Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 93

This week's photo, was taken by Laura Williams, a photographer from Cambridge, England. She calls this one Invisible. She takes some fabulous shots. You can find them on her Flickr account here. She calls this one Invisible.

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Gone

It first occurred when the hair dresser tried to show Lucinda the back of her hair. She couldn’t see it; her head wasn’t there. The strange thing was she could see herself in the mirror in front of her, just not in the one held by the hairdresser when showing her the back.

If the hairdresser hadn’t freaked, she could have pretended she had seen her hair and gone home and processed the event there. But the stylist got hysterical, especially after testing it out on her other clients and it only being Lucinda.

Lucinda had dropped cash on the counter and rushed out.

At home she tested it out herself. It was handheld mirrors – she tried several of them. It’s like she was invisible in them. She even turned her back to the full length mirror and faced the handheld. There was no reflection of her face in the handheld mirror, but she could see the full length mirror reflected and her back in it. It was bizarre.

Lucinda went into her sister’s bedroom and tried it out on her, making some excuse about her new haircut and wanting to compare it. The back of her sister’s head showed just fine in the mirror. However, she made sure her sister didn’t see her reflection – or non-reflection.

She did the same with her brother and her mother and again, theirs were perfectly normal. In the large oval hallway mirror she could see herself, but when she took it off the wall she disappeared. It made no sense.

But when she attempted to hang the mirror back onto the wall, her thumb slipped and disappeared into the mirror. She paused, looking at her thumbless hand clasping the mirror. She wiggled her thumb, she could feel it move, but there was no movement on the surface of the mirror. She drew her hand back, her thumb was intact.

She needed to investigate further, so she took the mirror up to her bedroom and shut her door. She propped it up against her bed. She sat cross legged in front of it and reached out, putting her index finger against the surface. But there was no surface, her finger vanished. Again no ripple; the surface was not liquid, it just wasn’t there. But she couldn’t see her finger. She could only see the reflection of the wardrobe behind her.

She pulled her hand back. Her finger was unchanged.

She laid the mirror flat on the floor and stood. She dipped a bare toe in, it disappeared, and then she put her whole foot in until the ankle. She did a sort of hokey cokey with it: in out, in out, shaking it about. It was normal.

She knelt down on one knee and lowered her entire leg in. There was no resistance, nothing to stop her. She then moved round onto her bottom and lowered her other leg in to join it, right up to her thighs and sat there swinging them about – or at least that’s what it felt like. There was no sensation. It was like she was dangling them over a building, she just couldn’t see them.

Then she turned herself round, laying face down on the floor, her legs still inside the mirror, and slowly shuffled her body further and further in, until only her arms, shoulders and head were out. Her arms taking her weight, because there was nothing under her feet.

She contemplated letting go. Wondering what she would drop into; wondering what was on the other side of the mirror. She debated until her arms started to ache, and then she thought, why not? And let go.

***

A few hours later her mother came upstairs. She’d called her for dinner and had no reply. She knocked on her bedroom door. No answer. She opened the door and found Lucinda’s room empty, the hallway mirror lying on the floor. She tutted and picked it up, taking it back downstairs with her, while calling for Lucinda again. She hung it back on the wall and adjusted her hair in it, and went back into the kitchen.