The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  The Queen of the Crows falls from her window at dusk. She catches the air. An old woman, languid. She glides down Ramses Street toward Masarra. She doubles back toward the river. Masr al-‘Adima. Everything’s pink. In the gardens of Maadi they are hosing down the paths.

  I am the spirit of ruined utopias and unrequited love. It’s not my fault. You didn’t recognize me—do you think I recognize myself? No! That face in the mirror: that’s not me. I see myself only in motion, smoking, gripping my windowsill in the instant before flight. I only recognize the wings that flap. God, I loved Mauhub so much. He was a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, you know—the king who lost his mind and ate grass like an ox, whose hair grew long like an eagle’s feathers and his nails like an eagle’s claws.

  It’s growing late. The Crow Queen always feels restless at this hour. She longs for flight. Tonight, however, she has a guest, a foreign researcher. The Crow Queen squawks like an impresario, preens before the camera. The photographs will show a bald old lady with snapping kohl-rimmed eyes.

  I have cast my lot with human beings, even knowing what I know: that things don’t always work out, that somebody has to pay. I’ll rise or fall with them. Dear beasts! Instead of scribbling down notes, why don’t you let me fly you over the square tonight? You can ride the featherless ostrich if you prefer, though I warn you he’s very slow these days, his belly scarred by rubber bullets. We’ll weave through the ghostly lights around the Mugamma al-Tahrir and watch the city flicker like a broken bulb. In that stuttering glow the square is like a dirty yellow mirror, a magic mirror reflecting even the ones who are missing. Yes, even the lions. I call it my palace, for these beasts are my true subjects. Look at me: I can’t stop shaking.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Sofia Samatar: I wanted to retell this story, first, because I love it: the role of animals fascinates me, as does the dynamic heroine Mahliya, who’s almost an anti-heroine, a beloved witch. I also wanted to interact with the story as an event, as part of the medieval text Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange, which was released in English in 2015, translated by Malcolm C. Lyons. This book comes into a world that has been primed to receive it by more than three centuries of love for A Thousand and One Nights, which is probably the most influential collection of stories in the world. I wanted to look at that—the western passion for tales of a marvelous, medieval east. I wanted to set the wonder tale against scenes of contemporary Egypt, against stories we’re less interested in reading. In doing this, I paid tribute to the poet and activist Shaimaa’ al-Sabbagh, “the poet who wrote of the streets,” as I call her in the story, who was shot and killed during a peaceful demonstration in Cairo on January 24, 2015.

  REFLECTED

  Kat Howard

  hen I was a kid, I played with mirrors. I was convinced that if I was fast enough, stealthy enough, something enough, I could make it so the reflection was different from the reality on my side of the mirror. That I could trick the mirror into showing something that wasn’t truth.

  My fascination with mirrors continued as I grew up. I studied the way they were made, and the way reflections happened. The way the shape of the mirror could alter what was seen in it. The more I learned about them, the more I wondered if my early childhood games didn’t hold some seeds of truth.

  Which is how I wound up doing my graduate work on mirrors and the physics of reflections. Which is how I wound up in the lab when, well. Easier if I just tell you.

  The experiment that changed everything started off as goofing around, the three of us playing “what if” with the kinds of ideas you get when you’re a kid: What if there really is an opposite world behind a mirror? What if you can walk into its reflection, breaking the surface as easy as diving into a still pool? What if you can walk into one mirror and out of another?

  What if  becomes something more when you have lab space and a research grant, when you’ve spent grad school studying quantum entanglement and positing the existence of pocket universes.

  So then it wasn’t just goofing around, late-night discussions over one too many beers, spinning theories like telling stories; it was Lara and Zack and me in the lab, trying to see if there was anything on the other side of the mirrors and how we could get to it, to figure out how to reflect whatever might be there back to us.

  I couldn’t imagine Lara doing any other sort of work. She seemed almost as if she was made from mirrors. Glass-pale and sharp-angled, she was the kind of person it could be stressful to be friends with: her reflection of you was uncompromising, and always less flattering than you wanted it to be.

  I stuck around anyway. There’s something compelling about the discomfort of that sort of reflection, like the relief of picking a scab and seeing the healed skin underneath. Plus, she was a brilliant scientist, utterly driven. It was like she could see the constituent parts of the universe in the same uncompromising and sharp-angled way that she saw people.

  Zack and I had been friends for what felt like forever, but was actually since our freshman year of high school. He was the person who knew me best, the person I could share anchovy pizza with at three in the morning, the person who also wanted to know how the small pieces of the universe fit together. The person I went to for everything, because I knew he’d help me see things clearly.

  The mirrors weren’t the hook for him. Zack wanted to know if there were other universes behind their reflective surfaces. If there were, he wanted to go to them. I didn’t. I wanted to know if they existed, of course—I had a theory that you could modify the mirror equation to measure their location the same way we measured objects’ reflected distances now—but I liked it here. There is comfort in known qualities.

