by Jeamus Wilkes —
“The Thing in the Mirror Over Your Shoulder”
Inspired to Scare (ItS) is a quarterly column by writer, artist, and actor Jeamus Wilkes. ItS is designed to help horror and dark fiction writers plant the seeds of inspiration and nurture its resulting creativity.
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Do I see myself, or do I see someone else? Do you see yourself, or do you see a slightly off stranger?
My earliest memory of a mirror was at four years-old, standing in front of the one above a bathroom sink with the help of a step stool. I remember this particular event as it involved discovering a dark brown dot above my upper lip that could not be wiped away. It wasn’t a booger, nor the result of a stray Magic Marker during my hours of drawing pictures. I inquired with my mother as to what this dot was. When she told me, “it’s a mole,” I thought it might be related to the Mole Man character in a Fantastic Four comic book I had been reading around that time. I started reading at an early age, and Marvel and DC comics were my first phonetic training ground. Little Golden Books rapidly seemed quite tame compared to them, and my older brothers let me read their comics whenever I wanted to. A mole. Comic book horrors discovered in a mirror.
The connections a boy of four makes may seem simple, but their implications are awesome in imagined terror. Years later and not long after I turned twelve, I had a cousin die at a young age from cancer, its origins in a melanoma on his neck. His death recalled all that small child’s examination of an itty-bitty mole. A few weeks later a dermatologist was digging that mole out of my Novocain-numbed face after I’d spent many sleepless nights obsessing about my cousin’s death. Three years later my father died from cancer. Thirty-four years later one of my older brothers would die of cancer. But I saw cancerous death first in that itty-bitty mole in the mirror. Death may also have been lurking just over my shoulder in that mirror, my eyes barely missing it as they were focused on a blemish.
As a child I found it simultaneously fascinating and eerie that my reflection did not match photographs of myself. And I saw a lot of photographs of myself and the rest of my family, as my Dad was an amateur photographer with pro-level skills. In how I pictured myself in the world, it was as if photographs were horizontally flipped lies and only a mirror could tell me the truth. A part of me still believes this. Childhood convictions are hard to shake as we grow, and one day we wake up on the side of the bed, and another person in the mirror in our peripheral vision, moving a fraction of a second slower, confirms this.
Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if printed words look reversed in the mirror. We should be reading, writing, and generally creating them in the opposite direction than what we are used to, because the world we live in outside that mirror is the one that is reversed, the one that is a lie in every atom of its existence. When you look into a mirror, your head and body move in the correct direction you tell it to. The truth is in the mirror and the thing just over our shoulder.
And then the truth is all the more terrifying when contemplating the urban legends like Bloody Mary. I think about things that can only be conjured from a mirror not because they are trapped there, but we are trying to trap them here, on the wrong side of that mirror. The cars screaming around you in your vehicle’s rear-view mirror aren’t just assholes trying to beat everyone else to work. They are the truth, the phantom screaming to reach through and destroy.
The above paragraphs can be considered a flight of fancy or dead seriousness. They’re only a half fib from me, but here’s the point: It began with a remembrance of the mole just above my upper lip. Do you have a memory of your first experience(s) with a mirror? How did it make you feel? How does the idea of you being a reflection and the person in the mirror the reality affect you. What if you are the copy, the doppelganger, the counterfeit in the glass darkly? What rabbit hole are you led down into when you contemplate all of this? If it makes your flesh crawl or even slightly uncomfortable, commit it to the journal, and then commit it to the fiction manuscript or poetry chapbook.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?” I ask.
“I am,” the face there says in a voice slightly lower than mine, slower than mine, and through a mouth with a pink scar slightly closer to its upper lip where an itty-bitty mole probably once lived.
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Further Reading:
Rochat, P., & Zahavi, D. (2011). The uncanny mirror: A re-framing of mirror self-experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 204-213. https://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/The%20uncanny%20mirror%20-%20A%20reframing%20of%20mirror%20self-experience%5B1%5D.pdf
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