The Heirloom

It’s bring a family heirloom to school day and my bag is empty. I could pretend that I haven’t inherited anything but that’s not the truth. 

On my chest of drawers at home sits a compact mirror. The outside is pale pink like a rose, with white daisies painted across it. When I flick open the latch I am suddenly on the inside, brown eyes peering through the glass portal. If the mirror-me is from another place, then I don’t want to go there; she looks just as tired as I do. 

The compact mirror was my birthright, passed down by my mum and given to her by her own mother, a binding thread between my ancestors like a daisy chain. Every woman in my family has had this object, but like laughter or a dance, it’s never the same twice. It’s malleable and morphs, transforming into something specific for each person. 

For my mum, it didn’t look like a compact mirror. Instead, it was a blanket her mother knitted. Every fibre infused with my grandmother’s scent, the wool with her words. I never saw the blanket as it transformed into the mirror when I was a baby, but Dad told me about it. How it would jump from a discarded bundle on the floor to tucked in tight hospital corners over their bed. If my parents tried to sleep with the blanket, my mum would gasp back into consciousness, chest heaving under the cable knit thread. As the size of the beds grew with my mum, so too did the blanket stretch, its beige ligaments swelling into new rows. 

My mum has never spoken about the blanket. She only left the compact mirror beside my crib so I could watch myself grow in her eyes. The pastel pink plated covering is simply gift wrapping, only I know what happens when the ribbon is untied and reveals what’s underneath. 

Women alone have these heirlooms, although you wouldn’t know as most daughters are trained to conceal them like I was. At school I’ve caught glimpses of potential heirlooms; a singular earring treasured, or a shocked inhalation at knitting needles appearing in someone’s school bag. You’ll learn to hide this part of you, my mum told me when I was eight and was sitting in the front garden, fat tears rolling down my cheeks at the reflection I saw in the mirror. 

Like my mum throwing her blanket aside, I too have hidden the mirror between piles of clothes, beneath stacks of books, stashed under floorboards. But then it appears again, cementing itself to my chest of drawers and snapped wide open, this glass version of me shocked at my own negligence. I’ve tried leaving it on buses, stranger’s sofas, even chucking it into a river once. 

When I close my eyes, I see the daisies on the compact, an endless string of them blossoming from the darkness like my own constellations. In my nightmares the daisies morph into the faces of women I don’t know, fury and disappointment fixing their muscles into scowls, and when I open the compact mirror they still stare back at me; except this time their features have melted into a familiar face. My reflection is like a painting of mixed mediums, crayon blending into oil paints together to present the unfinished portrait of who I’m meant to be. Sometimes I catch my mum looking at me like she wishes I could just be a blank canvas again. 

I’ve asked my dad if he could take the compact mirror. He looked down at his boots, feet scuffing against the floor. It’s not for me I’m afraid. He smiles when he looks into mirrors, every version he has been before unifies into this back-patting approval of what he sees. I slipped it into his bag once before he left for work, but Mum saw me do it. Yanking it out of his bag, she turned to me. Her face sculpted into a neutral expression, but I could see beyond her painted placidity. Her cheekbones pushed out by her clenched jaw, teeth grinded together, thin red lines in her eyes like ropes trying to hold them in their sockets. She grabbed my wrist, exposing my empty palm where she placed the mirror, closing my fingers around it. This is its true home; this is your burden to carry and alone. 

I used to think my mother controlled the mirror. After she caught me slouching as a child sitting at the dinner table, I walked into my room to find it open on top of the drawers, even though I’d hidden it under the floorboards. Or the time I went to get a haircut without her, it was beside my hairbrush on the bedside table. She toyed with the ends of my newly shoulder-length hair afterwards, as if feeling the ghost strands that used to reach my waist. But now I know she has no more control over it than she did her own blanket. It’s simply the heirloom; the daunting expectation looming over the heir, for the next of kin to carry forward. My grandmother used to tell me about this knife she had; it was about fifteen centimetres long but thin, like a snake's fang. From childhood, she used it to cut food from breakfast to dinner, its rhythmic chopping underscored her life. It would appear near her even when she didn’t need it. Sticking out of her shopping bag. At the hairdresser’s. In her pocket at the tailors. I remember asking her, naively, whether it ever hurt her. She forced a dry cackle, neck trembling with the effort. You don’t get to be as good a chef as me without learning how not to cut things. The knife seemed to anchor her to the kitchen. And after it disappeared, she remained there, her shoulders slowly hunching over the stove like it had a gravitational pull, until her spine was crooked. 

