Entry #175
January 25, 2026 — 11:30 PM
This morning I pulled the upstairs bath mirror to square the frame and check the studs. The backing paper was brittle and spotted with old steam, the kind of brown that looks like tea wept through muslin. Under the paper, a narrow label ran along the top rail, held by two rusted tacks. The glue still had a faint sweet-sour note when it let go. On the label, in a proper serif, one word in black that hadn’t bled like the rest: Blackwood.
I set the glass on towels across the sink and went to my phone. “Blackwood + glass + county” returned a run of attorneys, an academic press, and a nineteenth-century hymn book digitized out of Ohio. Nothing here. The recorder’s office site is slow, and their vendor lists from that era are a scanned mess with the edges cut off. I tried alternate terms, different spellings. Not much. The word stayed simple and stubborn, a name without a person.
I rehung the mirror at eye level and worked it plumb with shims. The level’s bubble moved like a slow bead of oil. The bathroom was still cold; the vent has never drawn right. Every sound had a porcelain ring to it, that hollow brightness tile gives a room even when it’s empty. My breath made a thin cloud and broke against the glass, leaving a pale oval that cleared from the edges in.
Leaning in to check the corner seam at the miter—there’s a hairline there I don’t like—I caught my own face sharp and plain in the center pane. In that tight distance the skin reads like topography. The small pale crescent under my left eye (it gets lighter every winter) sat where it always sits. I shifted the angle by a degree to catch the bevel, and for the space of a blink it belonged under the other eye—clean, definite, not a ghost double from the edge. My jaw tightened and the glass gave me back the left-side crescent again as if it had never moved.
All at once I was counting: right hand raised, right hand up in the glass; I spoke my name, the mouth worked in tandem; I set the level’s green strip against the frame and watched the reflection’s bubble roll exactly where mine did. Nothing out of line. The bevel can throw a echo at certain angles, I know. Light from the small window on the east wall comes in low in the morning and hits the glass hard. A simple explanation fits. But the feeling was specific, not general—the clear misplacement of a mark I don’t think about until it isn’t where it belongs.
The label went into an envelope with the other bits I’ve been finding. I kept looking for “Blackwood” in county newspapers, trade ads, even cemetery transcriptions. Almost nothing. A surname that dries up as soon as I try to press it into context. The more I look at my notes, the more the name looks like a word I wrote to myself to remember later.
By evening the mirror had warmed with the house, and the glass lost that metal smell. I stood there once more with the room light on, tried to chase the angle again. No slip. I could have convinced myself I imagined it if not for the clarity of that brief wrongness. I prefer clarity; it admits argument. This one will not.
The most merciful distortions are the ones too brief to verify.
— Thomas Hale