Marlaina Cockcroft’s short stories have been published in Daily Science Fiction, Mythic, Factor Four, Dark Matter Magazine, JUDITH, and Luna Station Quarterly, as well as the anthologies Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic; Stories We Tell After Midnight, Volume Three; Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging, Volume Silver; Summer of Sci-fi & Fantasy: Volume Two; Fear Forge: Fall Quarter 2023; and Dragon’s Hoard 3.
Her Mother, Reflected
by Marlaina Cockcroft
Maggie hadn’t expected to get into her mother’s house easily, because she didn’t have a key, and for other reasons. She’d knocked, then pounded on the mahogany-style door splotched by sun damage, calling out, “Mom, that’s enough. You have to let me in.” The screen door, having finally rusted off its hinges, lay angled on the porch next to her. The magazines piled over the porch, around and on top of the door, left her little room to stand. “I swear I’m here to help you.” Because social services won’t, she thought sourly. Someone had to clean up this mess.
Ignoring the stares from the front window next door—they’d called her about the smell, shouldn’t they be grateful she’d showed up?—she hurried back down the driveway, opened the trunk of her car, and hauled out the tire iron. She used it to bash the doorknob a few times, then wiggled it into the doorjamb and pushed. The door was already half-busted from when Maggie had called the police on Vera, begging them to make sure she was still alive in there. The officers had forced the door open and found Vera on the living room couch, watching TV, barely visible behind the piles of things keeping her company. Yes, she was fine. No, she didn’t need help. She told the social services worker who showed up later the same thing. “She refused services, we’re sorry, there’s nothing we can do, ma’am,” they told Maggie on the phone. And Vera really started shutting Maggie out.
One more shove and the door gave up, splintering inward. Maggie started inside but the smell pushed her back. It was old food, curdled dust, mildew on top of mold, the smell of breaking down and rotting. A garbage dump, well preserved. She gulped a breath, then pulled a leftover KN95 face mask out of her jeans pocket. For once, she was glad to have it.
Mask on, with her sensibly short brown hair twisted up out of the way, she tried again. She got all the way inside, tripped over a box, landed on five more boxes. Twenty or thirty other boxes loomed around her, sent from various shopping sites, all unopened. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, watering from the smell and the heat, she saw even more: stacks of magazines, shopping bags full of flowy shirts on plastic hangers, piles of paperbacks stamped DISCARD along the top, queen sheet sets still in the packaging. Cracked-open bottles of essential oils spilling their contents down piles of papers. Here and there, something personal: a photo, a drawing Maggie had made in grade school. But mostly it was stuff Vera had bought, stuff she’d saved from the trash, stuff she’d sworn she needed but had never used.
It was an ocean, rising to the ceiling, pinning Maggie in place. She couldn’t even see the couch, let along the entrance to the kitchen behind it. There was an indentation in the piles of stuff, just where the doorway to the kitchen should’ve been, as though Vera had cleared a path and it had slumped inward. An avalanche of boxes and bags and bottles and wrappers, resettling to hide the rest of the living room floor. Vera hadn’t let Maggie inside in so long; she didn’t know it had gotten this bad. She remembered how annoyed the officer had sounded when he returned her call—ma’am, she’s fine, there’s nothing else we can do—and how tonelessly the social worker had told her they wouldn’t be stepping in. As though Maggie were bothering them both. If Maggie wanted to find her mother, she’d have to dig through the stuff.
“Mom,” Maggie croaked, then louder: “Mom.” Silence, broken only by Maggie coughing out the foul air. Which was worse—if Vera were in here, or if she weren’t?
Maggie was dimly aware she was crying. She couldn’t answer the question yet, not yet. Instead she pushed herself upright. She needed supplies.
*
There was a store a few streets away. Maggie got in and out of it as quickly as possible, conscious that the smell was clinging to her clothes and hair, trying to ignore how the teenage cashier wrinkled his nose as he rang her up. Armed with ten big boxes of trash bags, rubber gloves, and a determined scowl, Maggie attacked the mess. She tried to examine the things first, to see if they were worth saving, but seven trash bags later, she didn’t care. Fill the bag, toss it out front, fill another bag, yell for Vera again, have a coughing fit, fill another bag, and why wasn’t she making a dent? How was there still so much stuff? Maggie tried to fill the bags more quickly, even though her back already ached and her fingers were curling into claws. Sweat darkened her T-shirt. She tried not to think about how much money Vera had spent on all this stuff, and how many times Vera had asked for help paying the electric bill. When Vera was still talking to her, anyway.
That was one thought too many. Maggie made a strangled, sobbing noise, picking up the nearest thing (a toaster, still in its box) and flinging it at where the wall should be. She watched it settle into another pile, not even giving her the satisfaction of a crash. But then she saw a glint of light. A reflected wink.
No sunlight in here, so what was that? She waded closer, pushing things aside until she could see the wall. The mirror was a garish oversized thing in a greening brass frame. One of Vera’s online finds, no doubt. How had she gotten this on the wall? Why wasn’t it dusty or moldy?
