The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Did you do anything to the glass when you tested it?” I asked.

  “Of course not, but that doesn’t mean it’s unchanged. We are working in fairly unknown territory here. If you don’t mind, I’ll run a few more tests while you put the mirror back together.”

  “Go ahead. Just . . . be careful.” I couldn’t shake the feeling that if something happened to the pieces of the mirror, we’d never be able to get Zack back.

  Hours later, the rest of the mirror reassembled, I went to get the twice-broken piece from Lara. She looked puzzled. “There’s something unusual about it. Nothing that should have changed its size or the way it fits into the image—I measured against the others—but there’s a crystalline lattice inside its two halves, and I don’t recognize the structure. It’s not normally found in mirror glass, and it’s not present in any of the other pieces.”

  The internal change shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did. I placed the other pieces Lara had been testing in the frame without incident, but when I put the two broken halves in place, all the pieces of glass fell out of the mirror again.

  It felt like something fell out of me with it. All those hours of work, lost again, meaning even more hours away from being able to even try to bring Zack back. I was terrified that one of these times, the strange luck that kept the other pieces from breaking further wouldn’t hold, or the pieces would fall out of the five other mirrors, or. I didn’t even know what other disaster to anticipate.

  “What am I going to do?” I scrubbed the exhaustion from my eyes.

  “Go home,” Lara said. “Warm up—I can see you shaking from here. Start again tomorrow with a fresh eye.”

  Good advice. I hated taking it.

  It was still snowing in the lab when I came in the next day. It had gotten colder, too. Measurably colder, cold enough to leave a rime of frost on things in the lab.

  Though not the mirrors. The five that had all their pieces still stood, showing the captured images. I spent most of the day putting the glass back in the frame with the missing piece, my hands aching from the cold.

  The snow fell faster as I worked, hard enough that it was difficult to see the mirrors through it.

  “I want to set the mirrors back into place like they were when Zack disappeared,” I told Lara. “See if it will bring him back, even with the missing piece. The rest of the mirror holds together without it.”

  “It’s unlikely to work,” she said.

  “Then it doesn’t. And we can try something else next. But we need to try this now. I’m worried about the obscuring effects of the snowfall, and if there’s something important about their precise location, it’s not like we can just set them up in another area of the lab.” I could hear the desperation in my voice. So could Lara.

  “Fine,” she said. “Maybe the temperature shift is a signal of some sort. Let’s see what happens.”

  Lara and I arranged them back into the standing pattern, six sides, like a snowflake. We set them in place so that with the final two, we would have been reflected in each other’s, had there not already been images of Zack there.

  We stepped back, and the temperature in the room plummeted. There was a great howl of wind and snow, and I could hear the shriek and groan of the glass in the mirrors.

  The snow cleared, and Zack was there.

  He was dazed and cold—blue framing his lips and edging his fingernails. His hair was rimed with frost, and snow coated his clothing. He blinked against the lights, rubbing hard at his eyes.

  He was here. Safe and whole, for all that he stood frozen in my arms as I hugged him, tears of relief freezing in the corners of my eyes.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. It soon became clear that while Zack had returned, he wasn’t the same. It was like his personality had been left behind, or frozen out of him. He was flat, not all the way here, a blank stranger dressed up in Zack’s clothes.

  And there was nothing that stranger wanted more than to go back to where he’d been.

  “Let me see the equations again,” he said to Lara. “Maybe I can see where you’re going wrong.” He spent all his time in the lab—there before either Lara or I were in the morning, staying long past when we left, running numbers, poring over notes from the experiment that had disappeared him.

  “Does he talk to you about it? Where he was, what happened?” I asked Lara. “Because he doesn’t talk to me.” Not about being there, not about anything. If I was lucky, he’d say hello. I’d asked him about the images in the mirrors, and he said that they already showed me all I needed to know, and walked away.

  “He lets bits and pieces slip when we’re working. Like, he said it was snowing there. But he won’t answer direct questions about it. He thinks it was something in the mirrors themselves that helped him pass through.”

  “And that’s why he couldn’t come back until they were reassembled,” I said. “There might be something to that. And the missing piece might explain why he’s been so strange since he came back.”

  “He’s not strange; he’s just focused.”

  “The kind of focused where he doesn’t remember to eat meals or leave the lab or interact with other humans. You know that’s not like him. There’s something different. I think something may have happened to him while he was gone. I mean, the other day, I brought him anchovy pizza, and he picked the anchovies off.”

  Lara looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t think good taste in pizza is grounds for assuming there’s something wrong with him. We sent him to another world, remember? People change for all sorts of reasons, and that’s a pretty compelling one to me. But it’s nothing more than that. Stop trying to see something that isn’t there.”

