The Whispered Hush
M. J. INGLIS
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
I was twelve years old when the Earth decided it had had enough of us. I was sitting on the couch watching my mum’s favourite show from when she was a kid, Bluey, when the first of many tremors hit. Mum looked at me like she’d known this day would come, pulled me close as the picture frames crashed down, and whispered so softly I almost missed it. ‘It’s waking.’
The weeks after blurred together. Sirens came and went. The air always smelled of dust. At night the fires on the horizon turned the clouds the colour of rust. Mum was always on the phone, always in meetings, always talking in that clipped voice she used when she was angry but too tired to yell. There was a strong sense that we were out of time. Like the clock had been running down for years and we just hadn’t heard it.
The reports Mum had written, the ones no one wanted to read, were suddenly everywhere. On the news, online. Influencers read aloud the most distressing sections to their audiences. Protesters shouted her words through megaphones in the city squares across the world. It was during one of those protests that the second tremor hit. Someone in the crowd had been live-streaming, their camera shaky but determined, broadcasting solidarity to the people who had lost everything in the first quake. I watched as the screen jolted sideways as the camera fell. It kept recording, tilted and half-buried, as the ground split open like a monster’s gaping maw, swallowing cars, buildings, people. After that, the tremors came every few days.
I pieced together what they’d all been trying to do – Mum, the scientists, the ones who chained themselves to trees and refused to move even when the bulldozers pushed right to their feet. They weren’t only trying to save the forests, or the whales, or the scraps of wilderness left between the highways. They were trying to keep it asleep. Mum used to tell me stories, half-remembered from her grandmother, about the Sleeping One beneath the world’s crust – a spirit older than gods, whose bones became the mountains and whose breath still stirs the seas. Maybe she’d believed them. Maybe that’s why she worked so hard to warn everyone. But the headlines called her a ‘fearmonger.’ ‘Anti-progress.’ And still the drills turned, the fires spread, the mines chewed deeper into the ground. Every day the air grew hotter, the horizon burned redder, the tremors came harder. And in the end, we woke it up. And it was angry.
It unfurled like a giant woodlouse, body scarred by our centuries of greed. Segments of Earth lifted and split as though its spine ran beneath the oceans and mountain ranges, the plates themselves nothing more than armour of something older and stronger. The coastlines fractured first, the oceans rushing inland to erase roads, towers, and bridges in a single tide. Volcanoes tore open, fire staining the ash-thick sky. Forests burned. Rivers broke their banks. When it finally stilled, it wasn’t relief we felt, but the pause before the final blow.
By the time the last quake came, there was no running. No warnings left to give. Only the silence after the sirens, the weight of ash falling like snow, and the slow, patient undoing of everything we had built. I sit with my mother, overlooking the flattened town we were both raised in, waiting. Resignation to the inevitable tightens like a vise around our throats. She holds my head to her chest. I squeeze my eyes shut as her tears fall against my hair. Beneath us, the Sleeping One exhales. The tremor blooms like a heartbeat, and the world folds inward on itself, gentle as a sigh.
*
It was not with a bang that humanity ended, but with the whispered hush of something ancient, shaking us off the way a dreamer discards a nightmare.
THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR
Content Warning: themes of sexual assault
There is a girl who lives inside my mirror. Her honey-brown hair spills over her shoulders in thick, wavelike currents that are frozen in time. Eyes dark and patient linger on me as I come to stand before her, as I do each morning. I lift my right hand to the glass where her left is already waiting. The chill meets my palm as we study one another. Sometimes, in the right light, the glass trembles faintly, the surface rippling where our hands meet. Her face is smooth, untouched by time, lit from within, as though some pulse beneath the glass keeps her alive. Her movements are slow, deliberate. I hold her gaze until my eyes sting, then lift the blanket resting on the bathroom vanity and slowly veil the mirror.
Grandma used to tell me stories about mirrors, remnants of a forgotten magic, doorways that never quite closed. She told those stories like warnings, though I only half listened. Maybe that’s why the first time I saw her, three years ago, I didn’t scream right away – part of me already knew what I was looking at. But the knowing didn’t make it easier. When the shock finally caught up, I cried and screamed for my mother to come. I needed my mother to see her, to prove to myself that I hadn’t lost my mind along with everything else. But I knew as soon as Mum entered the bathroom that she couldn’t. Mum’s eyes swept every corner of the room for a threat that wasn’t there. I soon accepted that no one else could see her. And for a while, I told myself I could ignore her. I tried keeping the lights off when I brushed my teeth, avoiding my own reflection in every polished surface. But the weight of her gaze followed me, patient and unhurried.
She is the girl from before that night. The night I fell asleep in what I thought was a safe place, and woke to a body that was no longer mine. A friend-of-a-friend, someone I barely knew, cleaved me in two. One half remained sealed in glass, untouched, preserved in a moment that never moved forward; the other half walked away in silence, carrying the weight of what could never be said. I told no one. Silence was easier; it asked for nothing back. I couldn’t bear to hand over what was left of me to strangers who would only ask for proof.
Still, her smile catches like glass in the throat. She is the me that never changed, never aged, never carried what I carry. I glimpse my true reflection through the camera on my phone. A ritual of comparison. On the screen, the light is harsher, unforgiving. It shows me hollowed cheeks and tired eyes, a truth I cannot escape. The phone does not preserve me the way the mirror preserves her. Her skin glows with life, while mine has turned thin and grey. My hair hangs dull and lifeless; hers still shines. Every morning, she greets me with the same soft mouth, the same wide eyes, and I feel the heat of envy rise in my chest, hard and unyielding. Looking at her is like staring at a photograph that refuses to yellow, while the person in the image rots outside the frame.
There are days when I stand too long in the silence of the bathroom, and the years separating us turn her into something else. In those moments, she isn’t just a reflection but the life I lost and the girl who never got to live it. The ache settles between us, heavy and unspoken, mirrored in the tears sliding down both our faces. The room seems to tighten around us, the air sitting close, carrying the sharp scent of soap and the chill of wet tile. In that quiet, the boundary between us thins; I can almost hear her heartbeat, steady and unbroken.
Even with the mirror covered, I can still feel her gaze when I close my eyes. I wonder if she knows, if she blames me. If behind that steady smile she is asking why I didn’t fight harder, why I never sought justice. I cling to the thought that she doesn’t know. When I whisper apologies into the glass, I imagine her brows furrowing in confusion, what for? she might ask. Her stillness feels heavier than the air between us.
At last, my body gives in. I sink to the bathroom floor, head pressed against the cabinet, the cold seeping through my skin. The mirror looms above, veiled in its shroud, humming softly through the fabric. There are times when I wonder if she’s waiting for me to find the right words, to unmake what silence made of us. Or maybe she’s waiting for something neither of us can bring back.
Tomorrow I will lift the cloth again, and she’ll be there, waiting. The girl in the mirror is not me anymore, and yet, in our own way, we are both trapped – suspended between what was taken and what remains.
M. J. Inglis is a pre-service teacher and aspiring writer living on the unceded lands of the Darug and GuriNgai peoples. She is completing a Bachelor of Arts (English major, Creative Writing minor) alongside a Bachelor of Education (Primary). Her interests include reading widely across genres and knitting.
