The Silvering of The Seventh Year - DHR
At the estate sale, among the widow - things --
mourning brooches, teeth in a saucer,
a fur stole shedding its cloak of moths --
the mirror lay wrapped in black silk.
The auctioneer would not touch it barehanded.
Even through gloves, he held it
the way priests carry difficult relics: at a distance from the heart.
I bought it because it was drawn to the way it ticked.
Not loudly -- a patient little sound, delicate as an insect worrying the lid of a coffin.
The frame exhaled the smell of rain-rotted cellars,
mold climbing the ribs of old houses,
wet roots, photographs glued together by floodwater.
It showed no reflection. Instead: the room emptied of me.
My lamp furred over with dust.
The fern beside the window sagged into threads.
The chair beneath my living body rotted into its patient skeleton of wood and springs.
I watched snow collect through a crack not yet born in the ceiling.
And behind the black glass—
not mirrored, but embedded impossibly within it—
the silver pendulum swung. Left. Right.
A small immaculate metronome
keeping faith with something terrible. Hours passed.
The future in the mirror altered by increments.
When my pulse quickened, mold flowered darker along the walls.
When panic seized me, another century seemed to enter the room.
Neighbors claimed she fled.
But I think she simply reached the end of herself.
Because the pendulum is not measuring hours - it is spending them.
Each swing subtracts something minute and irreplaceable—
not seconds, but permissions:
one more breath, one more swallow of sleep,
one more astonishment of blood.
The mirror does not show the world after your death.
It shows the world as death prepares to remember it without you.
Tonight the pendulum has grown almost still.
In the glass, the dust has settled completely.
Even the curtains hang with the composure of the deceased.
And there in the ruined chair
sits the mirror alone, awake in the dark,
waiting for whoever next mistakes its ticking for a clock.
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