Ficlet: The Other Side of the Mirror

Written in answer to NightMaden’s Deja Vu challenge.

He had always seen ghosts. Not like that kid in that movie. Nothing creepy like that. Just glimpses, quick shots of people who weren’t really there, going about their lives, minding their own business, completely unaware that he watched.

As a child, he’d been called insane, among other things, and sent to get his head shrunk. Later, he was a psychic sensation, except he never believed what he saw was psychic. Now, he was a forgotten oddity. The public had moved on.

But he still saw ghosts. And they never saw him.

Until now.

He stared at the face in the mirror, and got an overwhelming sense of deja vu. He had seen the face before, many times. It had belonged to him, once, long ago.

He’d worn that face the first time he looked in the mirror and saw someone else.

Saw the face he wore now.

He stared at the ghost of his boyhood, as it stared back, unknowing, at its future, and wondered.

Which one of us is the ghost?

By J. M. Bauhaus. All Ficlets are written under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.