  Which was why it was going to be Zack standing inside the mirrors that day, and I would be on the outside of them, recording observations and making adjustments as Lara tried to capture his reflection. And yes, I mean capture, not just see. That was part of the idea: that if we could separate a reflection from the reflected object, it could more easily travel between the mirror universe and our own than a physical object could. We were hoping that if it worked, the connection between Zack and his reflection meant that he’d be able to provide us with specific observations of what that mirror universe was like.

  “Are you worried about what might happen to your reflection?” I asked, ducking under his arm to turn on the lights as he held open the lab door.

  “What, like it’ll get caught in the mirror and never come back?”

  “Or maybe that it likes it there so much, it decides to stay.”

  “Wouldn’t happen,” he said.

  “You’ve been talking about how cool a mirror world would be since we started this. What do you mean, it wouldn’t happen?”

  “Well, my reflection might want to stay, but you would reach through the mirror and pull its ass out.” He grinned, and we got to work.

  Lara had been setting up the mirrors in increasing numbers. First, there had been two full-length mirrors, framed in wood that looked almost red, Zack between them. Then she put him at the center of an equilateral triangle.

  “No good. I’m still catching bits of secondary reflections,” I said. We were after a clear image, not a reflection of Zack, plus a spare reflection of one of his arms.

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to actually do anything?” Zack asked.

  “Just stand there and look pretty,” Lara said.

  Zack struck an exaggerated runway model’s pose.

  I laughed and helped her turn the triangle into a square, the muscles in my back and shoulders grumbling as we rearranged the heavy mirrors.

  “Remind me again what you’re going to do with his reflection if you catch it,” I said.

  “I have some thoughts.”

  “She’ll clone me and all my fabulousness.”

  “Wrong field, Zack,” I said.

  “Details, details.”

  But four mirrors wasn’t the right number either, and neither was five.

&n
bsp; Six, however.

  Lara and I were moving opposite mirrors. Had we stopped and stood in front of them, I would have been reflected in hers, and she in mine. Then we set them, six-sided as a snowflake.

  “I can see—” Zack began, his whole body taut, electric.

  A great shattering. Particles of mirrored glass falling through the air like snow. When they settled to the ground, the space at the center of the mirrors was empty.

  Zack was gone.

  All the way gone. Disappeared.

  I flung my arms up and shouted, my stomach knotted into surprise and delight. We had done it. We had really done it. Forget capturing his reflection, we had skipped that step completely, done what we’d only barely hoped might someday be possible, and sent Zack somewhere else, another world maybe, through the mirrors.

  The mirrors.

  They were destroyed. Shattered. Not one piece of glass left in a frame. Which meant that whatever there was to connect Zack to here, to us, was gone.

  The knots of my emotions twisted from delight to concern. I stepped toward the broken mirrors.

  Lara shouted from the other side of the room, startling me into stillness. “It probably can’t happen again without the reflections, but.” She pulled one of the mirrors to the side, breaking up the snowflake symmetry.

  “Still,” she said, face flushed, eyes shining, her excitement a heightened reflection of mine. “Look at what we did!”

  “It is kind of amazing,” I said. “Kind of completely amazing. But we need to bring him back.”

  “Right,” Lara said. “It’s no good to us if all we can do is make someone disappear. A stage magician can do that. So we need to figure out what happened here, exactly. That should give us some idea of where he is, and what to do next.”

  So we spent the day taking measurements, recording every factor of everything we could think of that might possibly be useful, and then, when we were as certain as we could be that we had the data we needed, gathering up the enormous piles of glass that sat at the foot of each mirror.

  “Are you seeing the same thing I am?” I asked.

  “All the pieces are broken in the exact same shape,” Lara said. “A hexagon, just like the mirrors were.”

  “Any idea what it means?”

  “Not yet. I want to run some basic tests.” After those tests were run, we put the pieces in marked, labeled boxes.

  “Are you okay?” Lara asked.

  “Sure, why?”

  “You keep staring at the center of the room.”

  Where Zack had been standing when he disappeared. “I guess I keep hoping that whatever we did will spontaneously reverse. That he’ll just be . . . back.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”

  She was right, of course.

  I dreamt about Zack that night. It made sense that I did—there were certainly reasons for him to be on my mind. But the whole thing was deeply unsettling. Memories appeared in still images like photos, then froze over and shattered: painting our faces blue and white for Spirit Day our freshman year of high school, making popcorn in a pressure cooker for our first-year physics lab in college, splitting a bottle of champagne the day we found out we’d both gotten into grad school here.

  When the pieces fell, they fell like snow, one after another after another after another, gone, until I stood in a blizzard made from the pieces of our past. And while I could see his footprints, tracks clearly visible in the fallen heap of memories, I couldn’t follow them, couldn’t find him.

  I woke up shivering.

  I didn’t get any warmer when I got to the lab the next day.

  There was snow falling steadily in the center of the room where the mirrors had been, over the precise spot where Zack had disappeared. I held my hand underneath, to check and make sure it really was snow, not just falling pieces of mirrors. Flakes landed, chilled my skin, then melted away into small drops of water. I scrubbed my hand against my jeans.

