Published 'Juju' 1999

The reflection in the mirror turned her stomach. There was a scrap of paper which seemed to be stuck on the glass, as if she could reach out and peel it off, but when she tried, she felt her fingernails clinking on the hard surface. Tantalisingly beyond reach.

Seeing that scrap of paper had initially turned her stomach because of what was written on it. Even in backward mirror-script, she could sense its message.

"What smatter?" asked Claude as he came into the bathroom. He was a stolid individual -  a fireman of the first water, with brylcreemed hair. Their marriage had indeed been a series of fire-fighting. The odd burst of flame from a once moribund fire in the old days' coal-grate. The sudden ignition of a garden bonfire after hope had been given up of it ever catching. The chimney fire streaming smoke and setting all the local kids a-goggling as they ceased, momentarily, their game of hopscotch or hide-and-seek. The conflagration that beset a local factory: a memory from childhood that would remain beyond the reach even of the final fire of all: a seething furnace which nothing at all could douse. Their marriage and more.

"Nothing Claude -  I just thought I saw something in the mirror."

Although retired, Claude retained a deep respect for anything untoward. He was the man for any emergency. His lack of imagination prevented him being scared of anything. He had never had a thought beyond the straightforward. Sanity was his watchword.

When he approached the mirror, to check it out, he was devastated, therefore, to find only the reflection of a woman's face -  blushing to the roots.

Somehow, he sensed, in the aftermath of the crisis, that he would never again have the stomach for a fire. It suddenly hit home that his wife had been cremated only yesterday; she'd not even left a suicide note -  presumably.

And more.