The Smile In The Glass by Huey Carroll

IT DIDN’T COPY HER. IT CHOSE HER.East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, 1937. The cotton has failed, the debt only grows, and seventeen-year-old Emma Ruth Halloran is the one holding what’s left of her family together — one meal, one prayer, one hard day at a time.Then a dead woman’s mirror comes into her hands.Her reflection doesn’t move when she moves. It waits. It watches. And when Emma finally looks — really looks — the girl in the glass smiles.The thing behind the glass has been patient a long time, and it knows exactly what she’s hungry for. It offers mercies no one else will: food when the shelves are bare, a cold nerve to face the men who own her family’s lives. All it asks is that she keep looking. That she come a little closer. That she never cover the glass again.Emma takes what it offers. And every time she does, a little more of the girl who reached for it goes quiet.She thought she was taking what she needed. She was being taught to open a door.