The mirror is a small one, the kind that comes out of a compact, and it is propped against the window glass at an angle.
Inside it there is a second street. The same lamppost, the same parked cars, the same wet road — all of it a little smaller, and facing the other way.
It does not glow. It does not hum. It sits on the sill collecting dust like everything else on the sill, and once a week you wipe it.
The Street Doubled in the Glass
You have probably arrived here because of a particular person, and a particular feeling that has been going on for weeks.
The sense of being disliked with some energy. Of being thought about, unkindly, by somebody who has decided something about you.
It is a specific and unpleasant sensation, and it has been named in every culture that has left records. Wanting to turn it aside is one of the oldest reflexes in the craft.
What follows is a reflective ward. Its entire logic is that it adds nothing and sends nothing. It only returns.
What Reflection Actually Means Here
A mirror does not create light. It does not choose. It has no opinion about what falls on it.
Whatever arrives leaves again at the same angle, unchanged in quantity, going back the way it came.
That is the whole idea, and it is worth holding onto precisely because it is so mechanical. There is no judgment in it and no appetite.
The older folk versions of this — a mirror at the window, a bowl of water on the sill, a bright pin in the doorframe — all rest on the same image. Turn aside, do not answer.
Nothing Added, Nothing Sent
Say those four words to yourself before you set the glass up, because they are the working’s actual boundary.
You are not sending anything toward the other person. Not their words back at them, not a lesson, not a taste of it.
If you find yourself wanting to add something on the return trip, stop. That is not a ward anymore, whatever you call it.
A ward that is quietly a weapon is worse than an honest weapon, because you will lie to yourself about what you did and then wonder why it sits badly.
The Ethics Line, Stated Exactly
Turning aside is not a curse. Declining to receive something is not an attack on the person who sent it.
You are allowed to shut a door. You are allowed to shut it firmly. That is the whole moral content of this working.
What you are not doing is reaching into another person’s life. Their sleep, their health, their luck, their choices — none of that is yours, and none of it is on the table here.
People sometimes reach for the threefold law to justify a return working, as though the arithmetic makes it clean. It does not, and it does not need to. The door argument is enough.
How to Keep It Clean
There is a simple test, and it is uncomfortable, which is how you know it is a good one.
Ask yourself: if nothing whatsoever happened to that person — if they went on with a completely pleasant year and simply stopped mattering to you — would that be a satisfactory outcome?
If the honest answer is yes, set the mirror up. Your working is a ward.
If the honest answer is no, put the mirror down and wait a week. What you want right now is not protection, and doing protection while wanting something else produces a muddle you will have to unpick later.
Whether Anyone Is Actually Looking
Worth asking plainly, without insult. Sometimes the attention is real and sometimes the attention is yours.
A person who dislikes you may well have thought about you twice this month. You may have thought about them four hundred times.
If that is the shape of it, the mirror still helps, but not for the reason you assume. It helps because it gives the vigilance a job and a location.
The old accounts of the evil eye are frank about this. The remedies were always as much about the household’s fear as about the neighbor’s glance.
Choosing the Mirror
Small, plain, cheap, replaceable. Those four words, in that order.
- Small — palm-sized or less. A compact mirror, a craft mirror tile, a mirror out of a broken pot of eyeshadow.
- Plain — no frame worth anything, no ornament, nothing you would be sad to bin.
- Cheap — because you may replace it more than once, and hesitating over cost will make you keep a cracked one.
- Flat — this matters practically. Never use a magnifying or shaving mirror. A curved mirror in a sunny window can concentrate light onto a curtain, and that is a real fire, not a folkloric one.
New is fine. Secondhand is fine if you wash it. An heirloom is a bad choice, because part of the working is being willing to throw it away.
Choosing the Window
One window. Not every window in the house — that is the reflex, and it turns a ward into an occupation.
Pick the window that faces the direction the trouble comes from. Usually that is literal: the street, the neighbor’s side, the road their car comes up.
If there is no literal direction, use the window of the room where you feel it most. The room where you sit in the evening and go over it again.
The mirror faces out. Reflective side to the glass and the world, back of it to your room. You should be looking at the back of a mirror, not your own face.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. A mirror facing in gives your eye somewhere to keep going, and this working is meant to stop the looking, not host it.
The Rite: Setting the Glass
Fifteen minutes, at a time you choose in advance. Do not do this the night you are most upset.
What you need:
- The mirror.
- A cloth and plain water, or water with a little vinegar in it.
