July 2026 Winner
Self-reflection
Aubrey Brumblow
Aubrey Brumblow is a transplant: raised in South Georgia, currently residing in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a degree in English as well as Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University. These days, she loves writing both creative nonfiction and fiction of any genre. You can find another story of hers featured in an anthology being published by By Chance Books this December.
She stares into the mirror hung on the manor wall, at the way it reflects everything but her. Never her. It denies her.
Long black tunnels for hallways unfold on either side, and faces of past ancestors with grim-lined brows frown from their portraits. In some, the paint is uneven, smeared, rendering the face a blurry photograph as if caught in blinding rain. The ancestors stand guard with elk skulls bestowed upon mantles, Winchester rifles in hand. Painted windows fail to hide the wilderness outside.
She stands and stares into the mirror, a floor-to-ceiling hole in a musty wall made from old-growth Douglas-fir that was the lifeblood of the family’s inheritance. She thought then, as she thinks now, that the trees must despise them—the people of the house, the reason for their demise.
The past unspools as she tastes familiar dust suspended mid-air. She has lived in this manor in the woods since her cavern-eyed mother caught the interest of the manor owner. As a child, she coughed for months, her lungs rattling, the dust settling into her bone marrow and coating her ribcage. She would lay in bed for hours, days, weeks, and she would stare at the splintering, webbing crack in the ceiling where the wood was darkened with water damage. She had nothing, not even a mirror. Her mother forbade mirrors because they were gateways to vanity, but there were other ways. In the water of the river segmenting the manor from the town, where Oregon ash trees stretched greedy skeletal hands, she caught sight of her ghastly pallor and cavern eyes.
The same eyes as her mother.
She remembers a boat and a boy. The boy on the boat, holding out a hand to her. But to step on the boat was to step into what she did not know. So she stood, and she stared. The boy’s hand fell, and the boat left the river bank, and neither the boy nor the boat returned. Two deep caverns gazed back from the water as water skippers blurred her image.
Her mother died first. Then her stepfather, wracked with a rattle in his lungs. The house killed them, and eventually so also did it kill her.
All she knows, all she has ever known, is the manor. It is all she shall ever know.
She is staring, and she is waiting when all of a sudden shadows ripple behind her. Her heart lurches. She has not waited for nothing! She bends closer, tracking the mirror’s surface.
Out of the shadows pops a short knobby-kneed boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old. The new owner’s son. He glances over and stares at the mirror.
At her.
She turns to face the child. In the faint light from the nearby window, his eyes glisten with water.
Her jaw unlocks, cracks apart, rusty from disuse. She smiles, flakes of dried blood fluttering to the floor.
Finally, gazing into his widened eyes, she finds herself reflected.