Cover the Mirrors

The wake was held at home. The old Urk way.

I noticed it the next morning. Coming downstairs, something about the front hall was off — it took me two passes to see it: the old mirror at the foot of the stairs had been draped with a white cloth.

The small round mirror in the kitchen. The bathroom mirror. The bronze-framed one in Old Yang's study. All of them. Every mirror in the house, overnight, quietly covered in white.

"Old custom," one of the aunts explained in English, voice tucked low. "When someone passes, the mirrors in the house are covered. The old people say it's so the soul doesn't catch sight of itself and refuse to leave. Others say it's so the living don't see, in the glass, what they shouldn't see." She patted my hand. "Very old superstition. There's no logic to it."

No logic to it.

I stood at the foot of the stairs looking at that white cloth for a very long time.

A family that has made mirrors of its men for four hundred years. Generation after generation, awake in the dark, watching roads nobody else can see — building a fortune on those eyes at sea and repenting of them in a pew every Sunday. And when one of their own dies, the first thing the whole house does, by instinct older than anyone living, is find every mirror under the roof—

—and cover it.

The house stayed quiet all day, a quiet with a shape to it. People came and went; neighbors left food; the church came to arrange things. Everyone stepped softly and spoke underneath their voices, as if the whole building were holding one breath. I helped where hands were needed — tea, cups, bread cut and plated. When your hands are full, your head is mercifully empty.

By evening the visitors had gone. Passing the foot of the stairs, I stopped at the covered mirror again.

And — possessed, one more time — I lifted the corner of the cloth.

In the glass: me. Swollen eyes, bad color, hair a ruin. Just me. An ordinary woman who had just lost the person she loved. I looked for a few seconds, then lowered the cloth and smoothed it flat.

That night I didn't dream. Not one image.

I woke in the small hours to a room so still I could hear the sea. And lying there in the dark, I realized what those hours had been: the first time in twenty-eight years I had slept a sleep with nothing in it. Empty. Black. Silent.

As if someone had gently draped my mirror, too. Just for one night.

I can't explain why, but I wasn't afraid. Not even slightly. I pulled the quilt higher and turned over. Down the hall, a thin line of light lay under Old Yang's door. One other person awake in this house, keeping his own watch.

Each of us walking him the first few steps, in our own way.

They covered every mirror in the house and called it an old custom with no logic to it.

But I know the logic. The logic is: for these few days, nobody looks at the road. Everybody looks at him.