- A pinch of salt.
- Something to steady it — a lump of poster putty, a small stand, or a windowsill deep enough to lean it.
- No flame. This is a window with curtains near it. Keep candles out of this one entirely.
The steps:
- Wash the window glass first. Actually wash it, properly, inside. This is half the rite and people treat it as preparation.
- Wash the mirror. Dry it. Hold it face down on your palm for a moment so that it is reflecting nothing but your own skin.
- Put a pinch of salt on the sill where the mirror will stand.
- Stand the mirror on the salt, facing out, and press it steady.
- Put one fingertip on the back of it and say the words below.
- Step back. Draw the curtain or blind as you normally would.
- Leave the room and do something else entirely. Wash the cloth. Make food. The rite ends by you going on with the evening.
The Words at the Glass
What comes here does not come in.
What is sent here is not taken up.
It goes back the way it came, no more and no less than it was.
I add nothing to it. I keep my own house.
Once, at ordinary volume, with your hand on the back of the glass.
Notice what the last two lines are doing. They are the boundary written into the words themselves, so that the working cannot quietly become something else while you are not paying attention.
If you write your own version, keep a line of that kind in it. It is the load-bearing part.
A Night You Picked
Choose the night in advance — Sunday, or a full moon, or simply the twelfth of the month.
What you are avoiding is doing this on the night you feel worst. Work done at the peak of a bad evening carries the shape of that evening.
Waiting also functions as a test. If in four days you no longer care enough to bother, that is a genuine and welcome answer.
Choosing the hour is a discipline that runs through most of the practical craft. There is more on that in the pages on timing a working by the day, though for this one, any night you decided on beforehand will do.
Living With It
Once it is up, the discipline is dullness. Do not check it. Do not adjust the angle. Do not stand in front of it wondering.
Dust it when you dust the sill. That is the entire maintenance schedule.
You do not need to explain it to visitors. A small mirror on a windowsill is one of the least remarkable objects a home can contain.
If you find yourself going to the room to look at it, that is the old vigilance dressed in new clothes. Set a rule: you touch it once a week when you clean, and otherwise it is furniture.
When the Glass Cracks
It happens. Sun heats one edge and not the other, a window slams, the putty gives and the mirror goes onto the sill hard.
Here is what a crack means: the mirror is broken and needs replacing.
Here is what it does not mean: that something got through, that an attack landed, that the count of unlucky years has begun.
The seven years business is a nineteenth-century scrap, and taking it seriously will do you more harm than any neighbor has managed.
Replacing It Without Drama
Do the physical part carefully, because broken mirror glass is genuinely sharp and it goes everywhere.
- Wear something on your hands. Gather the pieces onto a sheet of paper, not into your palm.
- Wrap them in newspaper, then in tape, and mark the bundle before it goes in the bin. Somebody empties that bin.
- Wipe the sill for splinters with a damp cloth, then throw the cloth out too.
- Wash the sill, put down fresh salt, and set a new mirror in the same place.
- Say the words again. Do not add anything about the breakage. It was glass, and glass does that.
If it cracks a second and a third time in quick succession, look at the window rather than at the cosmos. Direct afternoon sun on one edge will do it, every time.
Taking It Down Cleanly
There should be an end to this, and you should be the one who names it. A ward left up for years stops being a decision and becomes an assumption about the world.
Six months is a reasonable term. Write the date somewhere.
To close it, take the mirror down in daylight. Wash it in plain water with a little salt in it. Dry it and turn it face down on the table.
Say one sentence out loud: “This is finished. It is only glass.” Then either put it in a drawer for a future use or wrap it and bin it.
Sweep the salt from the sill outward, out of the door if you can, and wash the window one more time.
What Remains When the Sill Is Empty
The mirror was never really the point, and by the sixth month you will probably know that.
What the working reliably did was give you an object, a boundary in words, a fixed weekly moment, and a place to put an attention that had been running loose through your house.
It did not promise that anyone would stop disliking you. Nothing can, and anything that says otherwise is not being straight with you.
If the trouble is not a feeling but a person doing things — following, threatening, arriving — then that is a matter for other people entirely, and the mirror is not the tool. Dark stones and old charms have their place, and so does a phone call to somebody with authority. If you want the stone version of this same instinct, the dark protective stones are the traditional company for a warded window.
What you keep is smaller and steadier. A window you washed, a night you chose, and a line you did not cross even when you badly wanted to.