Mirrors

By Kathy Silvey Hall

     “You own a lot of vampires,” I said, checking my hair in my mother’s vanity mirror.  

     She said nothing, and I could neither see her reaction on her face or see her reflection, so I turned to look. My mother was smiling and continuing to dust her room.  I had said the wrong thing to her, and I often did, so I couldn’t very well expect an answer, certainly not from Bella Silvers.

     As many times as I had been there in the past, today I felt like I had never really noticed my mother’s room before. There had always been a big Frank Langella poster on the wall, but watching her dust the furniture, picking up here little figurines of Nosferatu and Gary Oldman, there sets of Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris books, I was aware for the first time of the extent of her vampiric collection.  There was an image of Brad Pitt, a magnet with David  Bowie and Catherine  Deneuve, buttons featuring Christopher  Lee and The Lost Boys.  It was rather morbid.

     I didn’t like looking at them, so I scanned the room for things which weren’t vampires. There were a few family photos: me, her parents, her siblings, but none with Mom in them.  The only photo of her was the beautiful full-length portrait her first husband had taken.  I had never met him.  The only other image of her in the room was a painting in which my mother was naked and winged. The man who painted that must have truly loved her, but I had never met him either.  I had never met any of them.  I wondered, not for the first time, how many men there had been who had loved her, whom she had loved.  I wondered how much of her story I would never know.

     She made the bed, spreading out the dark satin comforter my father had chosen for them.  It must have been a decade ago now.  He’d been gone so long.  The lamp by the bed had a shade on which was silkscreened an image of Leda and the Swan.  One of her lovers had given her that, too, another gift from another love, like so much of the jewelry in the boxes on her dresser, so many items of clothing and pairs of shoes in the closet.

     In this room, where my mother slept alone, the undead were everywhere.  

     There were only remnants of the men she had loved, vampires, I thought, who bled her dry.

     Then I looked at my mother’s cheerfully placid face and saw no evidence of heartbreak, and I wondered. 

     It might be possible. She might have been the vampire all those years ago.  Maybe she had drained the life from them and now haunted her own small bungalow surrounded by the hollow bones of her prey.

     My mother checked the time on a clock with Alexander Skarsgard’s face against the one in the bathroom whose face was a peacock.  The clocks continued to tick, and on both faces there was no time but the present. 

     She cleaned a double-sided mirror, then replaced it on the vanity.    Like many double-sided mirrors on many vanities, one side was more forgiving than the other.

Kathy Silvey Hall’s book of poetry Herstories was published by Literary Alchemy Press.  Her poetry also appears in Redshift 2 by Arroyo Seco Press.  Her short fiction appears in the LA Fiction Anthology by Red Hen Press, Chiron Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.