The mirror gleamed at her. Maggie leaned forward with a gasp. She should’ve seen her face, thin and dust-smudged, with angry reddened eyes peering over the mask. Instead she saw the living room. Clean. Bright. No mounds of stuff.
“No,” Maggie said. “Absolutely not.” But the scene didn’t change. Maggie tapped the thick frame, then the glass. Both solid. The peach-colored walls, green-and-white flowered couch, wooden coffee table gleamed in the sunlight.
“You’re a liar,” Maggie told the mirror, because this room had never existed. When she was in grade school, the coffee table had held all the laundry that never got folded away. In high school—after her father had left—the piles of magazines began to sprout from the carpet. Articles she needed, Vera said, but she never cut them out. She also never got around to reading them. But she did expand the piles to the kitchen, the den, the bathroom. Maggie spent her high school years stepping over the “to sort” clothes covering her bedroom floor, which never seemed to get sorted. When Maggie moved out for college, the good-deals moved in: socks, shampoo, pajama sets, alarm clocks, paper towels, blenders, toasters, popcorn tins that Vera had to buy because they were on sale or she had a coupon. Essential oil kits that Vera was really, truly going to learn how to use, for ambience or feng shui or aromatherapy, Maggie couldn’t remember. Books that Vera had always meant to read. Gardening gloves and pots and bags of soil, for when Vera was ready to take up gardening. The day she graduated from college, Maggie kicked through the stuff up to her room, threw the few things she wanted into a trash bag, and left for her new apartment. Wringing her hands, her mother watched her go.
The other rooms in the house, the ones Maggie hadn’t seen in years, were probably worse. Impassable, walled off. That perfect room in the mirror was mocking her.
A gulping, sobbing breath broke out of her and she grabbed the box poking into her shoulder—whatever was inside was already shattered, judging from the crunched-glass sounds—and lobbed it at the mirror. No crash this time, either. It sailed right through. On the other side, a delicate glass candy dish appeared on the gleaming coffee table.
Maggie gawked at the mirror-living room. No box, just the candy dish. Either the air in the house was clogging her brain, or that mirror was some kind of doorway. She stopped to cough again, then threw another box at it, a long rectangular one. A framed flower picture appeared on the wall above the couch.
Magic portal? Entrance to an alternate universe where her mother wasn’t a hoarder? Maggie didn’t know and, for now, she didn’t care. If she’d had this living room growing up, she wouldn’t have been too embarrassed to bring friends over. She and Vera could have cozied up on the couch and talked, like other mothers and daughters. Maybe she couldn’t fix the real-life room, but she had an overpowering urge to make this one look nice. Just for a few minutes, while she waited for her mother. Vera would be so pleased, when she came back.
She tossed a few more things through—figurines, pictures, even some throw pillows she found. On her side, the pillows were dotted in little mold curlicues. Through the mirror, they were perfectly white with yellow diamonds. Watching the things become clean and new was all Maggie wanted, all she would ever want, even as the cresting waves of stuff pressed in on her and bits of flotsam, dislodged by her redecorating, pelted her head and shoulders. She pulled the next picture out of the muck and gasped.
Not a picture, a photo. The black plastic frame was split at one corner. She and Vera stood together outside an Italian restaurant. Vera’s birthday, two years ago, the last time Vera had left the house to do anything with her. In the photo, they both wore pretty tops and bright lipstick. They were both smiling.
Maggie clutched the photo, remembering. She’d read the pamphlet from the hoarding support group. She’d practiced what to say with her therapist. She was going to get through to Vera this time. But it went badly. “You don’t get to judge me. I am fine. I don’t need your help,” Vera had said, tossing her napkin on the table. Her round cheeks were flushed.
Maggie had tried to keep her voice steady, but it wobbled as she said, “You were climbing over your stuff to get to the front door. I heard you. Please just come with me to talk to someone.”
“You can’t have my things,” Vera had snarled, as though Maggie had suggested removing a leg or an eye. “Nobody touches my things.” She’d flipped her graying black hair over her shoulders and left the restaurant, her face set in a silent rage. Maggie had sat there for a long time after, wilting under the stares of the other diners, until she felt strong enough to leave.
After that, whatever Vera did for meals, it didn’t include Maggie. After the time Maggie called the police—her last-resort solution—Vera’s phone went right to voicemail. No matter how hard Maggie pounded, Vera wouldn’t answer the door.
“I just wanted to help you,” Maggie told the photo. “So you didn’t live like this.” Crack. She unsqueezed her fingers. The cheap frame pieces slipped from her hands and disappeared into the stuff.
She let out a ragged breath. That was all right. The mirror could fix it. The perfect room needed a nice family photo. Maggie held it up to the glass and gently pushed it through.
The glass caught her hand, tugged on it, wound around her arm like a whirlpool. She blinked as the light from the mirror-room brightened.
She was in the room. So was Vera.
