The Mirror
A short story I wrote in late 2024/early 2025. The core of the idea — the light and the quotation — came to mind one night during a dream I had.
The Andersons lived on a 15-acre plot of land, not quite in the countryside and not quite in the city. In the town, each home stood on a sizeable plot and had a long tree-lined driveway. A well-mannered peacefulness reigned throughout.
Their home was both homey and stately: tan stucco exteriors, ivy growing up the walls, and thick cherry-wood doors. The children, Sarah and Evan, had grown up in the home.
Sarah was 21, a rising senior at a well-known college in another state, majoring in chemistry with plans to become a doctor. Evan was 26 and worked in marketing. He'd studied economics in college, also at a well-known college.
Growing up, there was a particular family ritual specific to the home. When the mother and father bought the home, the realtor had shown them a special feature: a reflecting mirror in the backyard, a small glass porthole of sorts built into a wall, and an old wooden chair inside the home.
The mirror, which was roughly the shape of the head of a spoon, sat atop a burnished silver metal pole. The pole protruded up from the lush green of the back lawn like a street lamp. The mirror, atop the pole, stood about 3 feet above the grass and was about 20 feet from the stuccoed wall of the back of the home.
Twice a year, at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the sun was positioned in the sky such that its rays struck the center of the mirror. When that happened, the mirror focused the light into the small glass porthole that was embedded in the back wall of the home.
The glass porthole was about 3 inches in diameter, about 10 inches thick, and sat about 3 feet up from the ground. The porthole was embedded into the wall with one end flush with the wall's exterior and the other flush with the wall's interior. The wall containing the porthole ran along a hallway between the dining room and the foyer.
In that hallway, across from the wall in which the porthole was embedded, there sat a brown wooden chair, with faded dowels forming the back supports, and pleasantly worn wooden armrests. On the day of a given equinox, a family member would sit in the chair. Then, sunlight would strike the mirror, stream through the porthole, and land just about in the center of the person's chest.
The family tradition was that if you sat in the chair, with the beam of light on your chest, you could ask yourself - quietly in your own mind - one question. You'd then receive a completely honest answer. Of course, nobody in the family believed in the supernatural. However, they reasoned that the ritual helped them focus somehow; to let quieter thoughts flow, perhaps.
That autumn, the parents had decided to sell the home in order to downsize to a smaller one, since both children were off to college. The autumnal equinox that year happened to be during a school break, a few weeks before the family was set to move. On the day of the equinox, everyone was busy packing, cooking, and socializing.
A few minutes before the equinox, the son Evan began searching through the cardboard boxes in the foyer until he found the one containing the wooden chair. He lifted it from the box, pulled away the packing material, and carried it to the hallway. In the hallway, he set the chair against the wall - across from the glass porthole - and sat down, waiting for the light to appear.
After a minute or so, the light beamed through the porthole and struck the center of his chest. He sat still and upright. With closed eyes, he asked himself: "Why is my friend Henry generally nice to me, but every so often injects some small-yet-piercing criticism of me?"
After a moment, he heard a voice in his mind, as though speaking from the center of his chest: "He hates you."
The voice was always clear yet quiet, like ripples moving across a lake in the rain.
After some time, he rose from the chair and walked outside to where the mirror stood. He crouched in front of the mirror and peered intently at it - something he'd never done before.
The intricacies of the golden-braided pattern of the mirror's frame looked like the burls of an oak tree. As the sun continued upward in the sky and so downward in the mirror, he noticed something near the bottom of the mirror's gray reflective surface. It was writing, etched in a neatly flowing golden script.
He leaned closer and read the words to himself under his breath.
It was a quote he'd seen somewhere, but couldn't remember where: "The closer you get to the truth, the simpler it becomes."