The medicine cabinet mirror

The hinge has never been oiled, and has never made the case for it. Behind it: aspirin gone soft at the edges, a thermometer nobody trusts, a prescription with somebody else's old name still on the label. In front of it: everyone in the house, several times a day, examining a face with more suspicion than they would extend to a stranger's. The mirror declines to comment on what it is covering. It holds the face still long enough to be studied, then swings shut on the evidence behind it. Logged across eleven consecutive mornings, the opening angle is never full, rarely past forty degrees, as though a wider swing risked finding something behind the glass instead of in front of it. There is a theory that a mirror this small, kept in a room this damp, should fog with more resentment than it shows. It does not. It clears in under a minute, indifferent, ready again before the towel is off the rack. The cabinet's contents rotate, expire, get purged in a fit of tidying that never quite holds. The mirror alone stays exactly itself, unmoved by any of it, which reads either as comfort or as a small daily rebuke, depending on the morning and the light. Six years of visits to this specimen have not settled which, and the not settling begins to look like the correct relationship to have with a mirror.

Marion Vale