  “Lara,” I called, coat still on. “You probably want to come here and see this.”

  I heard her footsteps stop when she saw it. “That’s unexpected. Hang on. I want to record this.”

  Outside the lab, it was early fall. The day was predicted to be sunny and in the upper sixties. We hadn’t even had a frost warning yet.

  Inside the lab, there weren’t any clouds or anything that might have given a clue as to where the snow was coming from. It was just there, starting about a foot above my head and falling to the ground. I hugged my arms around my stomach, chilled.

  “Frozen in reflection,” Lara said as she checked gauges, took samples.

  “Reflection,” I repeated, the word setting off a train of images in my mind. “Do you think the snow is coming from wherever Zack is?”

  “I think that’s the most likely possibility. We did ask him to send back any impressions. You know how he is. No matter how weird things were, he’d try to stick as close as possible to the plan of the experiment.”

  “And so he’s sending us snow.”

  “Either that, or sending him through weakened the barrier between the mirror universe and ours to the point where we’re experiencing their weather events. Either way, it’s interesting,” she said.

  I stood in the falling snow, perfect six-sided flakes reflecting the light, and pushed the memory of my dream away. That hadn’t been real, and dwelling on it wouldn’t help. “It is interesting, but watching it isn’t bringing Zack back.”

  “I thought we agreed the best way to do that is to figure out where he went—I’m running your modified mirror equations now—and determining the source of the snow could help do that. There may be trace elements in it that will offer some data.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s the best way to find him anymore. I think I need to concentrate on him, not his location.”

  She shook her head, dismissing the idea. “You can’t bring him back if you don’t know where he is.”

  “I think I can,” I said.

  Lara looked at me.

  “Spooky action at a distance. I re-create as much as I can of the circumstances of his departure, and see if by acting on the mirrors I’m able to act on him wherever he is now in a way that pulls him back through.” It was the same sort of large-scale entanglement we’d hoped for with the original experiment—the captured reflection being held in the mirror, with Zack here to influence it and relate its experiences—just reversed. Well, reversed and complicated by the fact that it was a person, and not a reflection, that had been captured. Complicated by a lot of things, actually, not least of which was that spooky action at a distance hadn’t yet been proven on anything larger than a particle.

  Lara shook her head. “It’s a stretch. Too much of one. I’m going to continue with the location work.”

  “I understand,” I said, then went down the hall and got out the boxes of shattered glass. I did understand, and I felt better that we were coming at the problem from two different directions. It was more likely that something would work.

  As I sorted through the pieces of the mirrors, I realized they weren’t clear reflections anymore. They held color, lines, fragments of pictures that didn’t change. It might not have been Zack’s reflection that we’d caught, but we’d captured something.

  I let myself hope.

  I set the glass back into the mirrors, very carefully. I didn’t want to glue it in, or introduce any material that might interfere with the mirrors’ connection to Zack. The glass itself was cold, so cold my bones ached after ten minutes of work, and I had to take frequent breaks to rewarm my hands.

  It took me days—days while Lara continued to run equations and tests, marking formulae on the mirror in her office in grease pencil, using her own theories to look for Zack—to sort enough pieces of glass to fully see it, but not only had we captured reflections, we’d captured six different images, one in each mirror. Pictures of Zack, frozen in crystals of time. Some of them I recognized—like the one of him disappearin
g, shock and delight reflected on his face.

  Some of them I didn’t. There was one that was him from the back, in the same clothes he had worn in the lab, faded jeans and a black sweater with a pull on the hem. He was walking through a snow-covered forest. In another, Zack knelt at the feet of a woman whose face wasn’t visible, passing a small piece of glass into her hand.

  There was a tiny piece missing from one of the mirrors. A thin shard of glass in one of the images of Zack that I did recognize, from the day we had all begun working in the lab. The missing piece was right over where his heart would be. I looked all over the tables, dumped the boxes where the pieces had been stored upside down, but nothing fell out.

  Lara found me, what felt like hours later, knees bruised from crawling back and forth across the floor. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a piece missing.”

  “It’s not missing. I know exactly where it is.”

  I picked myself up off the floor and followed her down the hall.

  The piece of glass was broken, cracked in two down the center. “I found it the day he disappeared. I set it aside because it was the only one broken differently from the others, and I wondered if that mattered—like maybe the shattering started with this piece. I’ve been running tests on it, checking baselines against the measurements we took of the other pieces the day they shattered. That’s why I had it in here.”

  “Were you planning on giving it to me?”

  “Once you needed it, of course.”

  The two halves fit together perfectly, but they didn’t fit into the mirror. When I set it in place, all the pieces of glass from that frame fell to the floor. I looked around, making sure the other five mirrors were still intact, coils of tension releasing from around my stomach when they were. I dropped to the floor, searching with shaking hands through the pieces of glass to make sure none of the others were further broken or chipped.