Behind the Mirror

You always hear stories of kids with imaginary friends. Mine wasn’t imaginary; and she wasn’t my friend. I’ve lived in the sanatorium for four years now. I used to live in a beautiful farm house with my parents.... and the little girl; the little girl in the mirror.

She used to just show up. Sometimes in mirrors. Sometimes in the pond. Wherever she wanted, really. It wasn’t my reflection. My hair was brown and I didn’t have her blue eyes. But I was the only one who saw her. I would tell my parents about her quite often. Her soft looking blonde curls and her pink frilly summer dress. They didn’t believe me. As I got older, she did too. By the time I was fourteen my parents had had enough of my “vivid imagination”.

And that’s how I ended up here. My parents don’t visit very often, anymore. SHE still does. I see her a lot more often than I used to. She shows up in almost every reflective surface of the institution. I sometimes even see her in the linoleum floor. Not often. She says she doesn’t like it there as much as she does in the mirror.

I’m sitting in my room right now. I don’t know where she is. She always seems to disappear when I’m given my medicine. I’m not allowed to take the medicine by myself because I don’t actually take it. But that’s because I don’t need it. Either way, I don’t like taking my medicine. A lot of the kids here don’t like taking their medicine. And there’s all kinds of kids here. She may just have gone away because of the doctors. She doesn’t like them either. But I don’t actually mind when she’s not here.

I took a deep breath before taking and swallowing the green pill. The pills weren’t always green. Antipsychotic drugs can be almost any colour. They all taste horrible though. I’m guessing that this nurse was new. She didn’t check if I swallowed my pill. For all she knew, I may not have swallowed it at all. She nodded and spun on her heel, the rubber of her shoes squeaking as it rubbed against the linoleum floor. She opened the door and stepped out, waiting for me to follow. She didn’t seem very talkative.

We were going to the recreational room. It’s were the patients spent most of their time. Either there or outside. I wasn’t allowed outside because, “it wasn’t a controlled environment”. All the doctors and nurses thought I was horribly dangerous. It was never my fault. It was always her. She would do things that no one but me saw. And because of that it always ended up being MY fault.

Some of the things that happened couldn’t possibly have been my fault. You see, she told me once that she hurt the people that hurt her. I didn’t understand how people could hurt her. Then again, it’s not like I was imagining her. And people hurt other people all the time.

The things that happened were never too dramatic. Just… unfortunate…
The only time she did something really bad was a couple of days ago. Thinking about it now, the things she did have become progressively worse.

It started with small things, like teddy bears that were missing their eyes. She would always bring them back to my room so that the nurses would find them there in the morning. She enjoyed it. And she kept doing it. I don’t think I’m able to describe all the ways in which they punished, or “treated”, me. The memories are horrible.

Then things got worse. She got bored more. At one point a nurse woke up, covered in blood. It wasn’t her blood. It was the cat’s blood. The one that had been strung up in my room.
You may think that the things that happened in mental hospitals in movies don’t actually happen in real life. The thing is, they do. But here not all of us are really sick.

I don’t know where she is right now. I don’t know which was worse either. Knowing where she was, or not knowing.

I had been sitting on one of the plush chairs for a while. I was looking at one of the flickering lights in the ceiling. I noticed that the nurse was too. She looked… nervous.

I didn’t know how to feel. I was pretty sure it was her again. She had said she was bored a lot. It had something to do with me being too old to play with her anymore. I don’t remember ever playing with her… not even when I was little.

The light was still flickering. More of the children were noticing it now.  The room seemed to rapidly grow hot and stuffy, filling with a rotten stench.
That’s when the rest of the lights went off, drowning the room in complete darkness…

There wasn’t a single noise. Not from any of the other children. Only the occasional thud. Like something falling to the ground… And then a crack. A single crack that seemed to echo through the room.

I could feel my stomach knotting; twisting; turning.

The lights turned back on.

There was blood flowing from the cracks in the mirrors.  I turned around just as I heard her giggle…