There is nothing left of the mirror. They came in the night, like broken doves, like thieves made of the spirit of fire, like the moon’s impossible ache. They came with a thousand things that never happened, and their intricate jigsaws and feral riddles absconded with shapely fractions in a pattern I cannot describe because it describes me. On the horizon, a hound let loose a wail that pierced death’s own ear, and my heart began to press itself into celestial shapes that will not be caged in a mortal breast.

As if shotgunned with absence, the mirror was first a labyrinth of apertures, and then a shredded map of punctures. I watched like an embryonic god whose three tails stir the crucibles of time, space, and matter. As they effaced it, it told me stories. Stories of heroism and despair, of loves known and lost, of mountains departing into oceans, of stars falling from the heavens into human bodies such as ours.

Soon, only a tracery of mercurial threads remained, and then, at last, even these were delicately unmade, as if temporality’s pole had been secretly inverted. Like the silence which invades the mind prior to music; there is nothing left of the mirror.