The Attic Above My Mother’s Room

I hadn’t been up to the attic since I was twelve. After the funeral, cleaning out the house felt like the only way to keep my hands busy, so I dragged the ladder up and pushed through the hatch into air that smelled like old paper and something else — something mineral, almost like rain on hot pavement.

At first, all I saw were boxes. Christmas decorations, photo albums, a broken sewing machine. Then my flashlight caught it: a shape tucked into the far corner, wrapped in a moving blanket that had gone stiff with dust. It was too symmetrical to be furniture, too smooth to be a box.

I pulled the blanket away and found a mirror. Not an antique one — the frame was plain, unremarkable wood — but the glass itself was wrong. It didn’t reflect the attic behind me. It reflected a room I didn’t recognize, dim and still, as though lit by a single candle somewhere out of frame.

I told myself it was a trick of the flashlight, some warp in old glass. I leaned closer anyway.

The room in the mirror had a chair in it. It hadn’t been there a second ago.

I stepped back, and the chair was gone. I stepped forward, and it was back — closer now, angled slightly toward whoever stood where I was standing. My hand found the frame without my permission, fingers tracing along the wood, and that’s when I noticed the underside had been carved with a single word in my mother’s handwriting, half worn away:

don’t.

Behind me, in the mirror, the candle went out.