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House of Mirrors – A Fiction Friday Post

House of Mirrors

 

I am the opposite of the House of Glass who just went so deep and soulful with the looking out and being looked upon.

 

I reflect my visitors in unexpected ways.  I am generally thought of as the fun house at carnivals.

 

A word of advice to all of you..

 

Do not trust your life and body to a thrill ride that can be taken down, hauled off and put back up again in twenty four hours.  (This is my sister, Kelly’s advice.)

 

If you think light can play funny tricks you should see what reflected light can do.

 

If you set up a mirror two of them facing each other very very precisely or maybe geometrically parallel ,the reflection can go on forever.  Each reflection is ever smaller. The photons just bounce around back and forth and back and forth forever as far as anything can see.  I really wonder if reflection can upset the nature of the universe at the speed of light or the speed of perception.

 

I have mirrors on every wall.  Some giving off true reflections, others skewed.  A person looking may see themselves as squashed or impossibly bent.  When they move up and down, hop, jump, and squat or just blink, the image I reflect will give an all but true rendering.

 

There are tall skinny making mirrors here.

 

I heard but I have never really seen it for myself, that the mirrors in upscale gyms are warped in all the right places to make the weightlifters seem more fit and symmetrical than they really are.

 

Mirrors are deceptive.  Mirrors entertain and magnify the flaws of those reflected.

 

Break a mirror and you get seven years bad luck.

 

“With one eye in the mirror you watched yourself go by.”

 

Rearview mirrors are great but come with disclaimers about the objects being rendered from a false perspective.

 

Mirrors.  Glass, highly polished.

 

Mirrors are the main components of telescopes and are very important for seeing into the windows of time.  One miss grinding of even the smallest telescope can be magnified so many ways.

 

Mirrors are everywhere, at the produce section of stores.  Clothing stores, hair salons, wedding boutiques. I wonder if the bridal places have their mirrors skewed to reflect a thinner bride to be?

 

Mirrors are the deeper theme of many novels short stories and poems.  Two-way mirrors are everywhere.  There is a trick to spotting them but I am at a loss to relay that information.

 

I do have a couple of two-way mirrors in me, set up mostly for the staff to spot lost and frantic visitors.  I am made to be disturbing but for some the experience is a tad more than unsettling more unnerving.

 

A mirror is a constant reminder of time.  Most of them verify the age of the viewer reflecting the rivers of time carving divots in a human face.  In a Harry Potter movie there was a mirror that looked into the past and the future.

 

Looking into the past is a perfected thing, when the Hubble telescope turns to focus on the vast emptiness of space it looks as far into the past as possible.

 

To look into the future though, I don’t think that can be done.  Not with any reliability.  The future is colored by now.  I just can’t think of any way to reflect the things that are meant to come.  The whole nature of reflection is second hand.

 

I have been traveling with this carnival for years confess I am not made of glass all the way through.  Some of me is but the nature of traveling and reassembling makes glass a risky business.

 

Did you know mirrors need recoating?

 

We can only reflect what is in our view.  We are useless without light.  We are totally dependent on photons traveling reflecting bouncing being absorbed.

 

In total darkness I am just total darkness, down for the count.

 

I bring joy and fear and wonder.

 

I’ve been retired and I am gathering dust.  I am seldom in total darkness because I am in a secured place.

 

I wish I could go back to work.  I always thought it amusing to observe others observing themselves.  The special attention I received throughout the day from the workers who constantly came through after groups and between them to clean the sticky candy and finger and face prints of the people who had just passed through.

 

Some of them would stop mid-stroke and have a good long look at some aspect of themselves.  One would focus on an eye lash, another on her nose.  They would stare or gaze for moments then catch themselves a bit self conscious and take another quick wipe before moving along to the next in line.

 

I suppose the nature of a mirror is to reflect things a whisper out of synch while creating the allusion of synchronicity.  No one thought a mirror could be so deep.

 

I am more of a maze than a hall.  For the little kids though just off that way there is a simple hall set apart, no one wants to mess a kid up and a maze doesn’t have to reflect to do that job.  A reflecting maze is a hall of mirrors with an adult rating.

 

I am pleased to have followed the house of glass.

 

House of Mirrors