Free Theater Macabre by Kealan Patrick Burke

place been at the front of the house where it belonged, smiling faces stared back at him. Friends, wedding pictures, deceased relatives…all grinning from within their frames. All their positions switched. One of them showed Carla’s dear departed Aunt Grace, beaming as an adolescent version of Carla and her brother Don sat on the old lady’s lap. In the wrong places. Another showed Nick’s father, scowling in jest at having his picture taken. The scar he’d earned from a fistfight had traded eyebrows.
    Nick wandered ghostlike through the house, numb from the stress of having to register nothing in its rightful place. He was suddenly living in a mirror image world in which he was the only thing still adhering to natural law. Everything else had somehow been reversed .
    He found a newspaper, the words backwards.
    Paintings on the walls had been touched up to reflect the images as they might be seen in a mirror.
    The control panel for the alarm, the television, the stereo…all on the wrong side.
    Blind fear clambered over his shoulders and draped black wings across his chest. He began to tremble, and then: Carla!
    Of course. He’d call her at work, she’d tell him to go back to bed and sleep it off and that’s just what he’d do. In this case at least, he’d be willing to accept any suggestions she might have to offer.
    But when he reached the phone, he realized he should have guessed that the numbers would not be in their proper places. The top left hand corner was a backward three. Resisting the urge to shatter the phone against the wall, he drew a deep breath and looked again at the numbers. Slowly, he dialed the number of his wife’s office.
    After the third ring, a receptionist answered.
    When she began to speak, Nick screamed.
     
     
    *
     
     
    An hour later, he stumbled to the bathroom mirror and stood just out of sight of his reflection in dread of what he might see in it. After all, he concluded, if the world had been reversed, then wouldn’t the people have been changed too? What if the human alteration had been something far worse than just a sweep of hair appearing on the wrong side, or a mole switching cheeks? What if the reversal occurred inside too? Or worse, perhaps the inside had become the outside.
    Trembling violently, he closed his eyes and braced his hands against the cold porcelain of the sink. His breath came in ragged gasps, the sound of it unsettling him further. It did not sound human. Animal perhaps.
    Or prey.
    When at last he opened his eyes, he saw to his overwhelming relief that his reflection showed what it was supposed to. A little paler and more terrified looking than he had ever seen it perhaps, but it was Nick Lewis, with everything as it should be. Slightly crooked teeth, dark hair, dark eyes – not a face he had ever been too impressed with, but he loved the sight of it now. Strange relocating bathroom aside, it made him feel better to know he hadn’t undergone some bizarre transfiguration while he’d slept. Unlike the rest of the world. But soon, that bade another question. Why hadn’t he been changed? The woman on the phone certainly had, unless it had been a recording. No. It hadn’t. He’d known the voice – Sheryl, the receptionist at Carla’s office. He’d spoken to her a thousand times.
    Thoughts of bizarre science experiments and meteors flashed through his head. He knew it was all ridiculously far-fetched, but awakening to a mirror-image world had seriously skewed his idea of what ‘far-fetched’ entailed anymore.
    And then he remembered the storm, the peculiar red lightning. He still wasn’t sure if he had dreamed it or not, but he needed something, anything to hang this insanity from.
    But what kind of a storm could alter the fabric of reality? It was an impossible train of thought and one he was desperate to dismiss, and yet it wouldn’t leave him, instead trailing him like a hungry dog as he wandered through an alien house.
    He wanted to call Bill, to