Entry #194
July 16, 2025 — 12:15 AM
I pulled the upstairs hallway mirror off its hooks to strip the frame and reset the anchors. The glass is older than I thought—wavy, with that cigarette-burn look where the silver fails at the edges. The hallway runs hot after midnight because the attic keeps its heat. The box fan in the bedroom window drags the air past me in a thin constant draft, and the house makes its usual ticking: joists, old paint giving a little.
On the back, under a layer of brittle brown paper, someone had nailed a rectangle of thin pine as a stiffener. When I pried a corner free, the paper split down the middle like a dry leaf. Underneath, in a firm graphite line, one word had been written across the raw wood in a hand that liked capital letters: BLACKWOOD. There was a shallow groove under the C as if the pencil point bit.
I stood there with the screwdriver and read it out loud, just to hear how it ran in the mouth. It stuck a bit, the k catching at the back of the tongue. I took a phone picture for the record. Quick searches gave me a winery in Oregon, a lumber company in 1910 advertisements from three counties over, and a boy’s baseball roster from 2003 that had nothing to do with this place. No local property hits, no obituaries. I added it to the growing page of names and notes. It feels like a joke the house is telling with a straight face.
I put the pine back and taped what paper I could save. New anchors in plaster: the stud finder coughed out a tone over lath and nothing solid where I wanted. I settled for toggle bolts. Plaster dust tastes like carrying chalk in the mouth. I held the mirror edge-on while I threaded the hangers. It threw a long thin reflection of the hallway, warping the baseboard into a slow wave. My face floated in a band of clearer silver near the center.
I don’t like working by myself when a sheet of glass is loose—too many ways to get cut—so I moved slowly and watched my hands in the glass more than the real ones. It was that watching that gave me the small, stupid shock. I lifted my right hand to check the top hook. In the mirror, my left rose, as expected, but not with me—there was a moment I was sure it had already started up, a fraction earlier, like it was meeting me. The waver of the old glass will do this: it throws a second faint image, a ghost from the outer surface. I know that trick. Still, I tested it three or four times. Once, when I wiped sweat from the scar under my left eye, the glass seemed to put the mark on the same side as my fingers, as if the mirror forgot itself and agreed. A quick little correction. The next second it was all backwards again.
It is nothing. Heat, an asymmetry in the pane, and the way your brain insists on straightening what it thinks is a face. I’ve stared into old glass before and had it show me two of my eyes, slightly apart, the second set pale and late. But this felt aimed—held a beat too long to be accident, like being nodded at from across a room. I stepped back and the fan in the other room made the hall’s light shake in the blemish at the edge. I finished hanging it and put my tools down with care.
I keep telling myself the house only bends what you bring to it. Then I think of the word on the back of the wood, written as if someone knew it would be hidden and decided that was the point.
The most disturbing reflections are the ones one cannot swear were wrong.
— Thomas Hale