The Boy in the Gray Hoodie

ELEVEN | Borders

Steel fingers held him to the gurney, cloth hands wrapping around his chest. He couldn't move, speak, think. It hurts, someone said. The boy inside the mirror. With black eyes and drooling lips. A melting face who swallowed the glass like liquid as it pooled over his throat, that bobbing pink bulge warped by ripples in the mirror. 

Who was that boy? 

Why did he stare? 

Did he live inside the mirror, or behind it?

They tore at him, pulling his skin, pinching his eyelids. Light bit through the darkness, hungry and desperate to see his eyes which swallowed the brightness and then ached, and ached, and ached...

Voices swirled, condensation gathering in the depths of his ears where they hummed agonizingly high. The ringing would not stop, and the voices added to them in a discordant undertone. His jaw throbbed, neck muscles rigid. They were talking to him as they lifted him from the gurney and into a chair with heavy cloth straps. His feet, not quite healed from the glass, rested flat against the floor, toes curled from an involuntary spasm. The sound pulled at him from every angle, stretching cartilage and bone until the fibers and fragments nearly snapped. When the voices finally ceased, the light still poured into him, aching as it swallowed up his insides, filling him with their eyes, fingers, and words. The doctors could crawl inside and examine every piece of him now that they could see where to place their feet on the way down. He was utterly vulnerable, his body no longer under his control. As the immobility lingered, traces of his mind came back. And fear, the most familiar sensation, crawled back inside of him too.

The boy in the glass continued to eat himself, already up to his chest as the ripples swirled down his throat. But somehow the image never ceased, no matter how wide his mouth became—a gaping hole beneath rivulets of mirror—the boy remained strapped to a chair made of plastic and buckles, the seat hard as bone. He couldn't move or fight them. His body was an empty suit, pale and hollow. It was a nightmare from which waking was impossible.

The car stopped, and Lisa opened her eyes with a gasp.

"What is it?" her father asked, alarmed.

She blinked uncertainly, her hand a little sticky from the warmth of her cheek where she'd been leaning on her palm while she slept. "Nothing. It was just a dream," she mumbled, sitting up and peering out the windshield to see where they were. Dr. Crane had been driving for hours, heading north toward the peninsula. They were at a red light, engine idling behind a short line of cars. It was the wrong time of year for people to be heading for the coast.

"The dream with the mirror," he stated knowingly.

Lisa turned too quickly to look at him and winced from the cramp in her neck. They'd been sitting too long. She needed to get out of the car and stretch. "How did you know that?" she asked, uncomfortable and unnerved.

"You've had that dream since you were little. You used to call it the water dream, but then the water turned into a mirror." He answered, easing the car toward the vehicle in front of them. He tended to follow too closely behind other drivers. Not because he was in a hurry. It was more about intimidation.

Lisa watched his foot press the brake pedal, heart pumping rapidly. She was starting to get worked up—and not from the dream. "I don't remember that," she uttered, shaking her head a little. How could she not remember having had the dream before? "How do you remember?" she demanded, feeling somehow cheated by the fact that he knew something that she seemed to have forgotten about herself. What other facts about her were lurking beyond the reach of her cognizance?

He turned and gave her a look, both impatient and resigned. "You used to wake up screaming about the little boy getting eaten by a broken mirror. Sometimes it was a girl. You cried for hours. All night, once. That's not something one forgets."