Ending — Shatter the Glass
Chorus of screams • Rain washing blood • A cracked but honest face
The mirror shatters. Glass erupts like breath, slicing light into a thousand tiny suns. Dio stumbles back, hands bleeding, the scream that leaves him half human, half echo. He runs through the ringing doorbell, into the rain, across a city that suddenly feels too awake. The sound of breaking follows him, a chorus that doesn’t end when he stops.
For nights afterward, he dreams of the glass breathing. Of faces forming in puddles, in chrome, in the dark gloss of his own eyes.
Weeks pass. The city forgets the storm, but not him. He starts seeing his drawings around the city again—on walls he doesn’t remember touching, on fogged bus windows, scratched faintly into bathroom stalls. The lines look like his. The shapes feel like his. But he can’t recall making any of them.
Sometimes he wonders if they were stolen.
Or if they were never really his to begin with.
People whisper that reflections are acting strange. That if you listen between subway cars, you can hear something breathing in the static.
Dio avoids anything that shines. But the city doesn’t. It remembers.
One night, he passes the pawnshop again. The red OPEN sign still flickers, though the door has been nailed shut since the fire. The air smells of metal and rain. Through the darkened glass, he sees them—a woman in a white dress, standing beside an older man. Her head tilts, as if listening. Her reflection doesn’t ripple when the rain runs down the window.
Neighbors say the shop isn’t empty. That the new tenant is a quiet, kind gentleman, often visited by a pale young woman who never speaks. They say she smiles like she knows things best left forgotten.
Dio doesn’t go closer. He only watches from across the street until the light above the door flutters and dies.
Then, faintly, the window breathes. Just once.
He turns away, heading home as the rain begins to wash the glass clean. But in the dark of a passing storefront, he catches a glimpse—
his reflection, almost him, but not.
The jaw too sharp. The eyes too patient. The mouth forming words he cannot hear.
It raises a hand, palm pressed to the glass, and its voice arrives a heartbeat late, threading through the static of a passing train:
“You can still say yes.”
Dio walks faster. The reflection follows in every pane—pleading, waiting, smiling with a mouth learning his shape.
And behind him, deep in the pawnshop’s black window, a dozen shards tilt toward the street,
bright as teeth,
hungry for something else he hasn’t realized he lost.