There's been a monster in the mirror since Ollie was eleven, and he only knows one thing: it despises the color yellow. So, when a truly terrible tragedy involving a spork and a too-long flight of stairs leaves him eyeless, and he's sent down the st...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"That's it," Ollie declared, releasing the textbook and his will to live with it. The thousand-page monster landed square in the middle of his chest, all but knocking the wind out of him. "I've hit rock bottom."
The tired ceiling fan wibbled, wobbled, and whined its agreement, missing blade flinging shafts of light from his jarred door to the cracked window to the mattress that burrowed deep in his off-blue shag carpet.
It wasn't an ideal living situation, but Ollie was deep in the throes of a doctoral geology program. His options were as skinny as the not one, not two, not three, but four sets of stairs that slithered up the corner of his building to his floor.
"Hey, grumpy, do you want one of my puddings?"
The world tipped upside-down, turning his pudding-holding roommate's sympathetic smile to a peculiar frown. Hessa loitered in the living room, her pink fuzzy socks hiked up to her knees and the baggy sleeves of an overlarge smiley face hoodie pushed up to her elbows. Her eyelashes, eyebrows, and hijab were all five shades of sunset. Vibrant, warm, and joy-brining, she was a lot like sunshine. The main difference was that, unlike Hessa, sunshine didn't steal his hoodies when it got too chilly in the early mornings.
"I've been looking for that for, like, three weeks."
"What?" Hessa asked, all the innocence of a raccoon caught in the recycling making her eyes big and glittery.
Ollie pointed. "My smiley hoodie."
Hessa propped her free hand on her hip. "Ollie, darling, I've had it for over a year." She'd exchanged her poorly-feigned innocence for a fond a smile. "Do you want a pudding or not? The offer expires in three ... two ... one ..."
"Only if you have tapioca." As desperately as he needed something to soothe his broken soul, he'd rather wallow in misery than eat vanilla pudding.
With a pout, she said, "I was really hoping you'd pick vanilla. I wanted the tapioca."
Ollie scoffed. "Who do you think I am?"
"Geology nerd who makes too many rock jokes and is really into yellow," she said, quick and precise, like she'd said it fifty times before. "Too easy."
All he could do was grumble a nonresponse. He wasn't willing to risk his pudding to argue a spot-on description. His restraint paid off, and Hessa tossed him the tapioca. It smacked him in the face a full second before his sluggish reactions urged him to lift his arm.
"Man, you really do need sleep," she commented.
"What I need," he said, "is to get anywhere on my research."
Hessa folded her arms across her chest, her skeptical scowl looking nearer to a smile than her smile had—she was upside-down to Ollie, after all. Then, she sighed and dropped her arms. "Hang on a sec and I'll grab you a spork."
"No spoons left, huh?"
"Nope. You're on dishes this week," Hessa called from the kitchen.
"Oops." That explained why there weren't any coffee mugs left in the cupboard when he went hunting. "Sorry. I'll take care of them ... sometime soon."
Hessa poked her head back around the corner, wielding the spork like a weapon. It might have been intended as a threat, but between her sunny personality and the fact that it was a spork, she looked awfully harmless.
Ollie knew she wasn't. She spent all her free time in the gym, rolling with her mixed martial arts friends. He'd come with her once, and been herded away with sympathetic pats on the back after he broke his own nose his first time on the mat.
"Tonight," she said. "You will do them tonight."
"Thorite," he promised. He heaved his textbook of his chest and rolled onto his belly, snatching the pudding off the floor. When he looked up, eager for his spork, Hessa was glaring down at him.
"Really? Thorite? That's not even funny."
Ollie summoned a yawn in retort. "Yeah, I know. It gets tuff when I'm this sleep-deprived."
Hessa flicked the spork at him. "Eat your pudding."
He peeled the foil cap on his pudding back, pushing the spork into its gelatinous goodness a moment before the doorbell chimed. Groaning, Ollie heaved himself up. He popped the first bite of tapioca pudding in his mouth, and said, "I'll get it."
He wandered across the apartment, pudding still in-hand. Near the door, he paused to jam his feet into his slippers. In the moment he stopped, he made the mistake of looking in the mirror. He was met with a big, big, big mouthful of teeth and eight glossy white eyes.
The monster wore the same faded yellow tee and ripped jeans Ollie did, and it had the same shaved panel that wrapped around its head under its dreadlocks, but it wasn't him. He knew because he only had two eyes, and markedly less teeth.
"Why are you wearing yellow?" the monster asked, its teeth glinting in the light. The word 'yellow' rolled off its tongue like the dirtiest of sacrileges. "You know how I feel about yellow, Ollie. I don't like it."
Ollie grinned back, flipping his middle finger at the monster in the mirror before dashing out of the apartment, pudding cup still in-hand. He might have been afraid of the monster if it hadn't been staring back at him for as long as he could remember.
When he was little, he'd been convinced he was staring at himself. He poked and prodded and felt around inside his mouth for the eyes and teeth that he was missing, but he never found them. That was when his suspicions that the monster in the mirror might not be him began. They were confirmed as reality when he first saw a picture of himself.
He wasn't an eight-eyed, thousand-toothed freak ... he just saw one when he looked in the mirror. By the time he came to that realization, the monster was familiar to him. It was annoying, but it wasn't terrifying—like an imaginary friend he never grew out of.
Ollie took the steps two at a time, daring to stick another heaping sporkful of pudding in his mouth when he reached the landing. His heel clipped the next step, and he slipped. It started gentle, and quickly spiraled out of control.
The pudding flew in the air, and by the time it landed and spewed its contents over the stairs, Ollie was in a rumpled heap at the bottom of the next staircase. One of his eyes bounced down the stairs after him, and the other dangled from its socket, both taken by the spork.
