HRALDFAR

"Every time she looks at herself in that piece of metal,” says a voice floating past her window, “it eats a tiny part of her soul. Or so I’ve heard, and on good authority."

“That might be true,” says another haltering voice nearby. "Whatever it is that thing does, though, it’s a shame it ended up in her hands.”

“I couldn’t agree more, my broddir. As if women need another distraction from chores these days!”

The men laugh too hardily at this wisp of a joke, but Hraldfar ignores them as they walk by her window. She only registers sounds, guttural rasps and whistling sibilants devoid of meaning, entranced as she is by her own reflection. Laying on her bed, she holds the burnished plate of metal not two inches from her nose. At this distance, every twitch of her eyebrow, every flicker of her eyes, even the slightest spasm in her lips finds its twin in the mirror.

No one could ever look at her the same way she looks at herself inside the little metal frame. She knows this deeply. Here she sees and is seen, she is both viewer and object of study. Which of her features, she wonders, would others’ eyes be drawn to? Which flaws and criticisms could she foresee and avoid? The second Hraldfar in the mirror is her harshest critic and most constant friend. Realizing this, she’s invaded by an almost reassuring fatalism, the thought that her every decision is not her own, but rather preordained by another, mirror-image Hraldfar beyond her reach.

"Hraldfar! Come set the table for dinner," yells her mother from the other room. She hides the mirror beneath the bed, ruffles the quilts over the mattress, and hurries to the kitchen.

While setting plates, forks, crocks, and spoons, Hraldfar glances at her mother hunched over the fire, tending to the last strips of mutton. Smudges of ash dot her face. Without a mirror, she thinks, her mother will continue to pace around the kitchen with her head held high, completely unaware of the dark soot coloring her cheeks.

“Hraldfar, dottir, what have you been up to all day?” asks her mother. “I hope you weren’t sulking in your bedroom.” She pauses to gauge her daughter’s reaction, and getting none, continues. “A beautiful girl your age can’t stay locked up at home. You should be out on the town, making yourself known! How will you find a suitor if you don’t leave the house?”

Hraldfar lifts her head from the table just enough to acknowledge that her mother has spoken to her, though not enough to show she agrees or cares.

“It’s nothing, mother—I just wasn’t feeling good today. I thought I should stay in bed and rest.”

“Sick? Why, how could you be sick? Your face is as fresh as could be, and not a drop of fever, by the looks of it.”

Setting down the poking stick, her mother leans over to lay a hand on her forehead. Hraldfar tries to think warm thoughts, prays for some heat from the hearth to radiate onto her mother’s hand.

“Just as I suspected: your temperature is perfectly normal,” she says.

Hraldfar turns away and hunches further into herself, her lie now unraveled. Her mother returns to the lamb shanks on the spit.

“You know I just worry when you keep to yourself,” she says. “You do remember what the shaman said, don't you?"

Before Hraldfar can answer, her mother recites, "'Perilous is solitude twice removed.'"

She remembers. The shaman’s glazed-over pupils flash before Hraldfar’s eyes; his pungent breath fills her nostrils and sticks to the back of her throat. Bonfires blaze in every direction, their wiry, shape-shifting flames forming a tessellated pattern on her unfocused eyes, shimmering like sun on rippling water. Still-warm blood, dripping from the neck of the sacrificial mare, laps at her shins as she kneels on the cold earth. Her breath, pale in the darkness, writhes upwards and mixes with the shaman’s as he whispers in her ear.

“Hear me now, little one,” he mumbles, his head cocked to the side, his speech slurred, his shoulders shifting in their sockets between each phrase. He grips her forearm, and she flinches.

“The netherworld,” he continues, “So deep and wide-yawning, rises about you, flirts with you, is licking about your being, just as the flame dances about the log before grasping it and turning it to ember.”

Hraldfar imagines this flame not as a scorching fire, but as a chill dagger plunging deep into her core. The physicality of it, its palpable presence among the flames, leaves her nauseated and dizzy.

“There is no cure for this danger,” the shaman rasps on, “No amulet or charm to protect you. One warning comes to me, and one warning only: Perilous is solitude twice removed.”

“Dottir, go tell your brothers it’s time for dinner,” says her mother, wrenching Hraldfar from her memories. She finishes setting the table and runs off to her brothers.

That night, after everyone in the house has fallen asleep, Hraldfar retrieves the mirror from under the bed and examines herself by the light of a tallow candle. Her face in the mirror contorts as the flame jitters about, so that she doesn’t see a single face, but rather the contours of a shifting collection of shadows and patches of skin.

The quality of the darkness behind her in the mirror changes, too, as if there were several gradients of dark, not a single blackness, but many scattered hues, ranging from the utter absence of light to the bluish gray tinge of moonlight, to that suggestion of light which lingers beneath certain kinds of darkness, which is often far brighter than light itself.

Engrossed in the depths of the mirror, she fails to notice the figures forming in the background, shiny and translucent, like blobs of oil floating atop a cauldron of bone broth, from which accusatory fingers unfurl like creeping vines to point at her reflection.

“Whose hands are these?” she wonders. “What do they see in my reflection that I cannot?”

Hraldfar looks for the source of the arms, tries to discover who they belong to, but only sees legions of arms emerging from the stumps of shoulders like maggots writhing out of their pupae. Soon the multiplying limbs fill so much of the mirror she can hardly see her reflection.

A shiver dances down Hraldfar’s left cheek, followed by more on her right, as though spiders were crawling across her face. She lifts her hand to swat them away and bumps into bony stumps of flesh. They are cool to the touch, reminding her of rotting, slime-covered logs.

So suddenly does the air slip from her throat that she notices the lack of oxygen before she's aware of the damp-cold hands gripping her neck. She struggles to pry the writhing fingers, but she can’t fend off the hands that slowly drag her, head first, through the frame of the mirror.

They pull the length of her body through the shifty, darkened frame with measured efficiency, first the braids on the crown of her head, gripped by a swarm of bruised, pale-knuckled claws, then her shoulders and torso, larger than the frame yet methodically yanked with violent, jerking force, then her legs, twisting and buckling from her hips to knees, till the mirror is held in the air by a lone ankle sticking out from the frame. Had anyone been watching, they would have seen the foot give a final quiver, like a death rasp, before being swiftly tugged through. But with Hraldfar gone, there is neither observer nor observed, only the mirror suspended in air for a brief moment before it plummets to the ground and shatters into a thousand pieces.

Her mother hears the crash of glass and metal and runs to the room. Swinging open the door, she can only make out lumps of blankets on top of the bed. Shards of glass pierce the soles of her feet as she reaches out to hold and comfort her daughter, but the bed is empty, the darkness complete, and her screams ring out in the cold silence.

Tyler Gebauer is a translator and writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. His translations have been published in The Southern Review, SORTES, and Packingtown Review, among others. You can read more of his work at: www.tgtranslation.com