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REFRACTION
The mirror sits at the place of honour, circled with flowers in the middle of the long table: a butterfly net for candlelight, one wide eye for the blind. Guests in autumn colours slide in to sit around the table, rustling and laughing delicately, small movements, each piece of jewellery one scale on a glittering fish. The mirror has a name, and his name is Pilgrim. Pilgrim has seen many things, and is scarred
with tiny fractures in his glass; he does not believe in this ceremony, the fire and gold.
Somewhere in the hall, a little boy and a wheelbarrow hide inside the seashell of the fireplace and watch the guests come in from dancing, one by one. The little boy's name is Jacob; his wheelbarrow's name is Sweet Apricot, and she has flirtatious wheels, a wide grin, and a mouth full of dried leaves and half-empty tubes of paint, twisted like twigs. Pilgrim thinks that in another life Sweet Apricot was a treehouse. He thinks: no one loves Jacob more.
The dinner table glints with porcelain and fine silverware, candles shining through red wine in thimble glasses. Jacob tucks himself into his wheelbarrow until the two of them are nestled in the fireplace, black-hearted and glowing like two snug coals. Jacob takes off his glasses and carefully places them inside Sweet Apricot's smile.
"Look," he says to her. "There is a woman with antlers on her forehead."
There is a woman with antlers on her forehead. She has icicles in the forest of her hair, and she is tundra, wasteland, an empty cathedral. She licks white ash or powdered sugar from her fingertips with terrible deliberation, one at a time, and her tongue is a map of the sky at night, the pinprick stars and their stories.
"Over there, Sweet," Jacob says. "There's a man with a birdcage in his chest."
There is a man with a birdcage in his chest. His ribs are curlicues of golden wire, and his heart is an aviary: oriole, goldfinch, flame robin. His bloodstream is a rainbow of feathers.
Pilgrim does not see antlers or birds at the dinner table, but sees them reflected in Jacob's eyes, somewhere between the glass and the bone. Pilgrim watches.
Once upon a time Jacob met a witch. The witch wore a lump of blue lace agate next to her heart and drank strong thyme tea with honey. She smashed glass bottles and dangled the shards over her windows on string, so her house was a prism of light. Jacob met her on his way to school, pushing Sweet Apricot in front of him. She sat on a brick wall with her legs swinging. Jacob and the witch studied one another cautiously.
The witch said, "Your eyes are weather vanes without the wind."
Jacob smiled and nodded. "Your eyes are spiders, trying to crawl away," he said.
The witch took Jacob back to her home and gave him cold water in a wooden bowl. Jacob took off his glasses and watched colours ripple through the water: turquoise, magenta, teal, forest fire, conch shell, fever. The witch murmured something polite and scientific. She made him sausages. "You can see inside of people," she told him matter-of-factly, "like still water. You can see the brightest parts, the strangest parts. Those little corners and doorways. It is a rare thing. You are an odd boy, Jacob. You will do one great thing," she said, "before you die."
The witch died. The spiders living in her eye sockets skittered around her kitchen, spinning webs in her honour, and Jacob recited the names of colours like a funeral hymn. He went to her grave in his best clothes. "Dear witch," he said, to the criss-cross marble headstone. "I'm sorry you are dead. Someday when I know all the colours in the world I will make you a new colour, and I will call it Witch. This will be the one great thing I do. Goodbye, witch," he said. The spiders, who had followed him to the graveyard, spun silk in a whir, their tiny bodies whistling, until the headstone had been webbed over and over like the cocoon for a great grey butterfly.
Pilgrim has lived through a hundred years. He never saw Da Vinci write like a spider back-to-front before his face, but he has seen fire and water and death. For a long time Pilgrim lived in a house grown over like a forest: birds in the ribs of the rafters, vines splitting the walls, wild cats stalking every room like kings. Pilgrim lived in a pawn shop with paper tacked over his eye. He fell asleep there, and woke up in a room of colour and light.
In the wrinkle and flash of bodies, blind except for colour, Jacob suddenly meets Pilgrim's eye, and Pilgrim sees the little boy stiffen. They are reflected to one another, back and forth and back, a hundred thousand mirrors and red wheelbarrows and little boys, a thousand thousand diners at the long table, silver spoons and napkin rings. Jacob is stained glass when the light shines through it. To him, Pilgrim is all colours, tarnished with colours, beautiful and unnameable, and somewhere is his one new colour, his one great thing.
Becca De La Rosa's fiction has appeared, among other places, in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and the Fantasy anthology published by Prime Books. She is currently attending university in Dublin. Stop by her website at www.beccadelarosa.com.
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