"The Mirror" by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

The Mirror

by

Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

“That won’t bring Mara back! Please!” Renato cried.

Malena crossed the threshold of the villa. Beyond its high, wide windows, the dreaded waters of Lake Como -dead calm, lying blue- spread out behind the two of them. Her monogrammed leather bags weighed on the incline of her thin shoulder for what little they carried-- some clothing, a few toiletries. A sheltered life, a charmed life, had thus far hardly prepared her for predicting what those necessities might in fact be. One thing she had decided on though, no mementos. She would carry no trace of the life that Renato had so loved snapping shots of, all those lazy hours with a prosecco on the porticoed terrace waiting for dinner to be served, a Campari on the boat. She would carry no reminders of how Renato let Mara pretend to sail, or how her little daughter played mermaid with her in the shallows, Malena never allowing her too far out, teaching her to swim in the pool that looked out upon the cerulean waters resting between the rising slopes that contained them. This would be too heavy a burden for even her sturdily crafted luggage.

She wasn’t sure where she could run, but it must be far from anyone she knew, from all that was familiar, anything to escape that gurgling cry and the deceptive surface of the waters. Otherwise, she knew she would follow their daughter’s path to the lake, fathoms and fathoms below, beyond the reach of any light, and like her, never return. She vowed to never touch wine again. Framed between the marble columns of the doorway, Renato stood, fingers flexing as though trying to hold back nothingness, then followed her out into the falling darkness, his warm hand grasping her forearm, “I know you hurt. I hurt too, but you can’t just run off and bury yourself in some godforsaken backwater and throw everything else we have away!”

“Watch me.”

 

***

Within the high walls of the fortress, the museum director had warned her, “Well, outside of occasional field trips from the grammar school, we don’t get a lot of traffic.” He looked doubtfully at the bias-cut silk of a dress that might have lost its way to a photo shoot on a catwalk in Milan. “We have uniforms for the guardians. We need someone, and now, but are you sure this is the right job for you?”

Malena, however, stood ready to don the stiff and scratchy navy-blue polyester twill and all that came with it. She had already sold the sleek little red convertible for a song: good riddance to bad rubbish. A bike would now take her to and from this, her first job. Nor could Renato have any idea how to locate her, here in this hamlet she’d never heard of before, north of Rome. In the deep, lush green of Tuscia, craters and low-swelling foothills made for lakes of her nightmares, but she refused to settle near any body of still-lying water. When she found Vulquinia, she hesitated only at the roiling tributary of the Tiber running in front of the museum gates. But the fact of the town’s few amenities appealed to her, as though, like her, its winding, cobbled streets refused comfort and convenience. Only one small grocer with some boxed pasta and the odd bunch of tomatoes, alongside another lonely shop or two kept it from utter dormancy. She approved and decided that the Museo Civico would serve as setting for her life sentence, her chosen prison with the thick stone of its ramparts from another age.

Alone with her thoughts, she could embrace long, dull days - one much like another. Swallowed by silence and solitude, she would watch over empty rooms with their damaged gesso moldings that had once endeavored to temper the castle's stern origins in long-ago warfare. The cause of those wars was but vaguely recalled from history classes, for she had done more note-passing and chattering than listening. Still, she was pleased to learn from the prospectus that the museum had even actually served as a prison in such days. As she left the interview, she traced her finger into the grooves of the graffiti left by the incarcerated of times past, words carved into its dank walls, traces at once concrete and spectral of the suffering they once contained.

She would have welcomed ghosts, or at least one, a small one, to haunt her, but there was no such luck, only the cobwebs hanging from remnants of Baroque frescoes looking down from the high ceilings. Lake Como’s elegant homes and sparkling parties receded into an unreachable distance, a tide gone out forever, someone else’s life entirely. Far away lay that blue expanse that would not leave her dreams in what little sleep she managed since Mara’s death. Had she ever been that woman that Renato married? It seemed there had once lived someone young and fond of parties, company, laughter, dinners, her doors always open, welcoming in friends, and friends of friends, no one a stranger, reveling in sharing the warmth of her home, her own good fortune, with others whether she knew them or not. Whoever this woman had been, Malena did not know her anymore.

***

Biking to work and holding her breath as she crossed the river, she arrived early, well before opening hours. She had little enough to do as the sun dawned away any chance at rest. The thankfully small futon of the furnished efficiency apartment still left her unused to nights alone and at every toss and turn she would expect the warm, fleshy forms of Renato there for comfort, his meaty arms to fold her in, before she remembered that she deserved nothing of the kind. She waited until sunrise. Morning meant only the monumental effort of a brief, painful shower, and some black coffee medicinally swallowed back, almost against her will. With nothing else to do, she went to work.

