The Mirror House

Some people swore that the house was haunted. Potts was the only one willing to go in every year and dismantle it. The mirrors had to be taken down separately, then the walls, then the platform. By the time Potts was done, it wasn’t anything much. Once you saw the skeleton of it, the house didn’t seem like something to be scared of.

The year Potts left the carnival was the first year he broke a mirror. It came down on him like a father’s hand—swift and sharp. He was lifting it off the wall when he saw Linda staring back at him.

She was all distorted probably because the mirror she was standing in was the one that makes you look like a snake that just ate a gazelle. The cut went up and out of her waist and he could see the scar tissue wrapping itself around her like her own injury was going to smother her.

Instead of pushing the image away from himself, he pulled it closer. He needed to see her, and the image was so clear despite the distortion the he felt like he could pull her down on top of him the way he used to when they’d be on the Ferris Wheel at night, and he’d pay Rich to leave them up top once most of the customers had gone.

She’d wrap herself around him, and they’d make love looking out over the remains of what used to be farmland—now just parking lots for retail stores where carnivals came to erect bumper car halls and a house of mirrors where people could pretend they were tall or short or someone other than who they were. A place where they could look damaged on the outside for a change.

The mirror house was the only place Potts wouldn’t go in until it was time to take it down, and Linda used to tease him. She asked him if he was scared of looking at himself, and he’d just say he didn’t think there’d be much to see.

When the carnival sat down in Espejo, Linda went into town with the boys before the opening day. She wanted Potts to come, but he had mirrors to mount.

They all left that night in one pick-up, Linda riding in the back. The last thing Potts saw was her standing up, dancing around the back of the truck, like she was riding on a parade float.

Rich said she was still dancing when they blew a tire and flipped over. Linda landed on a fence next to the road, but the guys just got banged up.

When Potts looked in that mirror, he didn’t notice that Linda’s face was all stretched out and purple. He didn’t see that the fingers on her hand went all the way down her legs. He didn’t notice that the deepest part of her wound matched the color of her lips.

He just wanted to reach in and grab her, whoever she was.

. . . . .

They found the broken mirror, but they didn’t find Potts. He took off in the opposite direction with a couple hundred bucks he’d been saving and a picture of him and Linda playing Test Your Strength.

It was seeing Linda in the mirror that made him leave. It was what he saw when the mirror broke. A thousand pieces of him staring back up at him. Some jagged. Some blurry. Some split into two halves.

It was looking at himself that did it.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.