brass · 1911 · the small drawer
a folding mirror the size of a large coin, brass on the outside, with a dent in the upper right like the mark of a thumb pressed too hard. it was carried for decades in someone's coat pocket along with a handkerchief and a small foreign coin. it now lives in the second drawer of the writing table, between letters that no one means to read again.
it reflects only a piece at a time — an eye, the curve of an ear, a strip of lip. nothing is ever shown whole. people who pick it up tend to angle it until they find the part of themselves they were looking for; people who do not know they are looking for anything close it again quickly.
the last person to look into it each day is, mostly, no one. it is opened only by accident, and only when a hand goes into that drawer after the wrong thing.
field-note a pocket mirror is a private object. it was made to be looked at in doorways, in corridors, in the small interval between two places.