In those hours before the official opening time, she wandered the labyrinth of corridors. At one point after the vestibule, she lost her way, one hallway seeming to circle onto another, into each other like so many fractals. Even the graffiti failed to serve as marker for which room was which, her gaze glancing off the exhibits lost suspended in time. Once she found her bearings, she passed through a room housing the third-tier Quattrocento masters. Another held anonymous painted crosses on one wall and Virgin and Child panels on the other, but she scurried past the latter. Further into the museum the Roman busts stared out from the past. Into the future, she wondered, or perhaps simply into the void? It was not a thought she cared to think for long and pursued the twisting halls to the final room. This lay in the very back, containing objects found on local digs of burial grounds and presenting remains of Etruscan culture. It had apparently served as antechamber to a room behind a door now labeled “storage.”

She contemplated the back wall of the antechamber, a detached fresco from a painted tomb. The tag identified the scene as Orpheus, or Urphe according to the Etruscan tongue, crossing the river of the dead, descending into the realm of Aita - their name for Hades, Persephone’s husband, it explained-- to bring back Eurydice. 

When she turned away, she found herself confronted with a transparent case holding a twin sarcophagus of a reclining husband and wife in terra cotta that dominated the collection. They lay joined forever, with a cup lifted in a toast to eternity, a love bonded in death that sealed them together for the centuries beyond. She recalled the last time she heard Renato laugh on the lido that day. It was the last time she had laughed, too. After they had toasted their anniversary, another glass, for ten years of shared happiness, seven of those years with the joy their child had brought. Malena had not thought at the time she might grow happier, and yet th this baby, who became then a small sprightly person, redoubled her love for Renato and she thought of how that love would nourish their daughter as she grew into a young woman. He whispered one of his ridiculous puns to Malena and she laughed less at the joke than at its pure silliness. It was their hilarity that covered over Mara’s spluttering. Malena shuddered, looking away from the effigies.

Another case held votive offerings to the gods, she read. Statuettes of swaddled babes caught her eye and she looked to another case. Other tags didn’t help, many identifying various wine vessels: a kylix, a skyphos, an oinochoe, olpes and olla. In another case stood a funerary urn with head and hands and feet, cindered remains contained in a semblance of the body. She wondered if the soul could be far behind. A strigil apparently kept such a soul clean in the afterlife as well as the mortal coil on this side of existence. Still other objects--things she might have found on her own dressing table, back when she had cared about such matters--told of the tie binding lives lived on either side of the grave: earrings and bracelets, a hairpin, a ring, a perfume jar, a mirror. The long-dead woman must once have gazed therein to find herself presentable for a party, for her husband, for herself.

All such things had been banished from Malena’s life, most especially anything that would force her to look at herself again, except for examining her own soul. She certainly had no mirror with her, no compacts, nothing of the kind. As for the door to the empty medicine cabinet in the bathroom of her cramped new quarters, so coldly surgical, she knew tricks to avoid its gaze. She thought too of the looking glass she had found left behind by some other renter, lurking in the vanity’s drawer. She had carefully turned it face down with the barest tips of her fingers – as though handling a venomous creature – and never touched it after.

Malena leaned over the display case containing the ancient mirror and squinted to better make out the engraving on its back, but the museum lighting contrived to show her only fingerprint traces from the days or weeks before, and her own vague shadow upon the protective glass. The new lines marking her lips and forehead mingled to confusion with those of the etched figures she could not make sense of.

At the sudden squeal of a child’s cry, she turned and found a little, white-bearded man opening the door from the storeroom, a large set of keys in hand.

“I oil and oil, the hinge catches anyway. I am Veturio.” He shuffled about his business opening locked doors, then swept on in silence.

“Yes, I’m Malena.” She stopped there, unsure whether to use Renato’s surname or that from before her marriage, another different, dead, self. “The new surveillance,” she added, “Do you need any help? My hands are free.” She didn’t like to see this ancient fellow hunching over and bending down but tried to diplomatically bury that concern in new-personnel helpfulness. Unused to jobs and coworkers, she hoped this was how they did it.

“No, no, thank you. These tasks are my calling, and I’ve been at them a long time. ‘Malena,’ you say?” He looked to her and to the display case and back again, with a curious gaze, and continued silently polishing the glass – so it was cleaned after all – and chasing away the dust. Then he left, closing the doors behind him again.

In her isolation, she stared into the dust motes falling past the flaking plaster, so many souls of the dead come back to accuse.

***

Again, the next day, in the early morning hours, she wended her way down the confusing corridors, still unsure of the path, until that final antechamber, the Etruscan burial collection where, for reasons that escaped her, she felt most at ease. She returned to the mirror’s stand, and once more the overhead lights served as a kind of veil against perceiving the scene depicted. Only her reflection peered back from the case’s clear glass, showing the shadowy circles under her eyes. Small handprints blurred what she could see even of herself. And yet she had witnessed the janitor wiping the cases clean each morning and evening.

