The Mirror (Completed)

••• One •••

Chapter One

It calls to me, every day, the same door that I've told myself to never walk past. Sure, I've been in there countless of times, often entering when I think of my father, just sitting on his chair as I look at myself in that mirror, the mirror that took him from me. Sometimes I think my parents never wanted me to see the show that night, that they never wanted to watch his final trick. I call it a freak accident. People call it a horrible happening to one of the greatest magicians to ever live. My mother calls it a tragedy and forever feels guilty. It resembles pain. It resembles the loss of the man she loved, the loss of her husband, and the loss of her only child's father.

But every magician has that one trick that they know will threaten them, at least the greatest do. My father was one of the greats, no one yet pushing the limits he broke. His final trick was a wake up call to all the other magicians, one that made them only more realize the ricks that they all take. Perhaps to the world of magic, they take my father's story as one of a great magic who let his arrogance get to him and destroy the very name he had built for himself.

"Candice!"

Turning around, I find my mother in the doorway, home from a day of work. Her job was once to join my father on stage as she assisted him. Their story was one many loved to hear, how the magician fell for his assistant. After my father died so many years ago, my mother went back to college, gaining even a doctorate where she specialized in string theory from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sometimes I think she chose that major because of my father, because of what he did. Father was smarter than many, physics was something he would study and implement into his tricks, applying insane theories that he had learned from the future professors of my mother. Mother never cleaned up his desk, all the notes he left behind with different equations and intense mathematical projections all in black ink. Yet academia was not all he used, for there were sketches of unusual symbols that mother tried to get rid of.

My father never saw his biggest trick complete. I don't know where he went. Many said my father had tried to make a portal, others said it was some trick with the reflection of mirrors and he was just hiding from us. But I believe what my mother says, how my father is gone from this world. I know she means the afterlife, that he is gone.

Every Christmas my grandmother tells me how proud he would be of me, how he is looking down from the heavens and smiling at me. She tells me if my father was here, he would be smiling and telling me how well I have turned out to be.

"Yes?" I ask, hopping off my father's desk where he once planned out his final trick. My mother told me he planned on retiring from the field of magic after that show. At school people either tell me how sorry they are that I lost my father at such a young age, or I hear the gossip of how he was a failure. A few come to me, talking of my father with high regards as they too hope to be just as great as he was. Father helped make magic something more than just a performance on some talent show, but a world-wide sensation.

My father made magic become something so many wanted to see, something even more popular than what it had ever been.

When he was searching the world as he learned magic, he would do tricks to gain money just for a meal, he would do tricks for a ride. After a while the royalty from different countries would come to him, wanting to see his tricks. Soon, after ten years of searching the world, he married my mother and as four years passed, they had me, and their talents were known throughout the world.

"I know this is very sudden, Candice," my mother begins, but I already know what she will say. "I just booked a flight to Iceland for tomorrow." She does this very often. No, not for leisure, but for study. I know my mother is searching to understand my father's final trick, to try and see what happened to him.