Reflection

   Once I got out of the shower, I looked at the mirror and realized no one was looking back to me. I hadn’t become a vampire or anything, it was just the steam that had rendered the mirror blurry and nothing could be seen. For a few seconds, however, I tried to look at myself on there. I pierced the glass, the fog and the humidity, but there was no one on the other side. It was better that way, I thought. I had never really liked mirrors but now I felt almost compelled to look at my face whenever I crossed paths with one.

 You see, I had accident a few months back and I got a very bad injury on my face. A piece of glass flew from the broken car window and slashed part of my right cheek. It was a deep cut and I lost a lot of blood because of it. Luckily, that was the most serious injury anyone received that day. No one died but I felt I was dying while they took me to the hospital and tried to save my face. And they did, they were really skillful at making my face look as if nothing had happened. A couple of days later, I was going home.

 However, I had seen myself in a mirror as they pushed my stretcher through the hospital. For a moment, they left me by an office and inside; I was able to look at my face and how bad the injury was. At first, I was too distraught to even make a sound. But then, not even a minute later, I started screaming and crying. I tried to get off the stretcher but a male nurse grabbed me and held me against the moving bed while a female nurse came in with a syringe and injected me with something that made me fall asleep.

 Hours later, I woke up in a dark bedroom. Everything had being done and I had no idea how many hours they had spent trying to save my face. I also had no idea they had been successful, so when I got off the bed and went into the bathroom to check on my face and so the bandages, the blood and the swelling, I never thought I would be the same ever again. I cried a little bit and then went back to bed. This time, I had no strength to scream or yell or do anything besides curl beneath the covers and let time pass.

 The day they released me, the doctor took off the bandages and let me see myself on a small mirror. There was a lot of swelling still and some dried up blood but my face actually looked normal. I mean, it didn’t seem anything had happened, although I told him that I still felt the sting of the glass slashing my face. He told me it was a normal feeling to have and that I could go to the hospital’s psychologist if I needed any help with coping. I told my mother right there to take me home, as I had a greater urge to get to my bedroom than talking to some stranger about my feelings.

 When I got there, I told my family I was going to sleep and asked them to not bother me for the rest of the day. I wasn’t hungry at all and just wanted to lie in bed for a long while. They had nothing to say against it, because who would? No one would ever go against the wishes of a person that has just been released from a hospital. So I went into my room, locked the door and just sat on my bed for a long time. I stared at different things, thinking about what had happened and what effect it had in me.

 Once in a while, I remembered I was supposed to take off my clothes and put on pajamas or something. So I would take off one shoe and then stare at something for a while. And then take off the other shoe and stare for a while at something else. It took me hours to wake up from my daydreaming and get naked. When I realized I could see my feet, my penis, my chest and my hands, I realized what had been bothering me about all that had happened. Again, I stood up and walked to the closet.

 On the door, on the inside part of the closet, I had a full-length mirror. I stood up in front of it, my bedroom a bit dark. I was tempted to turn on the lights or open up the curtains, by I didn’t. I pierced through that glass until I saw myself. I saw what I had seen for so long: a body I had always been at odds with. The body I had been born with and had tried to mold to no avail. I moved a little but my opinion of it didn’t change. It brought tears to my eyes, because I realized I was still that young boy from many years ago.

 I had tried exercising in all sorts of ways. I had tried poses in pictures, different kinds of outlets. I had tried all sorts of things and now I was almost thirty years old and I had realized that all my fears and insecurities were still there. I could hear people talk and laugh and then the scar on my face would get larger and more visible, like a red crater on my face. My stretch marks looked brighter and my penis looked smaller. And then I grabbed a shoe from the floor and threw at the mirror, shattering in several pieces.

 They found me on the floor, crying in silence with a piece of glass in my hand. My fingers were all bloody and my eyes were lost, far from that bedroom. They rushed me to the hospital naked, as they had found me, trying to prevent more blood to leave my body. I had used that piece of glass on myself.

 I spent years in therapy, months in a special facility and countless hours trying to get over all of it. I’ve never been able to completely but at least I get to breath now, as never before. However, I now always stop at mirrors and pierce them with my eyes.

 I do it in defiance of what they had done to so many others and to me.  Of what I had done to myself because of the world, because of all the pressures coming from places I cannot even explain. I still feel it but I can now fight it. And I will keep on fighting as long as I can.

