hallway. Almost at once I noticed something wrong with it that I kept explaining away. Movement in the mirror lagged. Not much, just a hair, a fraction of a second. I would raise my hand and the reflection would raise its hand a beat late, or I would walk past and my reflection would follow a heartbeat behind, as if the glass were showing the room a second after it actually happened. In certain light you would not catch it. In the quiet of the hall at night, you would.

I told myself it was an illusion, tired eyes, the wavy old glass. And then one night I stopped in front of it to turn off the hall light, looked at myself, and turned to go, and my reflection did not turn. I walked two steps down the hall and glanced back and it was still standing there, facing where I had been, my own reflection, not following me, watching the empty spot where I had stood, a full second, two seconds, before it slowly turned its head to look down the hall at the real me.

I took it down that night. I did not want to smash it, some superstition I could not name stopped me, so I wrapped it in a bed sheet and put it in the back of a closet with its face to the wall, covered. It has been there since.

I would leave it at that, except that some nights, from the closet, under the sheet, I hear it. A small sound, like a hand moving lightly across glass from the other side. I have checked. The sheet is undisturbed. The glass is covered. And the sound comes anyway, a second late, always a second late, as if something in there is still catching up to a room it can no longer see.