"The Reflectionist" by Kip Knott

It’s a job that most people don’t even know exists, and a job that no one ever admits to working. It’s a job that requires an unseen workforce around the world to live outside any normal concept of time. It’s a job that demands each worker accept a selfless life working alone for the benefit of others who will never know of their existence. And despite all the requirements and demands of the job, every single person who works the job would tell you, if they could tell you, that they were called upon by something greater than themselves to carry on a tradition whose origins have become as distant as a dying star. 

Take for instance the longest tenured of these workers, Toshie. She is a woman who, at the exact moment the last ray of sunlight dips beneath the horizon marking the beginning of her shift, has no regrets when she clocks in for the final time after a millennium on the job. In that time, Toshie has become a Grandmaster at her craft. But the only people in the world who acknowledge her existence and accomplishments are the other chosen ones who work alone, emulating methods she perfected from dusk until dawn every day of her long life.

Toshie removes the clipboard from the wall next to the timeclock and reads through the orders. Tonight is a light night, with only seven orders listed: a sixty-something man one month removed from his most recent facelift; an adolescent girl who has completed her last acne treatment; a middle-aged woman whose hair has started falling out after her third round of chemo for breast cancer; a pre-teen boy who is playing dress-up with his mother’s red lipstick and red high-heeled shoes; a man who just turned forty and was told by his wife that he is the spitting image of his father; a twenty-something young woman who has painted her eight-month-pregnant belly like a moon; and an elderly woman who has chosen not give a reason. 

Toshie turns to her workspace and opens the crate that holds seven blank panels. She peels off the protective covering, revealing a perfectly flat black surface that holds something deeper than two dimensions. Before she begins, she takes a moment to admire the unadulterated beauty of the pristine panel that is somehow both opaque and transparent. Like the universe itself, Toshie whispers. Filled with nothing and everything all at once. 

With a sigh that conveys both sadness and pride for what she is about to do, Toshie lays the flat panel on her workbench and begins to mix the proper powders from the myriad of ancient bottles stacked on sagging shelves all around her, taking her time to count out the precise number of liquid mercury droplets needed to create her medium. When the concoction is just right, Toshie pours it into—not onto—the panel and waits for the face of the sixty-something man to come into being like a time-lapse film of a rose transforming from seed to bloom. Once the image sets, she kisses the man’s reflection and slips it into the slot in the wall above her workbench to be delivered to his mirror. 

Toshie spends the rest of her shift transforming the remaining six blank panels into reflections. Knowing these will be her last, she pauses to admire each one she completes. She caresses the smooth face of the adolescent girl. She gently strokes the last few wispy strands of hair on the middle-aged woman. She brightens the color of the lipstick and high heels to candy-apple-red on the pre-teen boy. She nods and whispers, Yes, you are, to the forty-year-old man. She cradles the belly of the twenty-something young woman in her wizened hands.

When, at last, she finishes the final reflection, Toshie closes her eyes and holds the mirror in front of her. Faces from a lifetime of reflections—young, old, male, female, neutral, fluid, happy, smooth, beautiful, ugly, pitted, scarred, weeping, and too often alone, alone, alone—swirl like innumerable galaxies in the universe of darkness that exists behind her lids. Wiping away tears, she opens her eyes, and for the first time in her long and lonely life, Toshie finds herself.

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, Best Microfiction Anthology, Ghost Parachute, Maudlin House, Milk Candy Review, The Sun, trampset, Vestal Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.