Inside

   Of the first night, I only remember when one of the nurses looked at me and she had this weird expression on her face. It wasn’t really fear but something else. Maybe it was pity or something similar. Anyways, I will always remember her face over mine, looking down on me. I felt I was already on the hole to be buried. You tend to get very dramatic when you’re sick. And that was the first time I was really sick. Doctors would tell me, months later, that I could have died.

 It was the fever that prevented me from remembering anything from that first day. But as time went by, I started remembering more and more things. For example, I know for a fact that on the second day, a male nurse came and stared at me for several minutes. I think he thought I was asleep or in a coma or something. I knew he was there because of his reflection on the window. It was very creepy. Maybe he did something to patients or something. I would know about it later.

 They gave me actual food only a week after I had entered the hospital. Before that everything had to get in me through an IV. I felt miserable, weak and fearful that so many things could happen. I was scared they would discover something in me that might mean then end of my life. I thought that stay in the hospital would be the death o f me and, again,  I don’t think you can blame someone for being overdramatic in a hospital. Awful things happen in those places every day.

 Luckily, with time, I was able to recuperate. It wasn’t fast at all but at least not every single bone in my body was aching. The pain started to go away and I was just so grateful that it was all coming to an end. I felt it was going to be going on for many more weeks but thankfully it didn’t. They did not discover anything strange, rather the opposite. What they did tell me was that I wasn’t eating well and that I should be trying to eat more regularly and more types of food.

 True, I had been neglecting my meals before getting sick. I had lost any interest in food or in anything that wasn’t going to give me what I really needed in life. I became obsessed with achieving one goal and it was then when I became ill and couldn’t even continue achieving that goal. I wanted to be successful and finally prove myself and others that I was worth something. That drive lasted shortly, as my stay in the hospital just changed everything for me. I didn’t do what to do, again. I was confused and relieved at the same time, it was pretty confusing.

 One month after leaving the hospital, I had to go back for a check up. They wanted to verify everything was ok. I had all the time needed because my ambition had been cut short and now I had no idea what to do, how to proceed. Unfortunately, I fainted in the waiting room, just as the doctor was preparing to receive me. They laid my body on a stretcher and gave me something so I could sleep for a couple of hours. Somehow, they knew I hadn’t been able to do it by myself for weeks.

 That time, they did found out that I had some sort of disease, a condition as they said. It’s very difficult to explain what it is and the name is even stranger but the point is that thing makes me weaker as time goes by. It has been inside me for a long time and now it will live in me forever until my death, which might be caused by it. Not directly but the weaknesses my body have will enable diseases and other awful stuff to just come through and attack my body in the easiest way.

 I was put in a room again and stayed in the hospital for a couple of days. I remember I cried a lot that time, because I felt I finally knew when and where I was going to die. Of course, I didn’t know for sure but it was pretty obvious that I would have to deal with something that most people have no idea about. If I had ever wanted to go back and try again l my failed attempts to be successful, with those news it seemed my world had ended and there was no way to turn it back on.

 I didn’t know what to do. When I saw my parents checking the prices of the pills I would have to take for life, I felt even more like a leech, useless and pathetic. I can recognize that I thought about killing myself but my body or something else wouldn’t let me. I found myself to feel not only weak but empty. I had nothing left inside and couldn’t even fathom the possibility of feeling anything ever again. I was in my lowest point ever and only a miracle could save me.

And it did. As it happens, I had been taking pictures and putting them online, for several years actually. I had many followers but they rarely commented. One of them was the male nurse that stood by my bed that time I got sick. I ran into him this one time, when I went for another check up. He reunited the courage to tell me he was a huge fan of mine and that he would love if I accepted to have coffee or something with him. Feeling so down, I said yes only to keep walking and reach my doctor’s office. I even gave him my cellphone number.

 Days later, he called and told me he could go near my house if I preferred. The point is, he is the most charming person in the world. We have been talking for a few months now and I think his interest and original take on everything that is happening to me, helps a lot in making me feel less sick of myself and more proud of the few things I’ve done. He makes me feel good when we’re together and that’s the best. He likes to hold my hands a lot and hugging me is a apparently a hobby for him.

 My disease is still there though and sometimes I can almost feel it moving through me. I feel like a bomb about to go off but no one knows exactly when, not me, not the doctors, not my family. But one day. The important thing is, it’s now right now and that’s something.

