She sprawls on the grass like a puppet with its strings cut. Tall green stalks obscure her face and her long blonde hair swoops across her back like a blanket. Wind whispers against her clothes, her hair, her face, but somehow the grass never stirs. She smiles slightly against her elbow and rolls onto her left side.

"Taya?"

Her eyebrows knit with growing consciousness. Cheeks crisscrossed red from the grass, she raises her head and opens her eyes. She squints against the sun and tries to locate the speaker through the knee high carpet of green. Her gaze wanders lazily to the right, then left.

"It is Taya, right?"

Awareness stings her like a bee and she jumps up, landing on her haunches. Someone was definitely speaking to her. Grass swishes as she pivots, scanning the shadows behind the trees for silhouettes. Her eyes slit, straining to see anything but bright blotches of color that hang across her vision like a drape. Even through the splotches, she fails to see anything resembling a person.

Where...

"Here, on your left." Another sharp swish, then silence when Taya finds it. She sees herself, stooped over, half covered by grass, arms curled around her legs. Hair hangs in her wide scurrying eyes and her back rises and falls with shallow breaths. She's never seen a cornered animal before but she imagines herself to look like one.

Two trees twine around a sheet of glass in L-shapes like students balancing a presentation board. Her reflection stares back from the center of the mirror. They stare at one another until her reflection breaks the stalemate. A smile flutters across her reflection’s face and her lips, nervous, then part for speech.

"Hi. Um, I haven't startled you, have I?"

Taya's hand wanders up to her face, tracing the curve of her frown and the line where motionless lip meets motionless lip. The voice sounds just like hers but she isn't speaking. The face looks like hers if she had such a vibrant smile. When she watches closely enough, her reflection doesn't crouch; it kneels and slouches forward with its face pressed up to the edge of the mirror.

Her reflection's brow furrows at the silence and the figure stands. As it stands, Taya begins to see the pattern of its shirt, the tufts of hair that stick out behind its ears, the shape of its torso. What she saw as herself transforms into a boy who could pass as her twin. She stands and rushes to the mirror, stumbling over the swishy green grass.

The reflection waits and watches her approach. He opens his mouth, closes it, listens to her footsteps through the silence and tries again. Taya hovers around the edge of the mirror, admiring the wooden frame. He tries to meet her eyes as she looks at everything but him. "I'm sorry, if I did," he adds. "I'm, ah, really sorry for a lot of things, I don't know exactly where to start."

The glass feels cool under her palm and impossibly smooth. She watches the progress of her hand as if the mirror would ripple at her touch. Her reflection shies away, watching her carefully from the rightmost corner of the glass. Taya wonders if she's become him, staring at a jittery girl alone in a field from the confines of a mirror.

"R- right. Well. Um, I've wanted to meet you, and things didn't exactly go how I planned, and I had something prepared to say, but it doesn't really fit now, so..."

"What's your name?"

Her voice surprises both of them and they breathe for a minute in quiet. He recovers first and begins to answer as she vanishes.

"T-"