Some prisons have no bars. They have numbers.
A soft, ominous click.
The iron lock sprang open.
Pedantic darkness didn’t await.
I looked around, eyes sweeping corners, before stepping through.
Into the —
Light. Not a pitch-black shroud of darkness.
But a ritzy wing of the Lim’s questionable abode.
Grandeur that surpassed anything I’d ever laid my eyes on.
Crystal chandeliers. Mirrors with ornate, gold frames.
Wallpaper with an opulent, oppressive purple velvet sheen.
A ballroom touched by a golden grift, untouched by dust.
The Lim’s private residence.
I made my way slowly through the gilded ballroom, its grandeur overwhelming my breath.
Each chair. Each chandelier. Each polished floorboard.
Raised a question.
How many girls paid for this?
Splendour. Not splendiforous.
But purchased.
Every ornament bore unseen fingerprints.
Every item, an exchange for comfort.
And at the opposite end of the ballroom, a portrait.
Empty.
Below that, a brass plaque, golden, neatly wiped.
But somehow tainted. Tarnished.
A bold engraving etched firmly.
The girl. Missing. Unidentified.
Nameless.
L14.
I stood there for a long while, rooted by fear and realisation.
Then, the click-clack of heels. Not elegant. Ponderous.
A shimmer, to my right, in the hallway.
In a forgotten Chinese cheongsam.
Her mouth rounded in that familiar, silenced gasp.
Almost a scream.
She extends her hands. Not for me. Not for the portrait.
For the brass plaque.
Her fingers trembled as they circled it.
“This was never my name.”
In a flash, I comprehended.
And she nodded, wanly.
Her elegant, well-chiselled face shaped not by beauty, but by sorrow.
The Lims had never wanted or recorded names.
Only inventory.
Faint whispers, coming, in a synchronised chorus, from the portraits around me.
The girls.
Each reclaiming.
Each trying not to fade.
L14 slowly lifts the brass plaque.
It comes away, with almost no effort.
Underneath, carved marks nearly undecipherable —
A girl’s name.
The portraits around me started stirring.
And blinking.
Mouths slowly rounding in dreaded gasps.
One.
By.
One —
They whispered. Then their whispers became voices.
Not pleading voices.
Voices that recollected.
Then, L14 smiled.
She hadn’t escaped the Lims, or their arrangements.
But because she had been reclaimed.
The floor beneath my feet shook.
Then…
A tap
Tap.
Tap.
The sound of leather shoes clicking across polished marble.
They didn’t belong to any missing girl.
But to someone else.
With a distinguishable male swagger.
The portraits fell silent.
The spectre of the forgotten girl turned.
Her mouth. In a gasp.
Mirrors of the Mind by Michelle Liew is a collection of psychological and supernatural short stories that explore the quiet unease beneath ordinary moments. These are not tales of spectacle, but of subtle fracture — where memory distorts, silence speaks, and the self is not always singular. In these stories, what is unseen often carries the greatest weight, and what lingers is not what is shown, but what is felt.