A squeal sliced through the silence and Veturio shuffled in with his slight and stooped paunch, enacting his wordless, ritual war against the ever-present dust and cobwebs and finger traces, keys at his belt, unlocking the doors, oiling the hinges. She jumped at the noise, so like a child’s voice in pain.

He looked to her and looked to the mirror and back at her.

“Malena.” It was both statement and question, neither of which she entirely understood. He seemed about to pursue this when throngs of children overran the room, their cheery clamor infusing a sense of life into the tomb, their shouts and laughter piercing her through. Malena’s whole body ached.

As the weeks progressed, she learned to dread Wednesdays with their sudden onslaughts of the field trippers, all movement and ruckus. She tried as best she could to steel herself against their giggling, their cries, the flurry of their tiny bodies. Malena felt it all the more keenly in that she had no escape but must follow them and watch carefully for clumsy gestures of small hands that might accidentally damage something. At first, she wished for Renato. Only his calm and anchoring presence ever eased her anguish, but such comfort was impossible. Even having him nearby, tho only other person who would know the echoing horrors brought on by high-pitched glee. She had, however, slammed that door shut. His strength, she thought, could open it again had she so much as left a forwarding address. Regrets gnawed at her, but this was how matters had to be.

She began to take this unruly mob of childish hue and cry as a kind of punishment. She relished the pain they brought as penance for leaving her daughter to be swallowed up by the lake while she was distracted with a second glass of wine and with her husband, the two of them wrapped up in one another. Not that penance would ever allow her to escape this hell, but she could embrace the torment these classes of eight-year-olds came to inflict, all unawares.

It was an age Mara would never see, perpetually seven, lying under the glinting, reflective depths of the lake. The authorities never found her little body, drag though they did, for days on end. They had already had to pull Malena and Renato from the waters, searching for the form of their lost daughter until they barely had breath left themselves. Renato had collapsed on the deck, utterly defeated. She had stood by, stoic.

With no remains, Malena had never managed to cry, not even at the funeral with a coffin empty of Mara, who lay still in the bottomless belly of Como. Without a body to mourn she could not weep. And when she remembered that funeral, dry-eyed still, she could not but hate herself more for her lack of tears. Had she not loved Mara enough, had she loved her at all? Had she acted towards her that day as a mother should, would she have lost her?

When the bustle and stir of the field trippers subsided, she returned to the thoughts that never truly left her, obsessing her imagination with water closing over a head and the suffocated screams that she noticed only after she had set down her glass. She shook her head as though to dislodge the image, and re-centered herself in the present, amidst this detritus of a world dug up from death.

A spot of sunlight reflected onto the wall from the mirror. She rose and went to the object. It might even have called her by name. Perhaps she might defy the display case this time and make out the scene engraved.

Then at a squeal of the door hinge, in doddered Veturio, who looked back and forth from her to the mirror.

She spoke to break the awkward stillness, “I wish I could see it, but the lighting always gets in the way, I can’t make anything out.”

Veturio said nothing but shut off the switch to the overhead lamps and stepped closer. In the half-light she could see the shadowy furrows etching his face, the tufts of greyish hair at his ears, and the deep green -shades of the landscape outside the walls– of his clouded eyes. His knobby fingers hovered just over the glass, over the tiny, spectral handprints, and traced the mirror’s figures that lay across that invisible barrier, along the lines of the strange, engraved lettering of the looking glass. At once the scene coalesced, just as he described it to her, with a warmth and animation that defied memorized texts or the bloodless narration of historians.

“First you must understand,” he explained in the vibrant tone of a much younger man, “this goddess who watches over what grows, you may remember the Roman Ceres or the Greek Demeter. For Etruscans she was known as Vei. But this is also the goddess of love, Turan, whom you know as Aphrodite or Venus. She is a mix of the two goddesses, particular to this mirror. Vei-Turan has lost her daughter to the god of shades, Aita. Charun, who ferries over souls into the underworld, is seeking with her in the mirror whether aught can be done to bring the girl back up to the lands above, which risk turning to waste with the mourning of her mother.”

She started. He could not possibly have any means of knowing her own story, not even the museum director who hired her had any idea what she was running from, only had his suspicions that she was running at all. And then, too, she thought of the janitor’s eyes, bleared by his cataracts. Had he memorized the scene from earlier days, when his vision was clearer? For this was no reading from a captioned text; these were his own words, describing the etching on the mirror’s back and its meaning, as his thick-knuckled index and middle fingers followed the curves of the forms depicted.

Now his finger followed the lines of the inscription from right to left, corresponding sounds to meaning.

“Hinthial, meaning a mirror’s reflection…” he began, in his gravelly tone,

“I see” she replied, not at all sure that she in fact did.

