HOUSE OF MIRRORS
Published in The Awakenings Review, Spring 2024
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize
The Awakenings Review publishes poets, writers and artists experiencing mental illnesses, and related writers. It is a print-only journal, but you can see a sample in this PDF file.
Throughout psychiatry’s history, its view of delusions has centered on their imperviousness to contrary evidence. In Kraepelin’s influential (1899) textbook Psychiatry, he writes that a delusion is a belief that is not open to doubt. (K. Arnold & J. Vakhrusheva, 2015)
It was mid-October 2008 and our last evening in Italy after spending several weeks in the Chianti countryside. 
With an overnight stay in the fishing village of Fiumicino near the Rome airport, we slept unaware of what was happening at home in Colorado.
Back in Boulder, through the fog of jet lag, I checked my email messages, something I hadn’t been able to do consistently in Italy. And there on my screen was a message from Vandy, a friend who had been restoring a small building at Stillpoint, our beloved property in the mountains. She had written it October 6, more than a week earlier.
Hi Carol,
I want you to know that we did not end up camping at Stillpoint last weekend. We arrived at the property and encountered a man who said he was the owner. He was not familiar with your name. After a short conversation with him we left. I felt as though the person we met did not belong there and thought you should know. He said that he planned to stay until November or so.
When I was eight years old, many decades ago now, I learned there were different kinds of dirty. We were new to the mountains, my family and I, renting a cabin at a small, rustic resort where the ghost town of Bakerville usedto be, near Loveland Pass. Down the creek a ways, lived an old man we called Pops. At least we thought of him as old, with his pudgy frame, poorly shaved face, saggy skin, and well-worn clothes. Pops would come around to the picnic area and play his harmonica for my brother, sister, and me. He would also perform magic tricks and give us silly names. Stump-a-Doodle-and-Bunch was one. He made us laugh as he entertained and teased us. We liked and trusted him because he seemed to care about us.