Mirror Stories
Literary stories and psychological parables about meeting yourself. Entries: 32. Page 2.
Cashier Lena sat inside her plexiglass aquarium and watched “movies.” Eight hours a day the black river of the conveyor rolled past her, carrying other people’s lives shrink-wrapped in cardboard. The scanner’s monotonous beep was the only soundtrack. Lena was a seasoned viewer. She’d long since learned to call the genre from the opening shots....
Old Ivar sat on an upturned dinghy, mending a net with a thick needle carved from whale bone. The air smelled of salt, rotting fish, and cold water. In front of him, at the new pier, a twenty-year-old who’d come from the city for summer break fussed around his yacht-dazzling white, slick, flawless. Its name was Serenity. The kid found a tiny...
Before her, my life was a single-player game polished to a blinding sheen. I knew my map by heart: the gray subway line, the humming office open space, the three familiar bars that rotated menus every Friday. My skill tree had long been leveled to absurdity: “Sarcasm” at level 100, “Art of the impassive face” at expert, “Ability to tell good...
Listen. You wake up and the first thought is, "Something's off." Not with the world, not with the weather-it's you. Yesterday you decided to be perfect. You looked at your coworker Petya, apostle of clean eating, and thought, "There. I should be like Petya." And today you overslept, and the grated carrot salad you swore you'd eat for breakfast...
Kael hated this tree. The old elm his teacher, Elias, dragged into the workshop wasn’t a material-it was an insult. Its trunk ran crooked, twisting as if in a death spasm. Dark, almost black knots stared back like blind eyes. Deep fissures split the bark like scars. For a week Kael had tried to carve a falcon from it. In his mind it had to be the...
You've got a warm, purring bundle of happiness weighing a few kilos resting on your chest, and you think you're the one who took it in. What a grand, glorious delusion. We build starships, decode the genome, argue about postmodernism, while the leading Zen master naps at our feet and we never think to sign up for his class. And his curriculum has...
Old potter Kenji didn’t produce bowls - he carried on a conversation with clay. His workshop, smelling of dust and rain, was lined with shelves. They displayed not triumphs but scars: hundreds of cracked, lopsided, imperfect vessels. One day a young student, Ryo, arrived with a shining ideal in his head: a bowl thin as a petal and symmetric as the...
A man built the perfect cage for his canary. Every bar was measured. Every perch polished. He calculated the ideal distance to the feeder and the water cup. Everything was arranged so the bird would be comfortable. So her life would be fully predictable, safe, familiar. He loved his canary. He only wanted to protect her from the chaos outside. But...
Arthur was not a person. He was a function housed in a flawless exoskeleton. His title - “Senior Partner” - was a cuirass. His measured, emotionless speech - a sealed visor. His daily commute from sterile suburb to glass office tower - greaves that kept him from straying. Deep inside that armor didn’t sit Arthur at all, but a small, frightened...
He lived in a departure lounge. Not a real one - in the one inside his head. He lived as if his real life was still on its way, as if everything happening now was a long, overextended prologue with his takeoff endlessly delayed. He sat in that lounge and stared through a foggy window at the runway where other people’s planes - bright, swift,...
Ignat didn’t work. He performed a rite. His temple was the city square, his flock the ashy little bundles of life, ordinary city pigeons. Officially, for the odd curious passer-by, he introduced himself as a “municipal ornithologist-statistician.” It sounded dignified, like a verdict. In reality he was simply Ignat, the man who counted pigeons. He...
Victor wasn’t living. He was sterilising reality. His apartment was an operating room, and he, its chief surgeon, carved out any tumor of chaos. His balcony, tiled in flawless white, was his personal annex of sterility on the seventh floor. Deep in the basement of his skull, in a dark, reeking corner, a howling monkey sat chained. That monkey...
"I am an explorer describing what I see. Each text here is a mirror reflecting one facet of human experience; one ray of light falling at a particular angle. This is not the ultimate truth nor a universal diagnosis. There are no final answers here. Only an invitation to reflect."