“...but can also mean ‘soul’ or ‘shade’ of person passed. Notice this word here,” again he traced the signs with his knobby, arthritic finger. “Suthina- ‘of the grave.’” At this, he took out his keys and lifted away the display case, turning the mirror over. Dulled, crusted layers of patina told of the ages separating it from its first use and from those long dead –perhaps even their souls -- who had held it daily, held it perhaps still, gazing at and into whatever the reflection shared. Despite the lifetimes the mirror had spent entombed with them, in the hands of Veturio, a brief gleam darted from the mirror’s obverse. Malena thought this surely a trick of the dim light and the afternoon sun pouring in. Then she could see nothing but the corroded surface marred with a gash.

“Did the damage come from the dig?

“No, indeed. For Etruscans, mirrors should only ever hold but one reflection, one soul, for which they were made, often a marriage gift to a bride, ending up in the grave, they were unfit for their first purpose and now only held the hinthial of the deceased. Otherwise, they were used for divination. This one joined together those uses, a means for a bride to adorn herself for love, the means for one lost in grief to gaze into the future and find perhaps the key to the past.”

The mirror lay there, holding on both its faces a tale that the old man seemed to decipher as though translating a beloved mother tongue. He seemed to speak with authority, of something known, secrets held, secrets still alive, surviving even now.

***

When the day arrived marking a year since her daughter drowned, and thus the anniversary of her equally dead marriage, she nevertheless biked in to work, numb. She held her breath as the wheels coasted over the bridge’s cobbles, over the waters, until she was safely inside the museum.

In the antechamber, the Etruscan room, a consortium of archeologists trooped in for a lecture about the collection to a sparse group of art history students. Only age differentiated instructors from students, both in their rumpled jeans and backpacks. The handful of young people milled about, glancing – some casually, some attentively – at the displays. Malena, relieved for once at the lack of schoolchildren, today of all days, sat in her chair by the doorway and listened in as they approached the mirror’s case, and the leader began to speak.

“Perhaps the most mysterious object in the collection, its iconography remains undeciphered. The central female figure has aspects that identify her as Turan, goddess of love, note the mirror she is holding up to her own nudity. But then other aspects – notice in her other hand the sheaf of wheat – seem to indicate Vei. Either is unsurprising for a mirror that would have likely been a woman’s marriage gift but we have no other example that combines the symbols of the two into one figure. Further, the winged demon is Charun-Charon who is not usually associated with either but they both seem to be gazing into that same object, a mirror embedded in a mirror, gazing in ritual fashion, with the gestures that evoke divination.”

Beyond that she did not follow, but wondered again that Veturio seemed to understand it so much better than the experts did. And his words as he told the tale had been so much realer than this clinical description. Or did his explanation -- that defied eyes surely half-blind-- correspond to something he had memorized from long ago? She could not believe that the words welling up as if conjured from his lips could be simply a garbled version of this dry and cautious discourse.

Eventually, students and professors left aside their hesitations and theories, and filed out while the janitor followed in and went about his stooped way, cleaning up all traces of fingers and hands and closing doors with lock and key.

***

Another sleepless night with her temples splitting and no Renato to rub her head, speaking words of comfort that he alone knew the secret of. Had she stayed he might now be simply holding her in the shared silence of another blighted heart. She rose to get her headache pills, not daring to keep them too close to her bedside. In the bathroom, they occupied the vanity drawer rather than the medicine cabinet, the better to dodge her reflection there.



Yet beside the pills lay, as if in wait, the hand-held looking glass, left behind by the person who had abandoned these lodgings before her. How it had turned face up she did not know, for she never touched the thing, but she caught sight of her own face there as she grabbed the blister pack. 

The reflection seemed to stir as the looking glass stared upward to some disturbance of its tranquil surface, beyond her hand reaching for the pills. It glinted; something blue blinked. Unsure of what she had glimpsed, she grabbed the mirror handle and looked at it, hoping for that blue eye she was sure she’d seen. Only her rumpled hair and the circled, reddened, gaze of her own dark eyes stared back at her. Then she held it by her face, gazing at the same time into the mirrored medicine cabinet. A face stared back, an infinite succession of faces receding into an eternal distance, of round smooth cheeks and beestung lips and wide cerulean eyes.

She shattered the medicine cabinet door with the looking glass and began to fill the tub, heedless of the shards of mirror scattered now all over the sink, counter and floor, gagging back a taste of wine which she had not touched since the incident.

She took one of these pieces and stared into her own brown eye as the water rose in the bath. Waiting for it to reach the level she wanted, she etched into the soft, thin flesh of her wrist. A stark red line bubbled upward. The idea of her body festering under the water for days, if not weeks, before they would find her appealed. She hoped for no atonement. She thought to write a note, a letter perhaps to Renato, to speak of the screaming weight of Mara’s absence that ripped them apart, that she missed him and could not find her way back to the life they shared, to their love. Words did not come.

