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[kc-readme]

Touch Wood

When I was 10, Brother and I broke the large, round mirror hanging in our living room. For years, it had been held up by the same tiny nails and hooks we used for our family picture frames, which were far smaller and lighter compared to that hefty slab of glass. I had grown up trying not to make eye contact with my reflection, afraid that one wrong look could knock the huge thing down, but the Feng Shui master had insisted on its lofty placement when we moved in. He might have changed his mind, had he known that someday, Brother would be annoying me with some stupid joke; that I’d shove him just hard enough to regret it; that when his back hit the wall, it would send the mirror crashing down on our heads.

Mother heard it shatter over the sizzle of dinner in her frying pan, abandoning the kitchen and running to investigate. Once she realised it hadn’t been our blue and white porcelain wealth vase, or our lucky bamboo in its ceramic pot, she froze in the doorway with such abject terror in her eyes, you’d think she had been looking right at a ghost. A dozen pie-slice shards and hundreds of odd fragments, like an assortment of tiny mirrors, were spread out on the ground, reflecting Brother’s bloody left eye a thousand times over. Mother vanished back into the kitchen and returned quickly, dropping to her knees amidst the web of glass. She was armed with both of our salt shakers, and, grabbing my wrists, emptied one in my grasp. Our trembling fingers sent stray grains flying, and though some found their way into my wounds, I could not manage to cry. I could only stare in horrified fascination as Brother’s eye continued its steady crimson drip on his hands, where Mother was exhausting the other salt shaker as if she could not see the granules dissolving in his blood.

“Throw over your shoulder,” she instructed.

We thought she was joking, even as the red seeped into the parquet and she shoved the mass of glittering scrap aside with her bare hands to knock, frantically, on the stained wooden slats.

Tok tok tok, tok tok tok.

We dutifully tossed our handfuls of salt, adding to what would undoubtedly be hours of cleanup. I tried to stand, knees wobbly from witnessing Brother’s blood loss and still oozing some of my own, and my teetering frame distracted Mother from rapping her knuckles raw against the floor. She scooped me into her arms, laying me down on the sofa before tending to Brother. The last thing I remember before passing out was trying to keep my gashed legs from staining the beige cushions, and though I woke up bandaged in bed with a growling stomach, whispers of Mother scrubbing her burnt pan in the kitchen lulled me back to sleep.

The next morning, Mother gathered all the mirrors in our house, even the ones that were adhered to our bathroom tiles with industrial-strength glue, loaded them into her car along with the broom she’d used to clean the mess, and drove to The Salvation Army. While she was gone, Brother and I delicately examined the one ornate hand mirror she had left behind, facedown on her rosewood dressing table. It was a gift from Father before he had passed on, and we ran our bandaged fingertips reverently over the elaborate, metal-cast phoenix design. Making sure to hold it safely above the lacquered surface, we turned it over for Brother to look at the gauze secured across his eye.

“You look cool, like a pirate,” I tried to assure him.

“Yarr,” he joked, nudging my shoulder delicately.

Every day for the next 7 years was a ritual. Our knuckles turned calloused from knocking so frequently on every piece of wooden furniture we owned, and we were no longer allowed to sweep the floor. Thankfully, superstition hadn’t said anything about vacuum cleaners, because at the rate Mother was throwing salt over her shoulder, we would be buried and preserved in our own home before the broken mirror could curse us in any way. The number of lucky bamboos in the house doubled, then tripled, and items from every religious denomination began to accumulate in our rooms. Crucifixes, horseshoes and dreamcatchers hung above us as we slept, though Brother and I still had nightmares that we kept secret from Mother, lest she made us sprinkle holy water over our sheets for the third time in a single day. We would sneak into her bedroom sometimes, stepping cautiously over the lines of salt across the doorway and around her bed to her dresser, where the hand mirror still sat. Our tiny reflections watched us preen as we grew older; we both began to style our hair, and I started to wear makeup.

Last week was the final week of our mirror curse, and we had hoped, though never truly believed, that Mother would ever let go of her evil-thwarting habits, even if nothing else unfortunate had occurred all these years by correlation. We knew she would owe it to the lucky pennies, or the rabbits’ feet, or Brother’s goldfish.

A strong industrial fan oscillated towards me and whipped my long hair into my face, jolting me back to where I stood before Mother’s open casket. She looked so different in death, despite the usual amulets and trinkets still wound tight in her braided hair, which the embalmer found impossible to remove without shaving it all off. They had called to ask about giving her a wig, but we’d be damned if Mother wasn’t cremated with her lucky charms. Brother put his arm around my shoulders as we stared at her pretty face, all 7 years worth of wrinkles gone from her forehead and making her look like she did the morning of the incident. We laid her hand mirror beside her head, its empty frame missing the piece of glass that once sat in its round indent. It had fallen out last friday, when she’d used it to powder her face, and she had a stroke when it hit the ground and split into three separate pieces. Brother and I dashed in to see her struggling for the bowl of salt on her shelf. We quickly heaped some into her hands, as well as our own, and tossing it over our shoulders together was second nature. I ran to phone the ambulance while Brother prayed by her side.

“Which heaven do you think she’ll go to; the Christian or Buddhist one? Maybe Islamic,” I mused lightly as I laid her diverse collection of prayer beads in the casket.

“I don’t know,” Brother turned to look at me, and a spot of light streaked across his glass eye when he smiled, “But there had better not be mirrors in any of them.”