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'My writing career began, technically, at 24—if you count three chapters and a lot of enthusiastic daydreaming as a career. Decades later, a friend still brings up my unfinished novel in the same tone he uses for local ghost stories: “Remember those characters?” I wish I didn’t.

I spent the next thirty-eight years buried in financial services—adviser, examiner, mentor—never quite shaking the feeling my true calling might involve fewer spreadsheets. Then, at 62, I collapsed at a country fair, mid-argument with myself over a second sausage roll. As I faded in and out, I heard my wife, three months married, sob, “I can’t lose him now!” Never a dull moment.

Hospital beds make you reflect. I reached for my laptop, intending to clear emails, but my brain decided to write fiction instead. So I finished my long-lost novel, Whispers of the Forgotten. Glowing reviews, small readership—such is life.

In 2025, I entered every short story contest I could find and was amazed when I actually won some. Flash fiction lets me try on new voices: fridges, mirrors, occasionally even humans. The year’s only half done, and I’m still curious where the story goes next.'

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What Mirrors Cannot Change

They think I only show surfaces, but I've witnessed her extinction—gradual, then sudden, like a star collapsing into silence.

The girl appears on my surface each morning, shoulders caved, eyes skimming past her own reflection. She’s perfected the art of avoiding herself. Behind her, the mother tightens a belt. “If you’d just lose ten pounds,” she says, her voice taut as a measuring tape. The girl’s face remains blank. She's practised being unreadable.

But I know the truth in every detail—the way her fingers hover over a dusty hairbrush she no longer uses, the subtle lines forming between her brows. Her fingertips trace the scar above her eyebrow, a faint relic. I remember the fall—nine years old, laughing with blood on her cheek. She didn't cry then. She doesn’t laugh now.

Evening. The father adjusts his tie, his smile a tight curve, all edges. “Never show weakness,” he mutters, yanking the knot, like he’s trying to choke something silent. The girl appears, report card clutched in her hands, the paper’s edges curling from being held too long. He waves her off. “Later.” But later never comes.

The light through the window shifts, a watery glow that splashes across the room. Once, it painted her hair in gold, but now it’s a cold stripe dividing shadow and light—her world split.

Night. The parents argue. Words surge and collapse, like waves against glass—potential, sacrifice, disappointment. The girl’s door clicks shut, her silence thick as frost.

She returns to me. Headphones on, volume high enough that I feel the faint thrum against my glass. A small suitcase rests by her feet—not pink, just practical. She glances at the door, then back to me.

“I could disappear,” she whispers. “They wouldn’t notice till dinner got cold.”

Her palm presses against me, breath misting the glass. Fingerprints bloom and fade. I want to show her what I’ve seen—how she built a snow fox for the neighbour’s boy, left crusts for birds, danced—barefoot, wild—when no one watched. She has always been more than this fading shadow.

But I am a mirror. I reflect, but I do not change. I do not save.

The house has changed, though. Once, her mother stood here, young, lining her eyes with mascara. Her father too, adjusting a borrowed tie, saying, “I’m going to be someone.” He almost believed it.

Now they are ghosts of those dreams, their reflections dull, faces losing shape in the glass. The girl breathes against me, fogging the surface, and writes one word in the mist: Goodbye.

And then she’s gone.

Morning splinters the silence. The mother’s scream crashes against me, sharp and cracking, a fracture forming across glass. I watch her stumble back, hand to her mouth. The father rushes in, his tie abandoned, his face a mask cracking at the edges. “Call the police!” he snaps, but his voice splinters too, jagged with fear.

I reflect them—chaotic, frantic, as they search. Drawers yanked open, cupboards emptied. The mother’s fingers hover over the missing suitcase’s spot. “She’ll come back,” she whispers. “Teenagers, they run away.” But there’s no confidence in her words.

The father’s face hardens. “Not if we act like this.” But his hands tremble. He avoids the mirror, as if I might accuse him.

Police come and go, their sympathy pressed onto card-stock promises. The parents sit on the bed, staring at the window. Beyond it, the world moves—clouds shift, sunlight shivers on frost, but in here, time has cracked.

Night thickens, and I hear them through the silence.

“She’s always been distant,” the mother whispers, twisting her fingers. “But I didn’t think—”

“Don’t. Don’t turn this into... into that.” The father’s voice is brittle. “We did our best.”

Silence, thick as fog. And then a whisper: “Was it enough?”

Days blur. They drift room to room, aimless. Sometimes they stand before me, searching their reflections for truths they never wanted to see. The father’s eyes, once full of certainty, now hold a vacancy. The mother’s face is etched with lines she never thought she’d earn.

The light changes with the seasons beyond the window, warming, softening. Spring tries to creep in, but the house stays frozen.

I want to show them what I’ve seen—her fingers curled around a half-eaten sandwich she left for sparrows, her wild dance on rain-slick tiles. The way she glanced at them, always looking first, waiting.

But they cannot see. They only search for her absence.

Yet she left something. A smudge below the word she wrote—faded now, almost gone. Her fingerprint, a ghost’s touch.

And I keep another memory: five years old, in a lion costume, roaring at herself, her tiny fists punching the air. Fierce once. Wild with pretend courage.

Now there’s only the space where she stood. No breath. No blur. Only absence, lingering like mist that won’t quite clear.

I cannot move. I cannot call. I reflect what's here—and what's gone. And perhaps that's the cruellest truth: that we can witness everything and change nothing, whether we're mirrors or human.