Her arms over the white porcelain, she bled into the tub. As pale pink tinged the water a color of pomegranate seeds, Mara’s form appeared lying at the bottom, as she had been in life, no bloating, no trace of fish feeding, the images that plagued Malena, waking or sleeping. It was Mara playing mermaid again. Holding her breath. Then bubbles rose.


Hand on the mirror fragment, Malena tried to climb into the tub, put one foot in the water and her whole being refused it, refused to enter that element. As Malena’s wrist ceased to bleed, Mara’s image, her body floated to the surface, rippled and vanished.

Malena decided herself a failure even at this, even at death as well as bringer of life, mother. She sobbed among the mirror shards glittering on the cold tile until she fell asleep. She dreamed of Charun ferrying her across black, reflective waters, staring down into them and telling her that her daughter was trapped, yet breathed. This, while Turan admired her own figure and laughed, merging into Vei shrieking in her loss. A glacial freeze overtook Malena’s body now and the waters became ice enfolding her. She heard her name spoken, a clear statement of “Malena” and a sound of gurgling, so like the cry of her daughter dying. She awoke to the rose-tinted water swirling down into the drain that her own hand had not unstopped.

***

“Is this the dead people room?”

Lost in her thoughts about trying again tonight, she looked around for the little voice that had just seared through her. Before her stood a small child, with long blond hair just washed and not quite yet dry. She wasn’t sure whether those great, wide eyes, tinted blue and green, the color of Mara’s, of Renato’s, belonged to a boy or a girl. A child so young must be accompanied, if only for museum rules, but Malena could see no guardian nearby.

“This is the room that has objects from burials. Where are your parents?” Malena answered gently, confused as this was not the day scheduled for schoolchildren.

“Oh, they’re here somewhere. Tell me about that couple over there.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Did they love each other?”

“I think they must have.”

“Did they have children?”

Malena surprised herself and, caught up in the moment, replied, “They had a child who looked just like you!”

“Why are you so sad?”

“Am I sad, then?”

“You shouldn’t be. Look at those dead people there, they are smiling and having fun!”

“Where is your mother, where is your father?”

“I don’t know - they’ll be here soon. What is your name?”

“Malena.”

“I know that word, that was what they called mirrors.”

“Who did?”

At this, the child rolled their eyes and clucked their tongue. “The people that lived here before– the dead people.”

Malena took the little one by the fragile fingers – the feeling of them nestling into her palm was both joy and misery. The different collections, the bathroom, the storeroom all stood empty. Again, there would be no school group today and then she looked at the hour – the museum had already closed to the public. She dropped the tiny hand from hers, just for the moment it took to open the office doors, crying “This child – the parents are nowhere to be found – I think she – he- must be lost...”

She spoke to an empty room. Everyone had gone home for the day.

Malena turned to ask the child’s name and address, finding instead nothing but pure absence. She ran through the museum corridors, her footsteps echoing off the marble until the confusion of corridors left her hopelessly lost, her way confounded by the doorways seeming to open upon each other with no logical procession. A cry of panic welled up in her throat. Was there even anyone left in this place to hear her?

In her confusion she wanted to call out. If she did, however, would it be the living to respond or some other kind of entity? She thought of that web of underground tombs perhaps burrowing through the foundations of the fortress, this prison, burial grounds whose dead bore up its very weight. She thought of the hands that dug their despair into the stone of those walls, vestiges of how they rotted their lives away trapped within them, hands that seemed increasingly alive, if not well, increasingly willing to take her own hand and lead her somewhere she was not sure she wished to go. Those prisoners’ traces, their silent, incised cries, threatened, time out of mind, to erupt into presence.

As this impression engulfed her, paralysing her, a door squealed open. Veturio appeared at the threshold, as though from thin air, turning toward her. For a brief moment, in the dimness of the unlit rooms, his head almost seemed to have two faces, one before and one behind. Malena shook her own head to see more clearly. As he led her back to the antechamber under a taunting of cobwebs, he spoke.

“Sorrow and pain still invest this old pile with anguish that rises up sometimes from the past and comes to confuse the unwary, to lead them astray. It wasn’t always so. As old as the museum walls may be, time was they didn’t scar the landscape. All this ground was just unbroken green. The haruspices –that was what they called them, the priests-- elected these fields as eternal home of those who had passed, elders, children, husbands and wives. It was a holy place, in short.”

They arrived finally at the antechamber, the Etruscan room, whence she could take the spiral stairwell down to her locker below, and there stand some chance of regaining her sense of reality. But when she saw a puddle lying at the foot of the mirror case, the confusion came upon her again. How could water pool here and nowhere else in the museum? She knew of no leaks. She looked to the janitor, puzzled.

