Friendly Mirror

I was nearly three at the time, so I did not completely know how most things worked in life. I always felt like if I talked to a mirror I would get a response back from the child on the other side of it. My parents thought this was cute, so they decided to record it with the tape recorder my mom has just recently bought. My parents recorded me pressing my face against a mirror and talking.

“Hi!” I said say over and over again, cracking up when I saw the mouth moving in front of me.

My parents giggled, turning off the camera. This left us with a tape that only contained about a minute of footage on it, so we just threw it in a box with a few other forgotten tapes. A few days ago, I was assigned with the duty of going through all the useless junk that sat around in the house. I discovered a pile of tapes, one sticking out to me. It was the tape about the mirror. I pulled it out and went on to set up my television to play tapes. I plopped it into the tape slot and watched as the screen flicked to life. I watched myself having the cute conversation with myself in the mirror. I decided to compare myself then to now, grabbing the camera and a clean tape as I ran down to the bathroom. The mirror had not been cleaned in a while, but it was still good enough to do this experiment. I giggled just as I did when I was a baby, although being seventeen isn't usually classified as a baby's age. I flipped open the side of the camera so that it would turn on, a slight flicking noise omitting from the camera as it did. I pressed record, then turning back to the mirror.

“Hi!” I choked out in the middle of me laughing as hard as I could.

My laughter was cut off when I looked up into the mirror. What I saw was not what I was hoping to find. It was of course still myself, but not what appeared to be my current age. I seemed to be much older and far more miserable. My lips in the mirror lagged behind reality although I seemed to be trying to keep up.

“Hi!” I clearly wanted to say, but no sound came out.

I noticed that I looked to be aging to the point where I could see my skin shriveling up. The mouth of my older self slowly creeped open as my skin split open, already dried blood cover cracks on my body. The lights flickered, and as they went back on I could hear the camera cut off on its own, the mirror returning back to normal. My eyes were wide with shock and horror as I grabbed the camera and darted back up to my room. After putting on the tape and watching it start, the screen barely lit up. Everything was still black, but it was obviously playing what was shown on the tape. At nearly three seconds in, audio crackled and what sounded like a fan was heard in the background.

“Bye!” I heard a childish voice say enthusiastically.