Work Text:
In downtown Seattle many apartment complexes crowded around the Space Needle, embarrassingly small compared to the landmark. People passed below me like rodents as I wiped away at a window of apartment 510. All I thought about was lunch as I dug dirt out of the nooks and crannies of this empty apartment as the open window wafted promises of fresh spicy chicken nearby. The landlord needed the one bed one bath apartment cleaned for a showing he had scheduled that day, rushing us and saying it shouldn’t take too long before shortly leaving. Mold fuzzied the window tracks, and another maid on my team somehow convinced our office that it was beyond our threshold for mold much to my delight.
My job was simple; clean windows and wipe down the living room. Parking was surprisingly easy and cheap and my music humming in my apron pocket put a spring in my step. Blue paint was splattered over the outlets and windows, a common “landlord special” that made discerning dirt difficult. I moved to the next window bobbing my head and wiping the glass to the beat, when the word “WHAT” appeared in the streaks and quickly faded. Intrigued, I blasted the glass with cleaner and wiped away the words “WHAT WILL THE MIRROR ERISED SHOW YOU!” ERISED. I kept wiping at the word trying to see if I misread it, but no, ERISED.
I pulled my coworker from the kitchen to show him, and we were both astounded. We had never seen anything like that before. None of the other windows had messages, and that one completely disappeared so I didn’t have to scrub it off. It only appeared in the fresh wet streaks. Who wrote it and for what? What was ERISED? Erased? I tried to take a photo but the camera only focused on the tree outside. Shadows flitted in my vision from staring at the bright outside for too long as I continued with the windows. A meager chain held the fireplace shut, a rare feature these days due to the danger. Measly recessed lights cast feeble rays onto the dark blue living room, the gray laminate plank floors peeling and disconnected in places. Something sinister called to me among the darkness and blue paint splatters and fleeting shadows and easy-open fireplace. I felt potential. A certain kind of person would delight in its dark seclusion. The glass-faced kitchen cabinets stood empty, but I imagined the jars of mismatched reagents for rituals pressed against the warped frosted glass.
The rest of the apartment felt normal: light gray walls, tiny dining room, standard rectangle bathroom, and a tiny kitchen with a fridge that annoyingly opened into a support pillar. But… that peeling living room, dark despite the six large windows, was wrong. The narrow opening to the kitchen pinched the room away from the rest of the apartment. The nook in the back could fit a proper work table, with the fireplace in easy range of where a ritual circle could mark the floor. Why were these thoughts coming so readily to me in this room? Something felt like death, cold and damp and sludged to the bottom of my heart like the mold in the window tracks. Not the sensational kind, riveting and sickening, but the fact-of-life inevitability, that blood had to be spilled to appease… something. Quiet, expected, given.
What happened there? Did a killer live out of that apartment, marking a piece of the ritual on the window as they also looked down on the people scurrying past? ERISED. It demanded my attention, and no other words or letters appeared near it no matter how often I came back to check. Ah, but a quick google search showed me that the “mirror erised” in Harry Potter is a mirror that reflects back someone’s deepest desire. Disappointing. All this flight and fancy for nothing. Maybe I am the weird person fantasizing about killers and ritual as I scrubbed the baseboards looking for excitement in the dirt.
In reality, the tenant was likely just throwing a party and that was a decoration, or that was how they decorated their chamber with its cute fireplace and windows. A few bookshelves and a nice armchair would transform that dark little ritual killing space into a wizard library in no time at all. Maybe the “mirror” reflected back at me. Maybe blue splatters on outlets and windows leave me wanting. Maybe dreams of fire and red hot iron and chalk circles and candles burn in my heart. A life with more than the cold aluminum pole in my hands as I mopped my way backwards out of the living room, turned off the lights, and told the other maids the room was all done.