He answered her glance while mopping, tossing off his sentences in passing, as though they offered an easy explanation of the puddle creeping into her shoes. “Water was essential to crossing to the hereafter, it served as the element of that passage, as accompanied by guides to the afterlife, who navigated so that the soul --remember the hinthial, the reflection-- might not be lost to the waves, bringing them safely ashore to the hereafter. Sometimes they get called demons of a sort, but they are not evil.” When she did not respond, he continued, “Not only water though. Blood too. Women used to bite the insides of their mouths till they bled down their own throats to satisfy the dead.” He set aside the mop to polish the case, wiping his cleaning rag over the clear surface. As if in passing, he offered further explanation, “Mirrors, like water, were windows, gateways to negotiate that passage between fate and fortune, the living and the dead.”

***

Once more before the ancient mirror the following morning, she found the case again stamped over with tiny handprints, though she had with her own eyes seen Veturio polishing the glass yesterday after closing. These prints frightened her out of the somnolence of her sleepless night, spent obsessing over the little creature who had so suddenly vanished from her view, the feeling of the child’s hand in hers, the disappearance. She swallowed back her turmoil. Had the child returned somehow, or stowed away for the night hidden in one of the storerooms? How could Malena find them again?

A few visitors trailing in meant that she must take her seat by the door rather than obey her instinct to search for the child.

The hours crawled by. Had there been a sun this late winter afternoon, it would have been setting, but in its place steady rain came down the whole day long. She could hear the echo in other rooms of a tour guide informing his flock of what the centuries had left behind of themselves. Eventually he entered this final collection, the antechamber, leading in a group of retirees. Malena wondered at how these people whose own death breathed down their necks felt in visiting this tomb-- but then her own position was not so very different.

“– Now this people believed that crossing to the hereafter was a voyage through gateways, thresholds, vestibules, led by psychopomps, that is, those who guided the divided soul across these dangerous passages to their eternal rest. Charun you know as Charon - who ferried souls over the waters of Lethe for an obole, but Vanth too, a winged demoness who also guided them into the Beyond. Nor can we forget Culśanś, more familiar to us as Janus, the god of doorways and his role in transitions and beginnings. As such he is represented in his traditional bicephal guise, meaning endowed with two faces: one directed towards past and the other to the future...”

While the guide droned on a memorized speech, recalling the lifeless theories of the archeologists, Malena,suffering from lack of sleep, nearly nodded off despite her anxieties for the little one. Her name pronounced woke her. She caught his bit of speech: “...was the word for mirror…”  

He continued on to the wall painting stolen from the tomb, “You recall from your school days Orpheus, who for the Etruscans bore the name Urphe, who so loved his wife he descended into hell to fetch her from death and bring her back to the world above. Here is a masterful if naive representation of the moment just before he turns his head to lose her forever.”

Soon he guided his flock outward, but with the patter of raindrops on the roof, she dozed off in her exhaustion-- her mind rippling into images of Persephone asking Eurydice if she wished to return to the world above, when a tiny hand nudged her awake.

“Hello Malena-Mirror.” 

She found herself addressed by the child with the wet hair again. They must have been out in this downpour. She wanted to take a towel to that hair and dry the child, warm them, keep them safe and sheltered.

“Yes, it’s me,” she answered, wondering how they knew her name.

“I have something for you,” said the little one, and pressed some small objects into Malena’s palm. 

“That’s very kind of you- what did I do to deserve a gift?”

“It’s for the journey.”

“What journey?” Malena asked as she opened her fingers, revealing pomegranate seeds. The child did not answer. “Should I eat these?”

“It depends on if you’re hungry for them” the tiny voice replied.

She rested her fingers on the child’s forearm, glancing to the pink seeds in her palm, their tint rhyming with the wound peeking out from her cuff. As Malena looked up again, the child had vanished. 

When the janitor came in, she cried “Veturio! Have you seen a small child, blonde, so high, wet hair….?”

“I locked the doors some time ago.”

“But I must find her -him!”

“Perhaps I know a way.”

The old man went to the display case. As he lifted the glass box, she grabbed the mirror and saw nothing but the age-dulled, damaged metal, that verdigris again the color of Renato’s eyes, Mara’s eyes, the color of the lake closing over her. Veturio took the artifact from her and turned it over. As his fingers closed over the handle, the surface, burnished now, gleamed golden. The gash in the metal had melted away.

He held the mirror up to Malena’s face. Her head spun. She blinked at the rippling, liquid surface and saw there the blurred outlines of a child’s face. The one who had just disappeared seemed to stare back at her until the face morphed again. But though she could not see features distinctly, beyond all hints of resemblance as well as doubt she knew those shadowy lines emerging from the depths: the eyes were Mara’s eyes, confused with the blue-green of the lake that took her.

Malena looked to Veturio and carefully took the handle of the mirror, and as she did so it clouded once more over the visage and those aqua eyes became simply the verdigris of its corroded surface.

