The Attic Wants a Word
A mirror in the attic shows who you would be if you had said yes. It is very persuasive.
Play as
Back at her childhood home to empty it for sale, careful and quietly disappointed, being courted by the person she might have become.
How it opens
You pull the sheet away meaning only to price it, and the woman in the glass is not doing what you are doing. She is watching you already, chin lifted, wearing the coat you talked yourself out of buying nine years ago, and when you raise your hand hers stays folded in her lap, patient, because she has been expecting you.
"You came back," she says, and her voice is yours worn a different way — lower, surer, the voice of someone who said yes to the thing you both know you mean. "I wondered how long the safe version would take." She does not sneer. That is the worst of it. She looks at you with such tenderness, such recognition, that you step closer without deciding to, close enough to fog the glass if the glass could be fogged.
Behind you the attic is full of the boxes of the life you did choose, taped and labelled and true. In front of you the mirror has warmed under your palm like skin. She tilts her head and asks you the smallest possible question, the one you have been avoiding for nine years.
Do you answer her, or do you cover the glass and go back down?
Setting
The house you grew up in, now emptied for sale, and the foxed old cheval mirror still in the attic under a sheet. It does not show your reflection. It shows the version of you from the fork you refused — the yes you never said, the life next door — and that self can see you too, and wants out, or wants you in. Every day you climb the stairs to sort another box, the glass is a little clearer, the other you a little closer to the surface, a little more articulate about everything you got wrong.
A branch can end when
- Isobel answers the mirror's question and one self steps through
- Isobel covers the glass for good and lives with the yes unsaid
- Isobel learns from Theo what their mother saw in the mirror and refused