The Infinite Starr

They say doing the same thing over and over again is crazy. Some of us call it consistency. Consistency looks crazy to people who have none. The rest of us keep on keeping on because it is what it is.

There was a shop at the end of a narrow city street that only appeared after dark. During the day, there was nothing remarkable between the old tailor and the boarded pharmacy except a brick wall stained by decades of rain. At night, however, a black door appeared beneath a tarnished brass lantern, and behind its cloudy windows stood hundreds of mirrors.

They were not beautiful mirrors. Some were foxed with age, some were cracked, and others had silver backing that had begun to rot around the edges. Their frames were carved from dark wood and decorated with peculiar things: serpents swallowing their tails, moths with human eyes, moons in different phases, flowering vines growing around tiny skulls. There were no price tags because the mirrors were not for sale.

Above the counter hung the only sign in the shop.

BY DEFINITION

The woman who kept the shop never explained what it meant.

People came because they had heard rumors that the mirrors showed the truth. This was not entirely accurate. Truth was much too ambitious a word for what happened there. The mirrors simply showed patterns, and patterns were often more unpleasant because they removed all the excuses people had carefully constructed around themselves.

The first visitor one evening was an older man dressed in an expensive coat. He entered laughing about the ridiculousness of the place and announced that he had only come because someone had dared him. He chose the largest mirror because men like him usually did.

At first, his reflection behaved normally. Then the room behind it changed.

A younger version of himself appeared, leaning against a kitchen counter while telling someone beyond the edge of the glass that she would never amount to anything. He looked pleased with himself in the way people often do when they mistake cruelty for prophecy.

The mirror moved forward through the years.

His reflection aged while the invisible person on the other side of that old kitchen continued climbing beyond the glass. Numbers appeared briefly in the reflection, salaries rising like floors in a building, until the number he had once considered the pinnacle of success became merely another floor someone else had passed on the way upstairs.

The older man stepped away from the mirror.

“I don’t remember saying that.”

The shopkeeper polished a glass bottle behind the counter.

“The mirror does.”

He left without asking another question.

The next visitors came together.

They had been together for so many years that their movements had become synchronized. They removed their coats at the same time, stood beside one another and smiled at their reflection with the quiet confidence of people who believed longevity itself was evidence of having chosen correctly.

Their mirror disagreed.

Behind them appeared a girl standing beneath a night sky with something bright strapped to her back. Beside her was a boy holding a lid.

The boy placed the lid over the light.

For a while, it worked.

Then the light escaped.

The couple watched as the girl rose beyond rooftops, telephone wires and church steeples until she disappeared into the clouds. The mirror continued through the years, but the boy and the girl beside him remained beneath the same ceiling while wallpaper faded around them.

Nothing terrible happened.

That was almost worse.

They simply became comfortable.

The seasons changed outside their windows. Opportunities passed the house without knocking. The ceiling seemed to lower by fractions until both of them had learned to walk beneath it without noticing they were bending.

Then the reflection changed again.

Thirty years had passed.

The light returned from somewhere beyond the glass, except it was no longer a girl carrying a rocket. It had become something larger and impossible to contain.

The man in the shop leaned closer.

His reflection was running toward it.

The woman beside him remained standing beneath the ceiling.

“Does he catch it?” he asked.

The shopkeeper looked at the mirror.

“That depends on how fast he learns to climb.”

Neither visitor spoke on the way out.

A third man entered shortly before midnight. He was enormous, the kind of man who had spent most of his life believing physical size was an argument nobody could answer. His hands were scarred across the knuckles, and when the shopkeeper invited him to choose a mirror, he selected one framed with carved wolves.

The glass showed a door.

A woman stood on one side and his younger reflection stood on the other.

His reflection raised a hand.

The image went black before it landed.

When it returned, years had passed. Children were being removed from a family photograph one by one. A courthouse door closed. Papers bearing official seals accumulated on a table. Then his reflection appeared beneath the flat white light of a camera that did not care how large he was.

The image froze.

A square photograph.

Permanent and terribly ordinary.

He struck the mirror.

It did not break.

“That’s not who I am.”

The shopkeeper finally looked up.

“Then why does it keep recognizing you?”

He left bleeding from one knuckle.

After him came a man who refused to stand directly in front of any mirror.

He moved sideways through the shop, glancing at the glass only when he thought it wasn’t looking back.

The shopkeeper had seen his kind before.

He finally stopped before the smallest mirror.

His reflection was handsome at first. Younger. Charming. Almost convincing.

Then another reflection appeared behind him.

It looked exactly like him except for the face.

That face changed every few seconds.