“Past or future?” said Veturio. “We never know what we are seeing when we gaze into somewhere beyond, somewhere we know despite being unable to know – the gates open, the doors onto something unknown, we cross a threshold into what is dark to us in the now.”

Before she could think of how to reply, Malena felt liquid seeping into her soles. A small puddle ebbed at her toes. At first, she saw only her own gaping face in the puddle’s reflection. Blinking, she saw at a second glance Veturio’s face staring back up at her, but lifting her gaze to his fleshly self, saw that his head had been turned to the doorway all the while. Those cragged and withered features had instead been imprinted on the back of his head. Her mind continued to swirl and spiral.

***

She descended the winding staircase into the shadows of the basement where her locker stood and took off her uniform. On some whim she barely understood herself, she searched her pockets for the pomegranate seeds, putting them in her mouth. Instead of the firm burst of sweetness she crunched down on something hard, spitting out of her mouth a coin. With the clumsy primitive minting, it bore a double profile of a man, looking both ahead and behind. It looked like something from the display cases, rusted and worn. It tasted of iron, of blood. The taste lingered.

Back in her street clothes she mounted her bike, carefully navigating the treacherous, slick streets. Her head still swam with the day’s events, the echoes of Veturio’s words. Then, at a glare of headlights, she swerved her bike’s wheels, already unsteady over the rail-less, cobbled bridge. Both bike and rider went flying into the chill current of the river.

As the river closed over her, wrapping her into its inexorable hold, she grasped onto the bike as it sank, letting the tow pull her further down. She quaffed the cold liquid into her lungs, the element that held her now like an icy amniotic fluid offering death instead of life, a sort of inverted baptism. Her horror subsided in the face of the finality it now offered. If only she had stones in her pockets to ease her passage to the riverbed. She imagined her arms and hair waving like algae. It seemed to her so strange that she had the leisure to think such thoughts, to be thinking at all. The water slowed time, held back one moment from following the next, suspending life from movement. She thought of this liquid embrace that ended her daughter’s life. This then was what she had felt, had lived through, had died of. A flash of pale flesh rippled before her and disappeared to appear once more, briefly, in and out of sight. She glimpsed this small form, hair streaming, fingers stretched wide, no bubbles issuing as it squirmed or danced in the flow. The figure came towards Malena, who recognized Mara and then did not. By turns her daughter’s features became those of the little child from the museum, arms wide open to Malena, looking at her with a question, urgent, lighting up their eyes in the darkened water that surrounded them. Malena thought of this hand in hers, grasped at it but it wriggled free. With a gasp full of river water, despite herself, she came up for air and swam to the bank. The river had at least washed the taste of blood from her mouth. She pulled herself forward.

Lying on the slope of grass, allowing air into her lungs as she spit up the river and its invitation, she watched the museum windows darken, one by one. Veturio would soon be leaving, and she hoped he might help her. Shivering under the downpour, she waited. Either he left by some exit she knew nothing of, or he slept at the museum. With the rain showing no signs of abating, and only her two feet to carry her, she limped back to her residence.

Once inside the cold, dingy apartment she decided against tea as too indulgent. She couldn’t, however, sit down in her sodden clothes, so fetched a dry terry robe from the bathroom.

As her arm reached for the closet’s chrome hook, the bathtub took her by surprise. She had no memory of having turned on the faucet, much less turned it off again, but there it stretched in front of her, full of water. Glinting at its bottom lay all the fragments of reflecting silver that she had left lying on the floor the night she had smashed mirror with mirror.

Puzzled that she could not remember, she told herself that the night had been a product of shattered nerves that prevented her from perfectly recalling her acts in the days that followed. She went to pull the plug, plunging her wounded wrist into water. The sensation repulsed her less than it had. In fact, it repulsed her not at all, especially in that the water was hot. The feeling against her skin welcomed, invited, caressing those same shattered nerves of both flesh and soul. Her pores opened to it. As if compelled she dropped her body slowly in, surrounding and surrendering it to that warmth and felt it penetrate her freezing bones. As she lay there, an image rose to her closed eyelids of Turan weeping into her looking glass, and then of Vei laughing in the melting rain.

When she lifted herself from the bath, hours later, the shards no longer studded the tub’s bottom. Then she saw that the medicine cabinet stood whole, still opaque from the heat of water, despite the time she’d spent soaking. She hesitantly reached out a finger to touch the fogged surface, offering herself up to the lack of sense, the irrationality of all that had happened, was still happening. Daring now her whole palm against the glass, almost trusting it, she wiped the vapor away. A now faultless mirror gave back to her the reflection of a body that was young yet, that was still beautiful despite how her ribs, her hips, fought against her thin veil of skin. This body, her own still, could bring not only pain, but pleasure once more, if only that of a long bath. She shook her head as though to rid water from her ears and went to the kitchenette’s electric kettle to make herself a tea, after all, and, after a moment’s hesitation, put in a bit of honey against the bitterness.

