My house has only one mirror. It didn't use to be that way, it used to have many mirrors. But I live in a neighborhood of exaggerated numbers. Some time ago news stations starting coming about to cover an explosion and the number of victims. Day by day, they started coming about less and less to cover them. We learned why later: they didn't like fractions. They loved rounding up the numbers of victims.
I always wondered how come the numbers of victims of an explosion are so perfect, ten, twenty, thirty, five hundred, a thousand. News stations, much like history books, love rounded-up numbers. So we learned the game and started giving them what they wanted so we don't remain forgotten. So when the thrift market exploded and seventeen people died, we gave them twenty. When fifty-seven people died in the school food poisoning attack, we gave them sixty.
That's how our neighborhood became known as the neighborhood of the exaggerated three. The three that made our newsworthy to be a main feature in the six o'clock news show. The extra three earned the local political analyst his wage as he wanted justice for each person who died. The extra three gave his demands much echo and credibility. That news article had such charm to it as it told the detailed story of the ten people who died.
I returned home after surviving another attack and saw that I was one of the exaggerated three who died. And for so long I was that exaggerated three, the sad three, the suicidal three who died next to my sister in the report about mental illness, the lonely three who died next to my parents in the segment about collateral damage to political assassinations. I turned off the T.V and was at the exaggerated three in the darkness that's left. I went to sleep, leaving that scared three behind.
As I was trying to sleep I started hearing sounds from the mirror downstairs. Sounded like muffled screams, screams that were subtracted after a gun was held. I ignored them like I do every night in the beginning. But the sounds of the baby crying three I left locked in a box downstairs started getting louder and louder. I couldn't ignore it, not tonight.
I walked downstairs and in the last remaining mirror in the house I saw him, or I saw it. It was sitting right in front of me, something I didn't know. Staring at me with eyes that looked a lot like mine, giving me that look that only meant one thing: it is hungry. I looked around the house and found nothing that could satisfy it, so I offered it my leg to eat, then I offered him the other one and sat there as I watched him eat it.
After it finished, it gave me that look, it didn't like the taste of my steps. I looked at it with a humiliated look on my face and I started to apologetically justify. I explained that the reason my steps tasted so bitter is that there never was a journey and that I was merely walking along with the blue, a walk that started from a bruise that ended in the sky.
After that exchange, I crawled back upstairs to sleep. The next I got up in the morning and I joined the other threes. Just a three that gets up in the morning and goes to work.
