On a blog that I read, a challenge was issued to write what's considered a forbidden scene in fiction: your character looking at themselves in the mirror and describing what they see. Forbidden probably because it's an overused and amateurish device for describing your character.
Here's what I wrote:
"Is it a mirror or a window? I used to wonder. Is a mirror just one of a billion tiny connections between this world and the next, where everything is almost exactly the same as this one, atom by atom and moment by moment?
She'd look at me and wonder the same thing. We had lived every moment of our lives in parallel, in lock step. We had looked into each other's eyes a thousand times and known... known? Yes, known... that we were not the same person and yet no random act, no sudden movement, no lunge forward, fade back, sudden drop to the ground, punch at the glass or bizarre face could break the illusion that we were the same.
I knew that one day we would be different, and she knew it too. I had tried to imagine what it would be, the clue that would prove it. A pimple on my cheek instead of my chin? A slightly different shade of red on my lips? A single hair falling across my eyes while my reflection's remained in place?
But I had never imagined this."
I kind of like it, and I've been thinking about it since, imagining what the change could be. Given that the mirror world can only be minutely different from this world, what could have happened that would have caused a change in the Other's appearance without deflecting them from the lockstep path they're on with the girl on this side?
Here's some things I imagine:
1. Someone shot at her - in this universe they missed, in the other universe, they grazed her cheek. In both universes there was a scramble for cover, a search for the shooter, and fleeing to the safety of home. No cops, no doctors.
2. Some kind of flesh eating disease, just starting.
3. A person in the room behind the Other.
4. A message on the mirror, but no Other.
Hm...
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