The Mirror Ban

Photo by Ellen Tanner on Unsplash

When I was twelve, my town banned mirrors for almost a month.

People joke about it now like it was just mass hysteria, but I remember how it started.

A boy at my school saw his reflection make a terrible gesture when he didn’t.

That’s it. That was the first story.

Then more people started noticing things. Reflections looking bloody and injured when they weren’t. Smiling when they cried. Wearing different clothes. Mouthing horrific threats while they combed their hair.

My father smashed every mirror in our house after my sister came screaming out of the bathroom one night with blood running from her nose.

“She spoke to me,” she kept saying.

Nobody believed kids back then, but when the adults became affected too, that changed everything.

Shop windows got painted over. Car mirrors disappeared. Someone covered the gym mirrors with black bin bags. The town hid the mirrors, but the fear remained.

The creepiest part was the silence.

The town got very, very quiet during those weeks. People stopped making eye contact. Church attendance tripled while pets vanished. One teacher walked into the lake holding a hand mirror and never came back up.

I remember the adults looking at each other from a distance with suspicion and a barely concealed thirst for violence.

Then one morning everything just… ended.

People uncovered the mirrors again and life went on. Nobody ever explained anything.

Years later, after my dad died, I found a box in his attic labelled ‘DO NOT OPEN AT NIGHT.’

Inside was what I assumed, from the shape, was a handheld mirror wrapped in towels and duct tape.

And a cassette tape.

I listened to it yesterday.

It’s my father’s voice, shaking so hard I barely recognised it.

“It didn’t ended one morning. That’s the lie we told the kids. It didn’t end at all. We just reached a compromise.”

On the tape, I can hear the distinct, rhythmic sound of scissors cutting through thick meat.

“They wanted to come out, and we wanted to stay. So we traded: one organ each. One piece of flesh per household to feed the glass, so they’d stay on their side of the frame and mimic us properly again.

I gave them my left lung. That’s why I’ve been wheezing for twenty years.”

My father takes a ragged, gasping breath on the recording.

“But glass breaks, and debts accrue. The mirror in the attic is empty, kiddo. It’s been empty since yesterday. Check your pulse. See what they took from you while you slept.”

I drop the tape player. My hand flies to my throat, then my chest.

There is no heartbeat.

There hasn’t been one all morning.

And the terrifying thing is, I hadn’t even noticed until now.

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