Mirror Image
by Nikki Little
Once upon a time existed a nation that was drunk with power even as it ignored the needs of its own people. An angel, sorely disappointed in the nation's arrogance and self-centeredness, decreed that for twenty-four hours every mirror in the nation would reflect not the image of the viewer, but, rather, the image that the angels saw. The appointed day came, and every mirror in the nation, from the grandest mirrors in the greatest mansions to the most humble cracked hand-held mirrors in garbage cans, performed its assigned and noble duty.
The first to notice the strange images in the mirrors were the nation's low-paid, unappreciated service workers. All they saw of themselves were faint, gray, misty outlines. They were ghosts. The nation's teachers stared into bathroom mirrors that morning and saw dart boards. The nation's homeless -- there were many -- stared into cracked mirrors fished from garbage cans and beheld themselves as faces only in concrete sidewalks relentlessly trod upon by those who deemed themselves better.
The nation's politicians, as they arrived in the legislative buildings, were shocked to see themselves reflected in the grand wall mirrors as human-sized, grotesquely obese pigs in topcoats and top hats. One politician, known for his honesty and incorruptibility, stared dumbfounded at the image of the accursed Cassandra before him.
The nation's rich people, upon discovering the phenomenon, smashed their mirrors because they knew what they would see.
In the nation's largest city, tourists who caught the reflection of the Statue of Liberty noticed that two rivers of tears poured endlessly from her eyes. The statue's torch was held upside-down, and an eternal rain of bombs dropped from the torch with the flashes of explosions appearing at the sidewalk level five seconds apart. Dismembered, bloody human body parts filled the streets.
In the capital city, a burned-out army nurse fled in tears to a wash basin when another blackened husk of a soldier missing three limbs and his face was brought in the door. When she looked up from splashing her face, she saw in the wall mirror every resident in her section clawing frantically with hyperkinetic speed at hollowed, darkened, empty eye sockets. She jerked her head away and the vision vanished. When she looked in the mirror again, the same scene returned, and in the center floated an ethereal, winged being of light. She noticed the winged being was crying.
A woman preparing to apply make-up while walking in front of the president's residence caught in her mirror a most frightening image just as she opened it: out of every window and door of that magnificent building came an enormous tentacle stretching as far as the eye could see. There were at least a thousand of these tentacles, all writhing and throbbing. Their color was a brilliant crimson red -- the color of fresh blood. At the end of one tentacle, soaring above all the rest and coming from an opening in the roof, was the president himself. The president appeared as a marionette with a crown of horns and a face that was insect-like in its hideousness. In front of the president's residence was an enormous mouth-like hole in the ground. Every second or two a tentacle dropped people, ships, planes, barrels of oil, timber, and endless other resources into the opening. The feeding never seemed to stop. The woman dropped her mirror and decided that the make-up could wait.
At the striking of the twenty-third hour, the need for mirrors in the nation's cemeteries vanished. The spectres of the unnaturally dead, wailing endless, ear-splitting cries of pain and horror, floated through the cemeteries and the nation's streets each with a placard around the neck indicating the cause of death:
"Killed by war"
"Killed by indifference"
"Killed by selfishness"
"Killed by greed"
"Killed by poverty"
"Killed for money"
And on and on it went...
By the time the appointed twenty-four hours were up, nearly everyone in the nation had seen the disturbing reflections and the spectres floating in the streets. The typically shallow news channels on TV were filled with talking heads discussing the meaning of it all.
Of course, the real question was "Would anyone's behavior be changed by what they had seen?" What do you think that answer was?
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This short story contains images lifted from the video game "American McGee's Alice." Electronic Arts (EA) holds the copyrights.
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Dedicated to former President George W. Bush, the puppet on the end of a tentacle.