I removed the cover from the mirror and took a long look. Almost immediately that familiar tingling rushed through me like every single nerve ending was being tickled and teased all at once. When the tingling finally faded, Nichole was looking back at me. She looked just like she had that night that we had first met. “It’s good to see you again, I love you and I’ve missed you so much,” I said to her, just as I had every Halloween night for the past five years before covering the mirror once again and getting dressed in the Cinderella costume that I had bought for this year.

Halloween had always been Nikki’s favorite time of year, every year she used to go all out on her costume. I had lost her on Halloween too. Six years ago we had been driving home from a party when our car was t-boned by a drunk, driving one of those super-sized pickup trucks. If only I had been driving instead of her, I could have died in her place and she could have gone on with her life. She deserved to live. She was kind, funny, intelligent, and always thinking of others before herself. I had never been that kind of person until I had met her and I often wondered what I could have ever done to deserve her, and for the past six years, I had wondered what I had done to deserve having her so cruelly taken from me.

Even now I tried to be the kind of person she would be proud of, but her death had crushed me. I was a ghost of the man I used to be, and I had vowed that I would do anything for just one last night with her. I had been willing to give anything a try to get what I was after and even went on message boards online that talked about magic. That was where I met Lillian, the pretty and lonely young woman who sold me the mirror nearly a year after Nikki’s death. She claimed that a witch had enchanted the mirror for her a long time ago, but I hadn’t believed her at the time. All that I had known was that she said that it could let me see my precious Nikki again. She told me about the mirror and that for one night each year I could use it to see her again looking just as she did when we met.

She said that the mirror was not without its dangers; that I could grow to hate her or find that I couldn’t live without her. I could never see the first happening and as for the second, well, I had felt that I already couldn’t live without her. My only hope had been that I could have that one more night with her. She warned me that if I didn’t look in the mirror again before midnight of the same night to change back that I would be stuck in Nikki’s body forever, never aging and having to look at her face whenever I saw my reflection for all eternity.

For those first few years, my only joy came on that one night of the year that I could use the mirror. That one night that I could see her face again, touch her skin, and tell her the words that I never got to say near enough while she was still with me. It was no longer enough. She should live on, not this sad hollow man who lived for one night a year in the body of his lost love. She could move on with her life and be happy, I was sure of it. Lillian was right, I couldn’t live without her, I couldn’t live without being her.

A knock at the door interrupted my musings while I was in the bathroom finishing my makeup. I double-checked that I had done a good job on it, I had been practicing for a while now, and then I put on the glass slippers and adjusted the tiara before saying to the young woman in the bathroom mirror, “Thanks for seeing me through this Nikki, I’ll never forget you.”

I made my way to the door where Lillian was waiting and smiling at me. “Hey… Nikki. Are you ready to have some fun?” There was concern in her eyes and she was giving me a chance to back out, and what she was really asking me was, ‘Are you sure that you want to do this?’ She knew how hard this decision could be after all.

“Of course I’m ready sweetheart, Halloween is my favorite night of the year. Let’s go have some fun, unlike Cinderella, I don’t have to be home by midnight after all.” I wasn’t worried and I had no doubts that this was what I wanted. Lillian and I could be happy together and Nikki would live on, just as Lillian had. I would find someone in need to sell the mirror to tomorrow.