A bottle. A powder-stained table. A hotel room. A woman’s silhouette. A locked bathroom door. A dog waiting beside an empty bowl. Headlights illuminating a driveway. A front door buckling inward beneath the force of someone’s rage.

The man stared.

“No one knows.”

The reflection smiled.

Behind it, another man appeared whispering into one ear after another.

The secret moved through bars, kitchens, text messages and late-night conversations until everyone in the reflection knew except the man standing in the center of it.

He continued behaving as though he were successfully hiding.

Then something stranger happened.

His reflected face began changing.

The years accelerated. Whatever he had been putting into his body began collecting payment. The skin altered first, followed by the eyes and the mouth, until the secret he had protected so carefully was no longer hidden behind his face.

It had become his face.

He covered the mirror with his hands.

The shopkeeper said nothing.

Some definitions require no assistance.

Near closing time, another large man arrived. He smelled faintly of rain and old anger. He chose a cracked mirror near the back and immediately saw himself standing outside a house beside a friend.

The scene shifted before he could understand it.

His own reflection disappeared.

The friend remained.

A bedroom light came on upstairs.

The man watching the mirror understood before the glass showed anything else.

His jaw tightened.

The mirror was not finished.

The friend turned out to be kinder than the man he had arrived with, although kindness did not make him immune to his own future. Years began collecting around him too. Children, complicated relationships, unpaid bills and debt stacked themselves across the reflection like unopened mail.

Then the glass returned to the first man.

Another woman appeared.

This one belonged to his best friend.

The mirror did not need to show what happened next. It simply showed a friendship disappearing, followed by another mug shot traveling across glowing phone screens.

The man backed away.

“Everybody gets what they deserve in here?”

The shopkeeper shook her head.

“No. That would make this place a church.”

“What is it, then?”

“A mirror shop.”

He stared at her for a moment and left.

By one in the morning, the street had emptied.

The shopkeeper began covering the mirrors with black cloth, but she left one uncovered.

It was the oldest mirror in the shop.

No one knew where it had come from, and unlike the others, there were no carvings around its frame. Only a sentence scratched into the wood:

Look as long as you like.

The shopkeeper stood before it.

The glass filled with mornings.

Hundreds of them.

The same alarm. The same dark sky. The same coffee cooling while work began. The same stubborn return to whatever had not been finished the day before. Years moved through the reflection, and the repetition was almost monotonous until its consequences began appearing around it.

A better position.

Then another.

Money staying in the bank.

Keys placed on a new counter.

A different house surrounding them.

A new car waiting outside.

Peace becoming so ordinary that nobody inside the reflection seemed to notice how extraordinary the absence of chaos actually was.

The mirror continued.

People who had once appeared enormous grew smaller in the distance. Some became photographs. Some became stories whispered by mutual acquaintances. Some remained exactly where they had been, repeating the same choices while insisting that circumstances were responsible for the familiar endings.

One figure appeared again after thirty years.

He was running.

The person ahead of him never stopped moving, but neither did he.

The shopkeeper watched him for a while.

Perhaps he would catch up.

Perhaps catching up had never been the point.

The mirror moved on.

There were no angels rewarding good behavior and no demons administering punishment. Nobody sat above the world assigning houses, careers, addictions, debt, loneliness, mug shots or second chances according to some celestial accounting system.

There was only repetition.

The thing done once became a choice.

The thing done often became a pattern.

The pattern kept long enough became a life.

She covered the mirror.

At sunrise, the black door disappeared from the street, and the wall returned between the tailor and the abandoned pharmacy as though the shop had never existed.

People who had visited sometimes came back looking for it.

The man with the bleeding knuckle returned twice.

The man with the secret returned many times, although each year the face searching the brick wall looked slightly less like the one that had first entered.

The couple never returned together.

The man who had asked whether he could catch the light came alone once, stood across the street for nearly an hour, and eventually walked away.

Nobody ever saw the shopkeeper outside.

There were rumors, of course.

There were always rumors.

Some said the mirrors predicted the future. Others claimed they punished people by showing them their past. A few believed the shop was nothing more than an elaborate trick operated by a woman who knew too much about strangers.

All of them were wrong.

The mirrors had never predicted anything.

They merely continued whatever had already been placed in front of them.

Perhaps that was why the shop frightened people.

A prophecy can be escaped.

A curse can be broken.

A ghost can supposedly be exorcised.

But a pattern requires someone to recognize it.

And recognition has always been the more difficult magic.

Years later, someone painted a sentence on the brick wall where the black door used to appear. Nobody knew who wrote it, and by morning most of the words had washed away in the rain.

Only three remained.

By definition… perhaps.