Everywhere I go, the mirror follows. 

I’ve grown and it still follows. My bones have extended out. The slopes of my muscles have grown into hills. Electrical signals are now racing faster across their neural tracks. And it’s still here. The mirror grows with me but only in weight. It can still slip into my pocket as a teenager but bruises the lining, weakening the stitches. Last week, it dropped straight through my jacket, leaving the pocket gaping and wounded. The compact was unscratched, despite the damage to my favourite jacket. When I asked mum where she kept the sewing supplies, so I could stitch it back up, she looked at the jacket and said don’t bother, it didn’t look that good anyway. 

And so, I sit in class, listening to the others share their stories. Here’s a wedding ring from a great-grandmother waiting to be used again. There’s a love letter which survived a war. A photo of someone’s relative graduating, first in the family. When it’s my turn I hang my head in surrender. A few girls shoot me looks of betrayal, their scowls suggesting I poured lemon juice in their bleeding cuts, and not my own. But I can’t help it, I refuse to show my open wound in front of everyone. My nails dig into my palms. Even without the mirror on me, I feel it like a phantom limb. I have to bandage this wound before it becomes infected. The teacher fixes me a look before moving swiftly to the boy beside me. He shows a broken watch, over a hundred years old. 

Seemingly summoned by the teacher's disappointment, I know the second the compact mirror appears on me. My spine sinks, becoming concave with the sudden weight in my shirt pocket. It sits over my heart, which beats sluggishly, as though my bloodstream has been infiltrated with the mirror’s glass and plastic. 

Class ends and the teacher spares a head shake for me before I leave. The weight is unbearable now, pressing against my chest too tight – too heavy on my ribcage. I breathe in deeply, inhaling against the mirror’s suffocation. Exhaling, I decide on my plan.

It's break time, so I know the classroom down the hall I’m heading towards will be empty. Once inside, I reach into my shirt pocket, threads already straining against the weight, and pull out the mirror. I drop it on the floor. The hinges click open, and I am staring at myself. And my mother. And her mother. And the women only half my genes recognise. The face is flushed, eyes brimming with tears and shame. The creases between the eyebrows spell out disappointment. Nostrils flared with space for guilt. How could you, not good enough, how could—

My foot smashes into the glass, ricocheting it across the floor. I run over to it expecting the same scowl to reappear but the face is split by a scar down its middle. Humiliation is still indented on its cheeks. So, I kick again, harder, heel colliding with the face. It skids away but is backed into a corner now. I attack the mirror again and again, fractures and splinters disfigure the face until it’s no longer visible. Now it’s only a map of fissures and crevices coated in sparkling dust. 

It is not as heavy when I pick it up and drop it into the bin on my way out. I know it will come back to me, but I had to try. 

When the mirror appeared on my chest of drawers the next morning, it looked unscathed on the outside. As my fingers brushed against the plastic covering, it felt less smooth than normal, as if there were lots of invisible scratches across its surface. I flicked it open and the glittering glass dust was gone but the jagged crack still remained. The face is still there, looking up at me but not as whole anymore.  My foot smashed it into fragments again; and by the next day the crack had doubled. 

I repeat this process every day for a month, shards of glass lingering on the floor, embedding themselves in my feet when I missed them while cleaning up. The face in the mirror became gradually mutilated by the expanding splinters, spreading like cracks across a frozen lake.

Until one day, I wake up and the compact mirror is on my bedside table, but it has transformed. Now it is navy blue, no flowers. I flick open the hinges and there she is, kindness smiling in her eyes back. Myself, and no one else.