until nothing osmosed out of pickles
by Mitchell Ny
Hup hup. Feel your chest expand. When it’s all-the-way full, take two more little sips and hold. Count to three. And whoosh—let it all out. Imagine your lungs shriveling like raisins.
I wonder what’s for lunch.
Almost there.
Right. Then hiss to wring what’s left. Picture your breath escaping you as black tar smoke—negative energy leaving the body. Then hiss again.
I just have to finish the day.
Hiss.
An unkempt Stanley slumps over a vanity, stealing time for breathwork. He sinks into a dank green velveteen armchair. The room is dense with the smoke of stale Newports. Back into him, the sour seeps like marinade. Today, his face is blue and he wheezes from dirt that cakes his lungs.
Towering above him, the vanity’s mirror looms. The frame is ornate like a coffin’s edge but chipped. A coffin’s only pretty above ground when someone’s looking, he reflects. His gaze bores into the tabletop—ashen, obsessively tidy beneath a blanket of grime and dust. Set equidistant: a badge that reads Stanley, a glass ashtray, a perfect stack of timecards. In the same greenroom, his colleague Norman paces, lighting a cigarette with the butt of another.
The air has died; his breath sings a eulogy of smoke. From the ashtray, a clean gray line rises and pulls his gaze through the mirror. A placard bouqueted with balloon animals on the wall behind him:
! S E L K C I P. Beside the placard, Norman plops before his own vanity, outwardly pristine. He’s hollow—chasms for eyes now that the audience has gone.
When no one is watching, Norman ceases to exist. Even as I watch him through the mirror, he is another mirror. He’s exhausted. I wish my presence stilled him. Because there’s no need for him to perform for me. I’ve already seen who he is: painfully ordinary, violent in his refusal to accept it. Still a mirror.
Am I Norman?
Stanley continues to watch Norman through the vanity as hollowness metastasizes into humiliation and fury. Norman channels fury into his smartphone. Dial tones become rage, compounding with each voicemail greeting he receives. The air now festers. Hiss.
Stanley slides open a drawer for a cotton pad and squeezes baby oil onto it. He wipes the blue from his face. Tonight, I will be green.
A bead of sapphire drips from cheekbone to jowl, revealing a deep black blemish underneath. He scrubs more diligently. The rhythm of his scrubbing carves space for recollection to intrude: “He’s excellent with people and so easy to work with.” “Where would we be without you?” He rubs into the blemish. The cotton pad frays.
As his pores water, he switches to isopropyl alcohol. The mirror constricts around his reflection. The mark on his cheekbone persists, even as the blue from his face drains. His jaw locks. “We need you—can you do Sunday? No one else can work the crowd quite like you.” Sunday is booked but he can move it—it was a family dinner. But he can’t move the dinner to a weekday. Work. The weekend after there’s a wedding he must attend and the weekend after that, he has promised his son they’ll run a half-marathon together.
Obligations—I’m failing someone either way. The cotton pad has gone, and he abrades the blemish with the whorls of his fingerprints. Pink, blue, black—all under fingernails. The alcohol is potent kindling for the burn in his cheek. What color was the smudge? What color was I?
***
A respite from stain removal, he watches Norman through the mirror as sour snaps to saccharine clamor. A call connects. Cords form on Norman’s neck. Beaming, he squeals into his phone: “There you are! Nice to actually hear your voice.” Noise. Stanley reaches for a tangle of steel wool and dresses it in peroxide. On cue, the air sours again, pennies in the mouth. “How am I the abusive one? You’re the one who sent me to voicemail—three times. You’re being vociferant.” Stanley cringes at the malaprop. I don’t think that’s what ‘vociferous’ means. “I’m done. Pure catoptromancy.” Norman rips papers to show he’s livid before hanging up. Sated, Norman pulls a sliver of the sour out the door with him, then slams it shut. Attention is oxygen for him. I want the fumes. I am not Norman.
Stanley returns to the raw of his cheekbone and scrapes with the wool. The peroxide bubbles—pink foam. Meat.
“Don’t get me wrong, he’s such a good person, just not the best father.” He swallows a wince. He erodes.
“You don’t care about us anymore.” A mess.
“If you can’t be everything for everyone, why be anything at all?” No one ever said this to me.
Through mirrors, clarity: the ivory peeks from beneath the debris on his face. It is laced with strings of red confetti. At the center, there is only bone. Shabby wood and glass gag him; finally, his reflection speaks. “Oh, Pickles. What a mess you’ve become.”
Photo of Mitchell Ny
BIO: Mitchell Ny is a Cambodian-Taiwanese writer based in Southern California. His work appears in Maudlin House, Same Faces Collective, Bending Genres, and he was a finalist for ALR’s 2026 Nonfiction Contest. He writes to wring from the mess: the scrappy, the ugly, and the brazenly beautiful.