Opposites C. Patrick Neagle Published by C. Patrick Neagle at Smashwords Copyright 2012 C. Patrick Neagle Find out more about this author at Smashwords.com This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. ~.~ Opposites (a short tale of horror) by C. Patrick Neagle I thought I saw something move in the mirror. But there wasn't another soul in the apartment. Imagination? Even though I wasn't quite looking at the mirror, I wasn't quite not looking at it, either. I was sure I hadn't moved. Had I? Mirrors were dangerous. Dangerous in the same way--well, no, not in the same way, but a similar way--to baths. That's why I never ever take baths. Just showers. I saw it on TV once--the Carol Burnett Show, I think, right before Airwolf. Or maybe it was right after Airwolf--but I saw what could happen if you took baths. They came up through the drains. You'd see the fin and there'd be this really menacing music, or maybe there wouldn't, and then the shark would get you. You wouldn't even be able to struggle or anything before it opened those big jaws and you'd just have time to see all those rows of jagged, bloody teeth before they tore you into chunks. Maybe you could scream. Maybe there was enough time for that. I don't know. Showers were okay. Unless you were in a hotel or motel. Then they could be bad, too. Mirrors were dangerous in the way that lightning storms were dangerous. When lightning flashes and the lights flicker, it means that Evil Big Bird is circling the house, crossing under the power lines, making the electricity--the safety, the sureness of a lighted place, a warm place--go away. That wasn't something I'd learned from TV. That was just something that, as a child, I knew. I knew that there was always an opposite because...because there are the ways that people and things are normally, and then there are the ways they are when they aren't being normally. Normal, I mean. Like with mirrors. There are opposites. So if there was Big Bird and he was big and yellow and friendly and would do anything to help you out, especially if you were a kid, then there had to be an Evil Big Bird and he would do anything to make your life worse, do anything to hurt you, and he wasn't friendly at all. Especially not to kids. Oh, and he was green. I knew that, like I knew about the mirrors. Right when you're leaving a room is the most dangerous time with mirrors. Especially right when you're leaving the room. No, wait, right when you're leaving the room and you've just turned the lights out but then you just happen to glance up or to the right or to the wherever the mirror is and then you just barely see yourself in the mirror. That's the most dangerous time. Then. That isn't you in the mirror. Not who other people see when they look at you. Because, well, because mirrors make opposites. Knowing all of that, I looked down quickly before I saw whether something had really been moving in the mirror or not. If I didn't see it, then there hadn't been. A roommate in college told me that. He was watching a show on Discovery or TLC or someplace about how all the trees in the Amazon were being cut down. They were showing the bulldozers and the smoke from the fires and my roommate flipped the channel and said, "Man, if I'm not watching it, then it isn't happening." After he said that, we talked about whether dolphins were smart or not and if maybe they had cities under the ocean and how they could save you from shark attacks. But I didn't think they could save you from shark attacks if you were in a bathtub. There wouldn't be room, would there? Anyway, I looked down at my feet and turned off the light--no, wait, I'd already done that and that's why I thought I'd seen movement, because that was the most dangerous time and I hadn't been paying attention, just on autopilot: flip the switch, open the door. It has to be the other way around or you risk seeing something you shouldn't. I opened the bathroom door quick-quick and went out into the hall and then into the living room. There was a lot of natural light in the living room. Not like in the bathroom. In the bathroom, there was only a small window, high up in a wall that faced another wall--a concrete one--across an alley, so that there wasn't ever much sun coming in. But there were three, hundred-watt bulbs in sockets above the sink in the bathroom, though--above the sink and above the big mirror that was above the sink. Andy didn't like the dark. She said she had "seasonal affectation disorder" or something like that that she didn't really have. She was always...well, if she didn't have cancer during any given week, then it was lime disease, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or seasonal affectation disorder, or whatever. She never had any of those things. I think she was just afraid of the dark. All kinds of dark. She triple-locked the doors. You know, like that. But she was also pretty. And smart. Sweet, people said. Kind. She was a year younger than me, but we'd started college the same time. When we graduated and came to the city, we decided to get an apartment together because apartments were expensive and because we were in love. Or maybe it was another reason. Hard to remember. There was lots of light in the living room, like I said. I stood in it. I stared. The back of my hand itched, so I scratched it. I had to go back in. Usually I don't. Have to go back to see, I mean. Why would I? Mirrors are dangerous. But this time-- I walked back to the bathroom, out of the light of the living room, down the short hall, then I went in and I turned on the light. And then I looked. The mirror was a big oval one, clean because Andy kept it clean, wiped down with paper towels so that the surface was so clear that it wasn't like a surface at all. Behind me was the bathtub. Andy was still in the water where the shark had gotten her. There was red everywhere and the water had to be getting cold by now. I leaned forward and looked at myself in the mirror. It was the same me. The me that I always see when I look in the mirror. Relieved, I waited until I was out of the bathroom before I stretched my arm back through the open door and flicked off the light. ~.~ About the Author C. Patrick Neagle is an author, photographer, game designer, and teacher who lives in the Missouri Ozarks when he isn't trekking around the world. Follow him on Twitter @Parablehead and at C. Patrick Neagle on Facebook. Read his blog at http://goblinbrook.wordpress.com. Find out more about him on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cpn