The streaks are whitish with furrows down the middle, like the contrails of jets. You had assumed at first that they were grime—some naturally occurring buildup or encrustation of mildew—in which case their reticulation would be incidental. But the longer you look at them, the more you convince yourself that they form a deliberate pattern. The lines are too finely controlled to be random. They cut across the mirror in wide crescents, in sustained curves and careful arcs that, occasionally intersecting, overlap in Borromean rings. Every line is a line of intent. Even here, in the bathroom’s mirror, the owner has installed a dreamcatcher! You cannot help imagining how he drew it: leaning over the porcelain sink with a pink wedge of eraser, pressing one corner of the rubber to the mirror and dragging. You picture the owner tracing an entire dreamcatcher in this way, inscribing its protective pattern on the glass.

You try centering your face inside the dreamcatcher’s streaks, until their network is superimposed over you like a wire cage. You stare into your snared reflection. The garish bathroom light makes your eyes seem more sunken and your cheekbones sharper than they are. Transverse streaks cut across your cheeks, your forehead, and your chin, introducing distortions into the reflection. Beneath the streaks your flesh turns the translucent color of flesh behind frosted glass. These arcs of blur seem to mar your skin like scar tissue. The meshwork is totally flat, laid over your face in a two-dimensional grid. But you find that if you focus your eyes on some fixed point—allowing your peripheral vision to soften and letting your reflection merge with the meshwork—it really does look as if the streaks are bending to wrap around your face. They seem to drape over it, like a net.

You focus on your eyes. You look into them until they begin to look back at you, and your face grows estranged in this way. Soon you cease to recognize your own reflection. It looks like a stranger’s face: the sunken eyes, the sharp cheekbones. Deep down, you know that it is your face. But the more intently you stare at it, the less yourself it seems, for it keeps staring intently back at you. In the muscles of your face—in the sensation of the skin on your cheeks and forehead—you feel your expression to be one of focused concentration and scrutiny. Except this is not the expression that the stranger has on its face. Seeing your so-called concentration and scrutiny reflected in its face, you would swear that it is an expression of tranquil hatred. The face in the mirror regards you with quiet, simmering intensity, the sunken eyes murderous above the sharp cheekbones. It looks as if it wants to kill you. It looks as if it is fantasizing about it right now. And the more frightened that this makes you—the more fearful you feel your own face becoming—the more hateful grows the expression on its face. Its hatred seems to grow in direct proportion to your fear. You even feel a paradoxical fear of becoming any more afraid, a panicked need to stop being afraid this instant: not only because your fear is irrational—the face is merely a reflection—but also because you want to staunch the strengthening hatred of its face. Yet you cannot help growing afraid: your fear only mounts, and with it, the hatred, and with it, more fear. When you feel the blood draining from your own face, the reflection’s face grows pale, as with rage. And when this makes you short of breath, the reflection’s face tightens, as with rage. And when at this your own eyes dry and widen, the look in the reflection’s eyes is like a nightmare you are having.