Forgotten

   When she looked at her face in the dirty mirror, she did not recognize her own self. She touched her face, clean it with the few drops of water that came out of the sink and just looked at her hideous face. Somehow, time had deformed it, changing from those times in which she had known proper food and a stable way of life. It hadn’t been like that for a very long time and she even doubted that all of the past she remembered had happened. Maybe she had invented all of it from TV, which now she loved to watch.

 The motel where she worked was the perfect place for her because there was no pressure in getting anything done. Her boss was a very fat man that couldn’t even go to the second floor of his own business, so she could spent all of the time she wanted up there and he would only yell at her once she came down, not having changed the sheets properly or without cleaning all the bathrooms of the very old building.

 She had chosen her name to be Carrie. One night, she had seen that very scary movie in her room and had loved it so much she had decided to be named like that. Her boss agreed to call her that as it was better than calling her “girl” all the time. She was thankful he was only a very stubborn man, as maybe her luck would have been pretty different if she had fallen into the hands of someone else. After all, Carrie was not her name as she did not remembered anything from her past accurately, only parts and feelings, like the ones that indicated her she had changed physically.

 Carrie had been working there for more than two years, and she was much more experienced now that she had been in the past, so just imagine how bad she was when she first started scrubbing floors and fixing small problems that people had in their rooms. Not that many people came to this part of the world. The world was normally empty, only some cars that wanted to take a more scenic rout would end up in the motel. The rest took the highway, which was better and much faster. But Mr. Ray, the fat man, never even thought of changing the location of his motel.

 Apparently, it had been a family estate. So when Mr. Ray’s parents died, the motel became instantly his and he had been managing it from the age of twenty. Carrie secretly admired him because the place could be much worse bur Mr. Ray kept it afloat; although how he did it was shrouded in mystery. Not many people came in and he only had two people to attend to the twenty rooms he had available. Carrie was in charge of all the chambermaid duties, Mr. Ray himself was the repairman (even if he did not know what he was doing most of the time) and there was also and old man called Timmy, who was the one protecting everyone and everything within the premises of the motel.

 So most days Carrie would only clean half of the rooms, as the other ones were rarely used, and she mused about what her life had been before. Mr. Ray had convinced her that looking for her past could not en up well for her and at first she thought that he only wanted to keep her there, almost like a slave, but that wasn’t the case. He let her go to the nearest town, where she told the police of her situation. At first, no one believed her. And when one young guy decided to listen to her, he couldn’t anything about a missing woman fitting her description. She asked him to check again and he even let her try but there was nothing in there.

 When she finally gave up, the people of the police were kind enough to give her a new identity, so Mr. Ray was able to actually pay her and keep her healthy in his motel. With Timmy, they worked as a strange family but every time things were going too good in the motel, she was reminded of that past she had no idea about and started crying: what if she had been married? What if her parents were alive and missing her? What if she had been a mother? That was enough to make her cry all night and not making her able to sleep.

 One day, a young couple arrived at the motel. They wore really strange clothes and barely talked. As there was no one else in the building, Carrie tried to be very nice in order to get to know them better. She even made coffee for them and gave them some cookies she kept for herself. The strangers accepted the gifts, but she wasn’t really able to speak to them or looking at what they had in their suitcases. They would only open the door enough to have a short talk and that was it.

 Every day, Carrie attempted to talk to them and to do her job, cleaning the room. But she was never able to do any of that because they wouldn’t come out of the bedroom for anything. She knocked on the door, asking them if they wanted new bed sheets, water, coffee, their bathroom cleaned, candles… But the answer was always no. Only at night she would see the man walking out and driving off to town, then coming back with what appeared to be food.

 Those times the woman was alone, she tied to talk to her but Carrie realized it was her who was the crazier or weirder one. She wouldn’t even open the door to say the few words that came out of her mouth and Carrie knew she didn’t even stand by the door to say these things. It was very annoying after a while and they ended up staying in the motel for almost a month. Even Mr. Ray tried to talk to them once, but they only answered by paying a whole week in advance, so he didn’t insisted on asking them who they were and why they were barricaded in his motel.

 The man, however, was nicer. Carrie had been taken out the trash one night and she saw him arrive from one of his trips to town. He carried two bags with him and when she saw some liquid soap fell out of one of the bags, she just helped him and had a short conversation. He smiled a lot and it did not seem fake, it seemed like he really wanted to be nice but just couldn’t be fully nice in that moment. Carrie talked to him many times at night and she would only get some words but enough to know his voice and that the couple living there were loaded.

