Chapter 2 — Reflections
Neon pawnshop • No clerk • A mirror that tilts its head first
Down 9th, the rain thins into mist, and the trail ends at a pawnshop with a flickering red OPEN sign that hums like a dying nerve. The window display is a graveyard of forgotten things: cracked clocks, chipped crucifixes, tangled necklaces, and instruments with strings gone slack. Everything inside glows faintly under the neon, caught between being sold and being mourned.
When Dio pushes through the door, a bell rings once and refuses to stop. The sound stretches and folds into the air like something alive. The room smells of dust, stale cigarettes, and the metallic bite of rainwater pooling under his boots. Light comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, the kind that reveals too much and explains nothing.
He’s been here before. The realization comes slow, like something rising from deep water.
Years ago, his mother brought him to this same pawnshop, before the red sign, before the dust turned to history. She had a bracelet in her hand and a lie on her lips, telling him they would come back for it soon. He remembered watching her reflection in the counter glass as she spoke to the man behind it, her smile too bright, her eyes never meeting his.
Later that night, she’d sat across from him at the kitchen table while he ate, pretending not to be hungry. He’d pushed food toward her; she’d laughed softly and said she’d already eaten. He’d believed her, though her stomach gave her away.
When they had money again, she stopped pretending. For a while, the table was full. But even then, he could still see that hunger in her face, the one no meal ever fixed.
The mirror had been there then too, smaller maybe, but alive in the same way. He’d seen his own face inside it, rounder, softer, and behind him her shadow, holding his shoulders like a promise. When they left, she’d squeezed his hand too hard. Outside, she told him every trade costs more than you think.
Now, standing in the same stale air, Dio wonders if she ever came back for that bracelet, or if she traded something else instead.
Behind the counter, an antique mirror leans against the wall, taller than a man and older than sense. Its surface ripples faintly, as if it’s breathing. Shelves around it sag with relics: a violin missing one string, a jar of teeth labeled assorted, a tarnished frame that hums faintly with the echo of a photograph long gone.
A voice moves through the air, low and close.
“You can trade anything if you know what it’s worth.”
It isn’t a question.
Dio looks into the mirror. His reflection grins before he does. It raises a familiar sketchbook from the other side, the edges blackened and curling. When it fans the pages open, he sees every secret thing he’s ever drawn: faces that shouldn’t exist, places that never did, the ache he’s spent his life trying to exorcise.
The reflection’s eyes glow faintly, like embers caught in rain.
“I can give you what you’ve always wanted,” it murmurs. “Fame. Money. No more hunger. No more pain. Your art will move worlds. They’ll worship you for it.”
Dio’s breath catches. He thinks of his mother’s hands, red and raw, her eyes hollowed out by work and worry. The voice slides closer, silky and certain.
“You could give her peace. A real home. She’d never have to lie again.”
He steps closer. The surface ripples, glass turning liquid, light bending inward. “And what do you want?” he whispers.
The grin widens, too wide, too knowing. “Only what you don’t need anymore. The part of you that hurts.”