Mirrors always lied. Sundha Dali was convinced of that more than she was convinced of anything in her life. They showed her what she didn’t want to see, transported her where she didn’t want to be, distorted her entire life. When she moved into an apartment of her own, she painted half the bathroom mirror black, only to realize that the black paint created a double distortion. The next day, she painted the whole mirror black, a hole into another dimension she could never quite crawl through.

                When she was growing up, her parents took her to a carnival and into a House of Mirrors. She completely lost herself among the myriads of images and reflections. She screamed until her parents took her back out. After that, she only allowed herself a small hand held round pocket mirror for checking her lips and her eyes and her hair without having to look at herself.

A man took her to his apartment and led her to his bedroom. The room consisted of nothing but mirrors, all four walls, the ceiling, the floor. She took one look at it and just wanted to scream and run, but she really liked the man and didn’t want to disappoint him. When she looked down at her feet, she felt as if she were going to fall into a bottomless abyss, reflected a thousandfold without end. But then the man took her into his arms and she was able to lean against him and close her eyes.

                Somewhere a man was playing chess with a mirror. Nobody won, nobody lost, only the mirror. She might have known.

                She kept her eyes closed until the man took off her clothes, put her on the bed, and climbed after her. When he was on top of her and his erection inside of her, she allowed herself a peak out of one eye. She saw her legs wrapped around the man’s hips, her arms around his neck, his buttocks moving up and down, and felt a strangely unexpected arousal rush through her body. She didn’t see any other parts of her body, shielded as she was by the bulk of the man on top of her. Perhaps it wasn’t always bad.

                Identical female twins were playing a fugue on identical violins, oblivious to the obvious mirror image of their performance. Sundha always knew that it would eventually come to that, one of the uncertainties of her life.

                The man withdrew from her and rolled off her, pulling her after him on top of him. She quickly closed her one eye. She straddled the man and impaled herself slowly on his erection to favor the delicious penetration of her body. She began moving up and down on him and opened her eyes again to see for herself what she was doing. She had never watched herself before, but there was something about the mirrored room that made her curious and more adventuresome.

                To her surprise, she found that she was quite proud of how she looked in the mirror. She sat straight up, pushed out her breasts, and let them bounce above the man. But then she suddenly saw herself mirrored a thousand times, with both mirrors ganging up on her, and she felt a strange dizziness flood over her. She quickly closed her eyes, then bent over the man until her breasts were in his hands and her head buried in his neck and she didn’t have to look anymore. She didn’t know what possessed her to even try.

In a park nearby, a juggler was practicing his act between two full-length mirrors. They reflected him and his act a thousand times until he became lost in a blurry distance. He didn’t seem to mind, although that particular pair of mirrors clearly won. A strange darkness settled over the park. She should have known.

                The man lifted her off himself and rolled her over on her back. She kept her eyes tightly shut while the man played skillfully with her breasts and she became more and more aroused. When he squeezed her nipples between his fingers, she almost cried out with the ecstasy of his caresses. She quickly opened one eye and glanced at her breasts in his hands, making sure she avoided looking in the mirror on the ceiling above her. Her world would have been irreparably turned upside down.

                She gasped when he moved down along her body, pulled her thighs part, and buried himself between her legs. She felt tempted to look up at the mirror to watch him, but she was afraid of what would happen to her whole self. Instead, she concentrated on the delicious feeling of his tongue on her wet labia, the sucking noises as he lapped up her abundant juices, and she cried out with passion and joy. It didn’t matter that she didn’t see what he was doing; the delirious sensation of his ministrations was quite enough.

                She remembered the mirror surface of a calm lake where her parents took her sailing when she was a bit older. She saw the sails above her and below her in the water, saw herself upside down in the water, almost lost her balance. She could have drowned. Her parents merely laughed, told her she couldn’t possibly have drowned.

                Perhaps it was that assertion from so long ago that made her want to look into the abyss and test its persistence. Perhaps it was just a whim born suddenly of her ecstatic arousal. Or perhaps she just wanted to dare herself. She hadn’t been completely surrounded by mirrors since that childhood incident. Perhaps she would be able to lose herself on one side and find herself again on the other, if she only tried, just once. Whatever the reason, and she didn’t try to figure out which was which, she opened both her eyes with the man still feasting at her cornucopia of tastes and smells and looked up at the ceiling.

                At first, she just saw her naked body reflected by the shiny glass. She looked better, being in bed with a man, than she had expected. The man looked titillating between her legs, licking and sucking her as if his life depended on it and she was shivering with delight. But then she turned her head to watch herself in the side wall and was immediately caught up again in the myriad reflections the two opposite mirror walls produced. She screamed, that time, and jumped off the bed, much to the man’s disappointment and chagrin, and went to hide in one of the corners where she didn’t have to see herself. The man tried to appease her and get her back into bed with him, but she was determined not to move again.

                The man finally turned off all the lights, pulled her out of her corner, and brought her back to bed. Even though it was pitch black in the room, Sundha kept her eyes tightly closed when the man climbed back on top of her and brought both of them, despite her dread and apprehension, to satisfactory orgasms and conclusions to the evening. They curled up beside each other and drifted off to sleep.

                Somewhere a House of Mirrors burst into a flood of multicolored lights bouncing off all the mirrors, like a sky full of fireworks, and yet the mirrors didn’t swallow anything or change anything. Sundha stirred fitfully in her sleep, then sank back into her nocturnal world of restless dreams.