***

Closing hour came after another day of rain, and she leaned over the display case again, the mirror behaving now as an ancient mirror should. Yet, as usual, little handprints set their seal on the transparency of the case, muddling its clarity. Veturio, surely somewhere near, would soon come in to wipe them away once more. The lighting still thwarted any attempt to see beyond her own face.

This time, though, the silhouette of another head emerged beside her own, with large liquid eyes – that blue merging with, and emerging from, the mirror’s hue.

“I found you. I crossed hell and high water to do it, but I found you.”

“Renato!”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude on your life here, now, but I came because I had to tell you – they found Mara, they found her – well, her remains. I needed to tell you that, before anything else. But then too there is also the burial to think of, and what we will do to handle that.”

“What? How? How did they find her? They’d given her up…”

“I kept after the lake authorities. I had them dive and dive again and keep diving and I did not let them rest. I dove with them, every time. The thought of Mara lying there, the thought of you, God knew where, in pain, it was too much. Finally, we found her, what must be her, anyway. There will be tests, of course, but they take some time. But the jewelry and her teeth– it has to be her”

Malena stared at him, taking this in. That she could see him again, so close to her. That they had found her baby, retrieved her from under the deep, cold, sinister calm of the lake, brought her up again to the world above. Something in Malena unfroze.

Renato stood before her, waiting for a response. She could sense him ready to turn away and leave, see his fear in his fingers flexing onto nothingness. So close that she could take in that old familiar vetiver of him, she began to sob. Into his shoulder, into his burly embrace her body shuddered, choking on the tears flooding her eyes, streaming down her convulsed face, barely breathing, barely daring to.

As she wept, Renato helped her along, from that old antechamber and towards the museum’s entry way, the vestibule, and the front doors, across the threshold. Veturio had appeared, from some storeroom or another surely, but as if from thin air, locking and unlocking the passages at each step of the path. He led the two through the gates into the rain falling darkly from the night sky.

Once cupped safely into the dark leather of the low-slung, gleaming two-seater, Malena turned back her tear-filled eyes to the museum, the rising thick walls of that fortress, built to withstand assaults of neighboring nobles in centuries gone, the assaults of the centuries themselves. As she made good her escape, she thought of the bodies held prisoner there, the words of their torment scratched into the very fabric of those walls, words of their longing to be free. How many had ever found release except in dying there, their souls perhaps remaining still. She thought of the dead sleeping beneath, in tunneled tombs reaching into millenia past. She gulped the damp night air.

She thought too of the fortress’s menacing mazes of chambers that had more than once nearly trapped her into an eternal loop of past and present, had Veturio not come to her aid. And then the never-ending dust and cobwebs besieging those rooms, despite the janitor at his ceaseless duties of ablution.

His huge rusty key ring in hand, the old man stood at the threshold of the vestibule, holding open the door onto the darkened entry, as though to welcome her back at a last second change of heart. As Renato turned the ignition, she caught Veturio’s profile. Under the vague light of the streetlamps, she thought she could make out, from the back of his head, the hazy silhouette of a nose, a forehead, a shadowy chin sloping down into what should have been the nape of his neck. She blinked and it disappeared. What she did see now was the little one, beside him. Malena took the coin from her pocket and tossed it towards the two. Closing the window against the driving rain, she cried at her husband “Renato! Look! See that child?” 

"No, cara, carissima, I didn’t see anyone...what child?”

She let it go, utterly unable to explain, not that, not any of it.

With the windshield wipers fighting off the swirling, maddened rainfall, her thoughts turned to

her time swallowed up by that water, her moments out of time with that child that was now Mara, now another, the grip of that tiny hand in hers. But the river’s freezing depths had, after all, allowed her to escape its embrace and now the bridge took her safely to the other side. She let herself breathe.

Her silence stretched onward, as did the crooked streets that slowly straightened as they headed out of Vulquinia. The car wheels sent the curb water splashing, as a ferry might part the waves separating it from destination’s shore. The couple reached the highway, and the downpour continued its furious pounding against the soft top of the cabriolet. Although Renato had closed the hood tight against the onslaught, it only half succeeded in the battle against what now had become an angry storm. Despite the small, sealed space of their means of escape, the rain attempted to gain entry by force. Malena wiped a droplet from her hair, another from her cheek like cold kiss, as they took an exit, the first one they found, to points unknown. At a flash of lightning, something – almost, but not quite, a movement – in the rear view mirror drew Malena’s attention. Peering from the glass, from the back seat where there was no back seat, a little blue-eyed, damp-haired person returned her gaze.

END

“The Mirror” first appeared in Dark Horses, No. 8, September 2022.

To procure the issue, click here.

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