In the night the son stood in the bedroom as the sun outside was coming down. Its orb slid from the sky in staggered increments, leaving a slight residue behind in slur, and where it began. The face of the sun itself was ragged and discolored, swimming—a humming hole impenetrable to eye. The way the light came through the window made the bedroom slow, the glass reflective, holding night out and inside in.
Parallel to there, just at his second side, the son had set the mirror on the air. He posed his body at an angle catching himself there in the two quick flattened planes reflected back and forth between the glass and glass a billion times, his body, each with mouth and skin and headholes replicated till there were more of him than he could stand. All of him crowded in and shouting: a maze of sons under no sun. Bruised skin in a relief map. Buttons.
There was someone other also in there, the son saw—slipped in the instance, between versions of he and he. Someone waiting, of a nothing. It had a black tongue. It had so much hair. It held a bell.
The son stuck his fingers in his eyes, color exploding. He could not see, though he could hear—the rummage in the glass, a muffled speech, his billioned skins peeling. The bending bow of glass sent out to kiss his head on both sides, in the pull. A sudden warm air hit the room—a pocket—squashing where his chest was, up his lungs. New words. Pistons. Popping. The son burst out and made no sound. He felt the many move into him.
The son, between the mirrors, fell.
When he could stand again, in the bedroom, the son closed the blind inside the room and took the mirror and wrapped it several times inside a sheet. He set the shrouded mirror in his closet with the reflective face turned toward the wall.