 Since they had arrived, they had spent a lot of money in food and probably other supplies. Besides, they would pay every week in anticipation and the car seemed to always have a full tank of gas. After the first two weeks, Carrie concluded that those two were running away from or with something, She even imagined they had killed people and the police should really know what was happening. But she was scared and decided to consult Mr. Ray before doing anything. He agreed and she called the young officer that had helped her search for her past.

 They decided it was best if they did it in the morning, as the couple would always make sounds later in the day, avoiding to be seen before midday. So the young officer arrived at the motel at nine o’clock and knocked on their door, announcing the presence of the police. At first, there was no noise, but as he kept knocking the door, there was a sudden strange sound. The officer understood the noise as something he had to respond to, so he kicked down the door (to Mr. Ray’s dismay) and shot one of the people inside and pointed at the other with the gun.

 Carrie came closer and saw the woman bleeding on the ground and the man terrified, fully dressed, by the window. They didn’t seem to have been sleeping; the bed sheets were in the exact same place Carrie had left them several days ago. None of them talked and when the officer attempted to call reinforcements with his radio, the man moved, causing the young man to be scared, shooting him several times. Carrie screamed and fainted.

 When she came to her senses, she was in the hospital. She had been taken there and Mr. Ray was in the next bed. Apparently the entire situation had been too much for him and he had a heart attack on the spot. Carrie did not feel bad, so she attempted to walk out the room but a police officer stopped her. It was a woman and she made her go back to bed. Carrie asked what had happened with the couple and the officer just told her that they had found them to be some kind of stalkers but that she shouldn’t worry too much about it, as she would get her answers pretty soon. So she waited, trying to sleep but unsuccessfully.

 The next day, she learned the young officer that had come to their aid was now facing jail, as there was no real proof the couple, which were dead, were any kind of criminals. However, they did found that they never slept in the days they were there, instead writing pages after pages about Carrie. They had taken pictures of her every day and, the strangest thing was that they had pictures that seemed to be her from a very young age. When looking one of the pictures, she cried because she couldn’t see herself in there. She was lost once again.

Mirrored

   The ship gently settled on the ground. It made no noise, it lifted no dust. Everything was very quiet and, for a place were rocks floated all around you, there wasn’t a single sense of danger. The crew of the ship, consisting of only three people, were checking the final numbers in order to decided if it was really safe to go outside and take a look.

 The planet was a gas giant and it had been discovered many years ago by traders trying to built faster routes into the worlds of the Core. Actually, according to the charts and many calculations, the planet was located exactly between the center and the edge of the galaxy. It was also a rare system, as the sun was potent and such have been the center of a very active neighborhood but the truth was that no creatures, no matter the type, lived in any of the planets.

 However, and exactly four months ago, a signal had been detected in the gas giant. First, it was thought to be a mistake but the signal persisted. Then it went mute. The traders and even the smugglers told the authorities that they hadn’t lost any ships and no other ships had been lost in the area. So who had activated a very strong signal on a deserted planet?

 The three-person team had been sent to collect data about the planet and check if there was a reason to believe anyone could be stranded on the planet. Upon arrival to its orbit, the team named the planet as Cotton World. It was not an official name of course. It was just a way to identify it and feel more comfortable while talking about it. The name, of course, came from its appearance: the world was covered by huge pink clouds that made the world look like a massive cotton candy. As they descended through the clouds, they realized that the name had been very accurate as the clouds were not only pink in color but were also kind of solid.

 The first to go out was the biologist on the team. Her name was Yarra and she came from a very different world, a world she deemed incredibly boring and that’s why she decided to have many adventures by joining the forces of authority that ruled the galaxy, Besides, she had always been interested in life and in all the shapes and sizes it took all over the galaxy. She had been working for the State for four years and she loved it: she traveled a lot, got to meet lots of people and made good money out of it.

 Yarra was half human but even her other half couldn’t breath on this planet, so she had to use a special suit to be able to walk around without fear. She only took a couple of steps before returning to the ship and telling the other two crew members that the rock seemed stable and that it was urgent that they began the search for the beacon that had been detected. After all, that was the reason they were there.

