What the Mirror Remembers

The mirror was listed for almost nothing. The moment she opened the app, the first thing to catch her eye was the "urgent sale" tag, and then three photographs of a full-length mirror in a solid wood frame. The seller's handle was "PreparingToMove," and the price was less than a tenth of retail. Park Yunseo thought it would fit perfectly in the master bedroom of the new apartment and tapped the chat button without hesitation. The seller replied quickly enough, but led with a single question: "Do you live alone?" Yunseo found it slightly odd for a moment, then decided they were asking because of the weight of the delivery. "No, there are three of us — my husband and my daughter." The seller's reply didn't come for another thirty minutes. "…I see. Please be careful." That was the last message.

The mirror arrived two days later, carried in by two delivery men. It stood a hundred and eighty centimeters tall and sixty wide, a heavy, serious object. The wooden frame was the deep color of aged chestnut, and along every corner, petal-like shapes had been carved into the wood. It was clearly old. Propped against the wall opposite the master bedroom window, it made the room look considerably larger. Her husband Jaeho said, "This is nice," and their daughter Haneul — third grade in elementary school — stood in front of it for a long while studying her own face, then walked out of the room without a word.

The first thing happened to Jaeho. On the third morning after the mirror arrived, he missed a step on the stairs and twisted his ankle. He had to take time off work, and suddenly there were hospital bills, transportation costs, money going out in all directions. Jaeho said it was just bad luck, and Yunseo thought so too. But the following week, Haneul came down with acute otitis media and a high fever. On the way out of the clinic with the prescription, Yunseo found herself thinking of the seller's last words. *Please be careful.* It was nothing. Of course it was nothing.

By the time the third thing happened, Yunseo could no longer convince herself it was coincidence. Her mother collapsed without warning and was admitted to the hospital. She had high blood pressure, but she had always been careful about her medication. Sitting at her mother's bedside, Yunseo opened the seller's chat on her phone. "PreparingToMove" was a deactivated account. The profile was gone, the transaction history wiped clean. Yunseo searched her gallery to see if she'd saved any of the listing photos. In the second of the three pictures — the one taken straight-on at the mirror's surface — she noticed something she had missed before. She had taken it for a flare of light. There, faint and hovering at the center of the mirror's face, was something shaped like the outline of a human face. If the seller had been alone in the room when they took the photo, it should have been the seller's face reflected there. But the shape was not facing the camera. Its head was lifted, its gaze directed at something else entirely.

That night Yunseo came home and stood before the mirror in the master bedroom. It was close to midnight. Jaeho had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Haneul was in her room. Under the fluorescent light, the mirror was just a mirror. Yunseo's face was there, and behind her the bed, the nightstand, the curtains. She stared for a long time. There was nothing. She was about to turn away when the eyes of her reflection — before her own eyes had moved at all — blinked first. She went still. When she looked again, the mirror was perfectly ordinary. It must be the light, she told herself. She was tired. But that night she could not sleep in the master bedroom, and she spread her blanket on the floor of Haneul's room and lay down there.

The next day Yunseo searched the internet. Superstitions about mirrors, the things said to inhabit old ones, how to be rid of them. Most of it was groundless. But on one forum she found a post from someone describing something similar. The writer said that after bringing home a secondhand mirror, one family member after another had ended up in the hospital, week after week. Near the end of the post was this: "I found out later that the mirror had belonged to an elderly person who lived alone. Someone who had passed away. It came out of an estate clearance. It seemed like the mirror had gone on remembering that person's face right to the end. As though it couldn't accept the new ones." There were no comments. The post had been written three years ago.

Yunseo decided to get rid of the mirror. It took a full day to explain herself and persuade Jaeho. He said it was absurd, but he looked at her face and said nothing more. Early on Saturday morning they carried the mirror down to the building's recycling area. The whole time they were moving it out of the bedroom, Yunseo kept her eyes away from its surface. She turned it face-to-the-wall and dragged it out that way. After they propped it in a corner of the recycling area and headed back upstairs, she tried not to look behind her. But just as the elevator doors were closing, she could see through the glass lobby doors to the recycling area below, and she could see the mirror — which she had left facing the wall — with its surface turned toward her.

On Sunday afternoon the building management office called. Another resident had taken the mirror from the recycling area. The call was to inform her that large items required a disposal sticker before being left out. Yunseo held the receiver in silence for a moment, then asked who had taken it. "The resident in 303. She was passing by and said it seemed a shame to throw away a perfectly good mirror."

That night Yunseo stood in front of the door to unit 303 with her finger raised to the buzzer, and stood there for a long time without pressing it. What would she say? *Please give it back — I threw it away, but there's something wrong with it, something bad is going to happen to your family.* From behind the door came the sound of a child laughing. A small, clear sound. Yunseo lowered her hand. *There's no evidence*, she told herself. *It was coincidence. All of it was coincidence.*

She went home and turned on the light in the master bedroom. Where the mirror had stood, there was only wallpaper. Yunseo stared at the spot for a long time. It was a bare wall. And yet, strangely — that empty space where the mirror had been — it still felt as though something were being reflected there. She turned off the light and left the room. Walking down the hall, she heard a small voice from Haneul's room. A murmur — sleeptalking, or perhaps just talking to herself. "The mirror lady moved away." Yunseo froze with her hand on the door handle. Haneul made no sound after that. Yunseo did not open the door.

The next morning, waiting for the elevator, the door to unit 303 opened. A woman who looked to be in her early thirties. Their eyes met, and the woman smiled first and said hello. "Hi there. I only moved to this floor a little while ago." A brief greeting. The elevator arrived and they stepped in together. Just as the doors were closing, Yunseo caught a glimpse through the woman's open front door to the wall inside. The full-length mirror in its solid wood frame stood there. And in the mirror, head lifted toward the entryway, a shape made only of outline — as though it had not yet committed the woman's face to memory — was looking at Yunseo. The elevator doors closed.