Short Story Contest Winner: “Mirror” by Christian Foley

Who was he? Who was I?  

His lie didn’t break me. I’d been lied to all my life.  

Father’s forgetfulness was the only thing I knew about him. That and his bullshit excuses. And  that was more than he knew of me, other than my birthday which was sometime in March. He  still called from time to time, weeks, months, years apart. He will be home soon. Yea. 

But she told me over and over again that my father was a fuck who didn’t give a fuck. About me  or about her. Just forget him. Forget him? What the fuck did that mean? My need for my father  was not a rational decision or a conscious choice made due to the feelings I had for him. My  need for him- and I say need because you cannot love that which you do not know- was based  solely on over 2000 years of human evolution. It is a human truth, like it or not. Now I’m not  saying I needed my father in some sort of “I’m gonna fuck every guy I see when I’m older” way. I just needed him in the way that… I was supposed to have you and I was supposed to love you  and you were supposed to fucking be here. Because you should have been here. And who knows,  maybe I am fucked up for your being gone. Maybe every guy I ever fucked had been due to  some deeply rooted self-loathing that I am not even aware of. Maybe that’s how I met him.  

“My father,” she told me. Yea, like her love was so impassioned. She did nothing to prepare me  to be a woman. She was a liar, my mother. To look into a mirror with her at your back was to see  the fat on your sides. The ugliness that was rooted in my heart spread all through my pores, took  

hold of my body and shaped it. She whispered those sharp malignant truths into my ear, that no  man would ever pick up such trash. Maybe that’s how I met him.  

He wasn’t the worst guy I’d ever met. Not by a long shot. He was funny. That was the first thing  that attracted me to him. And he cared, he genuinely cared. Each time I thought that he would  break my heart and leave me like my father or scar me like my mother, he didn’t. So why do I  hate him so? Maybe it was the day of or the night when. No, there was no singular word or day,  but rather every word followed by every day. The closer we became the more I loved and hated  him. Because he was a mirror, cracked and broken like me. A reflection. Showing me that it  wasn’t the lies we were told by the world that hurt us most, it was the lies we told ourselves. And  I hate him for showing me that.