Creepypasta

The Looking Game

The blaring sound of seven in the morning jars you violently from sleep, shoving dreams away like rocks off a cliff, never to be seen again. You stir and make morning noises as you reach from beneath your sheets and blindly search for the Snooze button. Once silenced, you convince yourself not to rappel back down the cliff of slumber and reluctantly get up to begin your day.

Yawning widely, you shuffle from your room to the hallway, wiping crust from your eyes and drool from your mouth. You never were a very pretty sleeper – part of the reason why you are still single. The thought makes you smile randomly.

You eventually find the bathroom and, after a few seconds of grasping in the dark, turn on the light. You flinch back like a frightened vampire before shaking your head at your own immaturity and stepping inside for a meeting with the porcelain head.

Concluding the meeting with a flush, you move to the sink to wash your hands. Your eyes wander up to the mirror, looking at your own semi-sleepy reflection. Your hair is a mess, and the bags under your eyes look like plums. You think to yourself, Wow, who’s that sexy beast? and chuckle softly, wringing soap from your hands.

Then, as you dry them on a towel adjacent, you get an idea.

Have you ever actually seen yourself looking away in a mirror? Not like you turn your head and look back with your eyes – that doesn’t count because you’d still see your reflection looking at you. You’re thinking more along the lines of catching yourself looking away, of somehow moving so quickly that you defy physics and actually see your reflection looking away before it can look back with you. Like the reflection is someone you can trick into making a mistake.

Clearly, you think to yourself, this is a dumb idea, a really dumb one. You can’t catch yourself looking off in a mirror. The amount of damage you’d need to do to the laws of nature and time… Well, simply put, it’s impossible.

That being said, you decide to try it anyway, a little pointless experiment to pass the time. It is Saturday, after all, so it’s not like you have anything better to do right now. Might as well indulge in a little childish self-amusement.

You place your hands flat on the sink, lock eyes with your reflection, and slowly turn your head until you can barely see the edge of the mirror. You mentally count one… two… three and turn sharply back to the mirror. Your reflection stares back at you. The both of you purse your lips thoughtfully.

You repeat the process: stare, turn, count to three, and turn back as fast as you can. Same result: staring at yourself. You stick out your lip in a pout. You don’t even know why you’re doing this, but it’s frustrating as hell. Maybe it’s because you’re still half asleep. Maybe it’s because you’re just crazy like your parents used to tease. Whatever the case, you decide to try again.

You stare at yourself, seeing all the colors in your irises, the red of the thin veins along the scleras. Slowly, you turn away, finding a point on the wall to focus on. However, instead of turning back immediately, you wait, keeping your head still, your eyes locked on the little nondescript spot. You tell yourself that, if you wait long enough, maybe you can fake it out, trick it into letting you win the game. You smile a bit at your own silly stupidity, but restrain the laughter, trying to maintain focus.

You count the seconds in your head. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. You remember your childhood, games played with friends, games like Hide n’ Seek or The Staring Contest. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. You remember your own competitive nature back then, the desire shared by all children to succeed over your friends, the desire to win at everything you do no matter how pointless or impossible. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. You understand that you feel the same desire now, to reach for something you know is too far away, to try anyway until your fingers wrap around its barely material form. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Even if it means falling over the edge, even if it means going just a smidge too far… the desire to win, in this moment of ticking seconds, is just too great.