Persuasive mirrorRewind the threadWhat appears oldBring once again back
He must have been just a little a child when his mother had taught him that nursery rhyme. Those few verses had found no resistance in his porous memory: he had assimilated them in no time, albeit unconsciously, not yet being able to articulate words. The rhyme had rooted in his mind, and then drowsed, silent, for years.
Along with it, other memories were hidden in the shadows. Secrets whispered by his mother's mouth.Years had passed by, and the child had become a teenager, and a man at last. The mother, now long gone, had remained a strong presence in his life until the very end. A lighthouse casting light through stormy nights, leading him back to a safe harbor.
But that night of twenty years ago, not even his mother had managed to save him. Coming back from a party, the numbness had wrapped him in a tight embrace. The limbs, heavy, had steered the wheel abruptly, projecting the car in the opposite lane. He remembered nothing of what had happened, nothing authentic at least. His memories were nothing but a patchwork of other testimonies: the stories of those who had witnessed him lose control and hit the girl who was walking on the opposite sidewalk. Nothing could be done for her: the impact had shattered her existence. She was only sixteen, and she would never see another sunset.
He had miraculously emerged unharmed from the accident, although evidently shocked. The routine checks carried out by the local authorities had not found traces of drugs; the levels of alcohol were also within the limits permitted by the law. It had been an accident caused by sleepiness. There would be no legal consequences for him, nothing that could help him alleviate his pain.His mother, whose face had been furrowed by the years, had tried for weeks to comfort him. But his agony did not give him rest. While awake, he would spend hours sitting in front of a window, his eyes lost in the front house garden. During the nights, his memory forced him to relive, slowly and with cruel clarity, the last moments of the girl’s life: it fabricated images that scratched his eyes, tormenting them behind the closed eyelids. He saw himself driving his car, looking up just in time to see the girl's smile twisting into a grimace of pain and anger, helpless and crushed by the inevitability of her fate. She would open her mouth to scream and he would fall over and over into the darkness of those jaws.
It had been awaking from one of those nightmares, beaded with sweat and barely holding back the shivers of exhaustion, that he had seen it for the first time on the side bed table. Persuasive mirror. He had picked it up and barely recognized his face in the reflection. Rewind the thread. The handle and the frame were made of silver, finely decorated. The oval shape gave away its oddness, as if something meant to be perfect had in the end gone wrong. On the back, engraved by hand, he had rediscovered the childhood rhyme. What appears old, bring once again back. He had touched the incision with his fingertips and felt something awakening inside. Under heavy veils, what he did not know he possessed was moving in the darkness of his memories. He had tried to fight it, but a primal instinct did not allow him to. He knew he needed what was hidden in the shadows. After all, it was a gift from his mother.
He looked again in the mirror: the lips began to move slowly. Persuasive mirror, rewind the thread, what appears old, bring once again back. With the rhymes, the secrets whispered long before also reemerged. You shall not forget. Salvation can turn into condemnation. The words liberated their ancient power and the mirror once again granted what the man believed to desire. He fell into a deep sleep and when he awoke he found himself a few weeks younger. The car was parked in the driveway, intact, and there it would remain for the day. There would be no party to go to that evening.In the following days he attempted several times to talk to his mother. He wanted to find out if she also knew what had happened. If she also carried that heavy burden. But if she was, she never showed it.
A few days passed by, and finally curiosity prevailed over common sense. After work, he went looking for the girl. He knew her name and where she was living with her family. He waited in the car, along the driveway, until he saw her coming back from school. With relief, he saw that she was doing fine. However, the same could not be said about himself. He felt something wrong growing inside: the germ of an obsession.
Day after day he returned and looked for the girl, to spy on her, to admire the life he had given her back, after having brutally broken it. The belief of being himself the origin of that life, of being responsible for it, kept growing as time passed by.
He never let the girl notice him. He saw her growing up, falling in love, and building a family. He saw her becoming a woman, the mother of a child who filled his parents' days with happiness and hope. He always remained a shadow for her, invisible and unknown.
He never spoke to his mother about the mirror or the nursery rhyme. Questions were never asked, trapped in a web of doubts and fears, until it was too late to ask them. His mother died at dawn, on a cold November day. Age justified her departure. Those questions found a place to rest at last, buried under meters of soil. But the idea that they had died together with his mother was nothing but a comfortable deception. Sitting in the dark on his sofa, he could feel them digging their way out of the wet mud, emerging again on the surface to caress his thoughts with their icy strands. He felt wrapped in them, a heavy blanket that clung to his stomach and neck, leaving him breathless.
Salvation can turn into a curse. A few hours before, as usual, he had passed by the street where the girl lived with her husband and son, now a teenager. A row of cars and people clogged the way. A little further up, firefighters were engaged in a lost battle against the flames that were tearing the building apart from the inside. On the highest floors, people condemned to their fate looked out the windows and balconies shouting their despair and invoking for a rescue that would never come in time. He got out of the car and tried to walk further, but to no avail. He had then returned home and turned on the television to follow the news. The anguish of not knowing what had happened to her oppressed him. The flames continued to flare up, putting the stability of the building at risk. The police had circumscribed an area of ​​over one kilometer and evacuated the inhabitants. No one had been saved from the burning building yet.
Several hours passed before the flames could be tamed. Still, the risk of possible failure in the structure did not allow for a rescue mission. It would have been necessary to wait for the day light, before deciding upon the next course of actions. At last, overwhelmed by drowsiness and frustration, he fell asleep on the couch.
When morning came, it took him some time to clear his mind and focus on what was going on. The flames, those many lives forever lost. The girl. Her family. He turned the television on and the images that came through moved him profoundly. The firefighters had finally managed to enter the building and were recovering the victims. A slow procession of black plastic bags. No survivors. At least twenty people had perished, unable to find a way out. The first findings suggested the fire had been set intentionally.
The following days he could not help but drive every morning to the corner of that road. He had not seen her yet. A few days later, the confirmation had arrived: their names had also joined the gruesome list of those who had died in the accident.On the day of the funeral he had gone to the church, keeping himself apart from the crowd. He kept wondering how much she must have suffered in those last minutes. Had she tried to save her son? Slowly, a doubt began to take shape in his mind: perhaps it would have been better for her to die many years ago. Perhaps bringing her back to life had condemned her to an even more cruel fate. A thousand needles piercing his mind.
The end of the investigation confirmed that the fire had been set intentionally. More pieces of the puzzle had found their place next to each other. The girl's son had long been treated for psychiatric disorders. How could I not know about it? You did not know because you always only cared about her. About her and no one else around you. Some of his classmates had confirmed to the authorities that in several occasions they had heard him saying he could no longer go on with his life. That in one way or another he had to end his pain.

Finally, something had broken inside his mind: he had gone to the living room with a bottle of alcohol and matches. He had spilled the contents of the bottle on the carpet and set it on fire. Before doing so, he had carefully locked the door and windows, and hidden the keys. For his parents there had been no chance of escaping. Both had tried to save him, but the flames had enveloped the room within seconds, swallowing them all. Twenty-three victims in total. Five families partially involved, including few children. And what about him? Should he consider himself another victim of this madness? Or was he rather the secret architect behind it? His salvation had proved ephemeral. His sentence would not be just as lenient. New doubts and new hopes embraced in his mind, dancing through dangerous vortexes. Maybe something could still be done. Maybe everything could still be fixed. Sitting at the kitchen table, he kept turning the mirror in his hands, his lips slightly parted in a whisper. Persuasive mirror...