Chapter 13 — Going Back In

She kept her eyes down. Not looking at the surface. The specific discipline of keeping her gaze at the frame, the floor, the edge — anything except the surface."I know you're hungry," she said. Out loud. To the flat. "I know you've been without anyone for twelve days. I know what that does."The flat was very still."I'm going to give you something," she said. "But it's not me. I'm not going to look at you. I'm going to give you something else to look at."She raised the hand mirror.She held it up, angled toward the large mirror, keeping her own face away from both surfaces. Her hand trembling slightly, the oval glass in her grip, pointed at the teak frame across the room.At first: nothing.Then the quality of the light in the room changed.Not dramatically — a shift, the way the atmosphere shifted before rain. Something orienting. Something that had been distributed and ambient becoming focused. Becoming pointed. At the small oval mirror in her hand.She held it steady.She heard — and this was real, she heard it, she wrote it in the journal when she could write again — a sound that was not any sound she had heard before, that was not in any category of sound she had experienced. The sound, she wrote afterward, of something encountering its own reflection for the first time and not knowing what it was looking at.And then it began.