They were wearing the clothes from the photo—Vera in a drapey blue shirt and jeans, Maggie in black leggings and red tunic. Maggie’s hair had been longer then, and the weight of it settled around her shoulders. “Maggie?” Vera said. Her voice was full of wonder.
“Mom! I’ve been so worried—” Maggie made herself stop. No fighting. Her therapist kept telling her, no fighting. “What is this place?”
Vera beamed. “It’s my perfect room. Isn’t it nice? This is what I always wanted the living room to look like.” Her smile faltered. “Did you add things? You moved my things. You know you can’t touch my things!” She bustled over to the couch and moved each pillow over a few inches. She did the same to the figurines on the lacquered black end table. Her quick, panicked breaths filled the room. “I need,” she said, froze a minute, tried again. “I need to fix this. Where is my computer? I need to check the sales.”
Maggie recognized the signs: her mother needed to buy things. There was no computer on this side of the mirror, which meant it was still in the little den on the other side, buried under the depths. Maggie glanced past the end of the couch to where the den would have been, but the entranceway was filled with a shivering, sliding darkness. What would happen if Maggie threw something into the darkness? If she walked into it? She shuddered.
Vera was still fretting. Maggie forced her eyes off the darkness. As gently as she could, she asked, “Where did you get the mirror?”
The question distracted Vera into answering. “Oh, the mirror was a good deal, that’s all. I found it online. The seller said it would show me my heart’s desire, but I thought that was just salesman talk, you know?”
Maggie stared at the cheery peach room. “This was your heart’s desire? Nothing else?” She glanced behind them and saw herself, the one in a dirty, dusty T-shirt and a black mask, looking at them. The other Maggie was frozen in place, hand perpetually reaching for the mirror. “Your heart’s desire,” she repeated. “It didn’t have anything to do with me?”
“I already had you,” Vera protested. Her hands curled upward, twisting into each other. Maggie recognized the gesture. Vera did this whenever Maggie suggested organizing her things, hiring a cleanout crew, talking to a therapist. Usually the next step was yelling, leaving the restaurant, refusing to answer the door. This time, though, Vera kept twisting. “At least I thought I had you. We haven’t spoken much, have we? I’ve missed you.”
A thousand angry thoughts jostled Maggie’s mind, but she wrapped her arms around herself and willed the thoughts away. No fighting. Not when Vera seemed paler, less there. Faded like an old photo.
Maggie shivered. What had she seen when she looked into the mirror? Wasn’t this clean room her heart’s desire, too? She was just as broken as her mother, and she hated the mirror for showing her that.
She took a deep breath. No rancid air here, but also no aroma from the crystal bowl of potpourri on the coffee table. No smells at all. “I missed you too,” Maggie said, reaching for her mother’s hands. She could barely feel them. “You’ve never been in this room before, have you?”
“Oh no, I didn’t even know I could do this.” Vera glanced around again. “I used to just sit and look at it.”
Maggie squeezed Vera’s hands, trying to force them into solidity. Vera kept smiling, no reaction at all. “Mom. This is important. Where were you before you were in here?”
Vera hesitated. “I was—I was looking at the room. No, that’s not right. I was hungry, so I left the mirror to get something from the kitchen.” Her eyes widened. “Something happened in the kitchen.”
Maggie remembered the filled-up entrance to the kitchen, the dips and whorls in the piles where a path might have been. The utter silence in the house, broken only by her own voice. She nodded, blinking the tears away. “It’s OK. I’ll get some help and I’ll find you.”
“Thank you,” Vera whispered. Maggie hugged her. It was like hugging a soap bubble, or a gust of wind. Together they turned and looked at the other Maggie.
“You look so sad now,” Vera said. “Too thin. You’re not eating enough.”
“I know,” Maggie said.
Vera said, “Will you take care of my things?” Her voice was rough, almost angry, but her eyes pleaded.
Maggie couldn’t lie to her. But she couldn’t tell her the truth. Did Vera need to know Maggie would be hiring a cleanout service? Renting Dumpsters? After a long moment, Maggie shut her eyes and said, “I love you, Mom.”
She waited for the angry words to fall. But all Vera said was, “I love you too, sweetheart.”
Maggie risked one last look at her mother as she reached for her other self. Vera smiled. Maggie managed to smile back as her hand touched the glass.
She blinked. She was standing in front of the mirror, holding a photo in a broken frame. Her eyes watered as the stench hit her again.
Maggie was so tired. Emptiness filled her up, took all available space.
She hunted around for a sheet set, pulled the fitted sheet from the packaging, and draped it over the mirror. Maybe it couldn’t do its magic, covered? Couldn’t mock her sad little heart’s desire. Maggie dug one-handed behind her till she found an iron, one of several she’d seen among the piles. She yanked it free, removed it from the box, smashed it into the mirror, over and over. Shards dropped from behind the sheet. She sighed, or sobbed, or both, then picked up a small shard and carefully slipped it into her jeans pocket.
Her eyes on the wrecked kitchen, Maggie pulled her phone from her pocket and asked the police to help get her mother out.
Copyright 2025 by Marlaina Cockcroft