The Mirror That Answers
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Mirror That Answers.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Plaster has fallen in sheets. An ornate mirror stays on the far wall, glass cracked like a spiderweb, a round hole at the centre. The hole is darker than the cracks that feed it. A woman stands before it in a coat grey with dust. The room in the glass is the same room, and her face sits further back than the wall allows. Fallen plaster on the real floor has a twin in the glass, and the twin lies a little farther from her shoes than the real plaster does.
She raises a hand. The reflection's hand rises a half-second late. She holds the hand up. The glass holds its copy late, and the lateness does not shrink while she waits. She lowers hers. The glass follows, late again. She lifts one finger. The delay holds. She lifts a second finger. The same half-second remains, no better and no worse. The face further on is not only copying her. Its mouth is already open. Dust ticks off the ceiling onto her shoulder and, after the same half-second, onto the shoulder in the glass.
She says one short word. The reflection answers with a word she has not reached yet, and then her own mouth catches up. The two sounds overlap and finish. She does not say a second word. She puts her fingertips to the hole. The glass is cold at the crack and empty at the centre. From the far side of the crack the reflection's hand is already through, in her air, arriving before she finishes the reach. The fingers in her air are dusty. They do not touch her. They occupy the space her hand was going to use.
She stops her reach. The hand from the glass does not withdraw. Dust from the ruined ceiling settles on her sleeve and, a half-second later, on the sleeve in the glass. Then the dust on the glass sleeve lifts again, a small reverse that follows the late settling, while the dust on her own sleeve stays. The hole at the centre stays open, blacker than the crack around it. A flake of plaster at the mirror's upper corner lets go, strikes the raised fingers in her air, and falls through them as if they were only the lateness of a hand.
She drops her arm. In the glass the hand is still raised. The hand that came through the hole remains in her air, empty, and does not complete a greeting. A thin sift of plaster falls through the hole and does not stop. It gathers on the floor beneath the mirror in a pale cone, and the cone in the glass is not there. The delay stays in every small motion left to the room. Her coat does not move. The raised hand in the glass does not tire. The cone on the floor grows by a grain and then by another grain, and the growth does not teach the glass to match it.
The sift continues, and the hole gives no sign of closing around it.