 The next one to step out was a big, yellowish creature. He wasn’t human at all but had many features that one could identify as human. The only things that really differentiate him were a horn in the center of his forehead, his large tusks, his four arms and tall stature. His name was Gorg and he always seemed menacing at first but he was the most tender and calm being ever to be seen by anyone. He was happy by just helping and had joined the force almost seven years ago. Granted, he was very strong and could fight any kind of danger physically, but he was first and foremost a physicist.

 Gorg was simply in awe of the Cotton World. In all his travels he had never encountered something quite like this place. The fact that sound didn’t seem to function exactly as it did in the rest of the planets, was something he wanted to understand urgently. But Yarra was right and their priority was to explain the origin of a beacon signal that had been detected in far way worlds. In order to do their examinations, Gorg put on his suit and carried a large antenna outside, as well as a special console and computer which they used to detect any electric emissions. No matter the type of beacon, it would leave an imprint in the atmosphere if it existed.

 The third crew member was the captain. He was full human and his name was Ionek. His skin had been burned by many suns so he had patches of red and brown all over. His eyes were yellowish, although they could change color depending on his mood. He was a tall strong man and he had been known many years ago as a military hero all over the galaxy. He had served in the army for many years before having to step out of it due to a scandal that he had to pay for. The only option they gave him was to have his own ship and serve the State with it.

 Ionek did what he had to do but he was always clear that exploration and discovery weren’t his first choices in a world where so many wars and battles were being fought. He wanted carnage and destruction but had to settle to be the pilot of some scientist trying to discover why fire burns. So he just sat down in his captain chair and tried to have a nap as the other two investigated outside.

 After several hours, Gorg and Yarra detected something very weak but still trying to work. It was located directly below them, maybe four or five kilometers. They copied the information on an electronic pad and then packed everything in order to investigate closer. Ionek wasn’t very happy that his nap had been cut short but at least he didn’t have to move too far. The trip downwards was an easy one but it wasn’t deprived of a few scares, mainly because the clouds and the environment got darker as the ship sank into the planet.

 Finally, they detected a rock they could land on and Ionek settled on it, but this time landing wasn’t as soft as it had been the last time. When they came out of the ship to check, they realized one of the landing “legs” had sunk into the rock and was now trapped in there. Captain Ionek wasn’t pleased at all and asked Yarra and Gord to be fast in order to mend the damage to his ship immediately. They then took the electronic pad and walked around the rock, trying to detect the signal again. But what they saw wasn’t a signal or a beacon but something far stranger.

 Below, another kilometer maybe, there was another ship on another rock. But that wasn’t the strange part: the strange part was that the ship looked exactly like the one they had used to get there. Both Yarra and Gord looked below and then their ship and then back again down. They couldn’t believe it at first but then they realized that the model was not that uncommon and that the most important thing was to determine who had entered the planet if it was supposed to be deserted.

 They went back to the ship, where Ionek asked if they could leave at once but they refused, telling him about the ship below and how they had to go down there and check it out from up close. The captain refused to move his ship and clarified that the model was exclusive, or at least that was what the army said when they transferred him from the military. Yarra ignored that last part and told him they were using the jetpacks. Nothing indicated they couldn’t use them and it would be easier for them to investigate that way.

 Minutes later, Gorg and Yarra were floating down to other ship. The jetpacks worked a bit awkwardly, not responding fast enough, but they were good enough to get to the next rock. Once they were close enough to the ship, they started to check for life forms and found out they were three and they were all inside the ship. Gorg turned to Yara and urged her to leave. He had suddenly had a very bad feeling about it all.

 Then two shadows crossed the sky and the whole area became shrouded in darkness. It was as if they had landed on a dream that was about to turn into a nightmare. The team tried to active the jetpacks but they were slow to respond. Gorg’s made him fly but Yarra’s wasn’t working. It was then when she heard a sound coming from the ship and, at the same time, a device in her backpack started to beep. She had found the beacon. It had been put up by…

 She screamed but no one heard it as she was wearing a mask. She did it just as she had seen the crew of the other ship come out of the ship and walk towards her. Her jetpacked suddenly worked and she landed abruptly on the right rock. Gorg helped her up and they both ran to the ship. Ionek used every force the engines had to liberate it from the sink part and he succeeded, only by leave that part on the rock before rushing into space.

As he typed the codes to achieve interstellar flight, he asked them what had happened. His ship was know missing a limb and he wanted to know why. Gorg told him everything he had seen: the other ship and the shadows. But Yarra was shaking and trembling too much. She only said two words “beacon” and “us”.