  I started staying overnight at the lab. Poring over all the notes the three of us had generated since we first started talking about the idea of a world behind the mirrors. Reading journal articles that theorized that time could be captured and crystallized, trying to see if I could find anything in them that would match up with the crystalline structure in the broken mirror piece. Staring at the frozen images of Zack in the mirrors, trying to parse the mysteries of the ones that were unrecognizable.

  Trying to understand what had happened. To understand why all of Zack hadn’t come back.

  I wasn’t the only one staying at the lab at all hours. Zack stood at the center of the mirrors, the puffs of his breath frosting the glass. That was the other thing that was different about Zack now—he was cold, all the time, as if the snow was falling inside him.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “I see a place I need to go back to, a place I should have stayed.”

  “Why?” I asked, my heart breaking over the question.

  “Because I was myself there. My true self. Look in the mirror—you can see how I really am.”

  I couldn’t, though—the mirrors no longer showed new reflections on their surfaces, only the images of Zack that had been frozen there when he disappeared. So all I saw was a flat copy of my best friend, a piece missing from his heart. This was someone so changed and cold that there was nothing left of the warmth I remembered.

  Still. Maybe he could see something I couldn’t. “How about me? What do I look like in the mirror?”

  “I don’t think I can see you,” he said. “There’s no part of you there.”

  Maybe not.

  Days had passed now, but snow still fell, in that space at the center of the mirrors. It felt like a door left open.

  I was still trying without success to decipher the crystalline lattice in the twice-broken piece of mirror. It looked, I thought, almost like snowflakes, like a pattern of frost. Frozen in reflection.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes.

  Maybe, I thought, maybe if I melted it. I put it on a plate and lit a Bunsen burner underneath it. After a couple of minutes, I heard Zack shout from the other side of the lab, crying out that he was burning, something in his shirt pocket, burning his chest.

/>   I turned off the burner. Heard Lara ask if he was okay, heard him say it had stopped.

  I looked at the pieces of mirrors again after they had cooled. There was no change. The heat that burned Zack from across the lab hadn’t been enough to melt the crystals.

  I put my head down on the lab table and cried.

  It wasn’t science, what I did. I couldn’t replicate it in a lab. I don’t know why it worked, and most of me didn’t expect it to. But I was desperate.

  I stood in the center of the room, where the snow fell, and I held the broken pieces of mirror in my hand, and I filled them with reflections.

  I thought about the time, sophomore year of high school, when my period had bled through my jeans, and Zack hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even blinked, just shrugged out of his ever-present flannel shirt, giving it to me so I could tie it around my waist and hide my embarrassment.

  About the time we had taken the railing off the wall to get the couch out of his floor of the rental house, and watched as it shot down the stairs, out of the front door, and across the street because both of us thought the other had a grip on it. How both of us had nearly fallen after it, we were laughing so hard.

  The time I said I missed seeing the stars, and he drove me out of the city, into the Florida Keys, so I could find them.

  I stood and reflected on all the things that were the way I saw him—his laugh, his enthusiastically off-key singing, the way he emptied his pockets for any homeless person he passed—and snow fell around me and froze my breath and my tears, and then I filled the small, missing piece of Zack’s reflection with the mirror I held in my hand.

  The image in the mirror changed—it became a woman’s face, crystalline and beautiful as snow. She held out her hand, and on it, there was a piece of a mirror, six-sided, like a snowflake.

  As I watched, it melted.

  She closed her fingers over the emptiness, looked at me, and nodded. Her image faded.

  The snow stopped falling.

  I heard the door to the lab open and looked over to see Zack, standing outside the ring of mirrors. I walked back through them, to him. He smiled, really smiled at me, for the first time since he’d come back, and rubbed his hands across his eyes.

  “Sophie,” he said. “You’ve got to come see this. I’m working on location calculations, when one of the mirrors in my section of the lab decides it’s like a slide show or something. It showed me all these old pictures of us.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Like the day we met, and the day we started class here, and, oh, in undergrad, the day we were mad scientists for Halloween! Remember?”

  I did. “That was fun.”

  But when we went into the lab, the surface of the mirror was clear of everything but the expected reflection.

  Zack shook his head. “I guess I’ve been working too hard. I must have fallen asleep and had a dream that seemed so real I needed to tell you about it.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” I said.

  “Right?” He grinned. “Hey, I’m starving. Want to go grab some pizza?”

  “With anchovies?” I asked, hoping so hard for the right answer.

  “Of course.”

  I glanced back at the mirror—now whole—as we left, and I saw the change in the reflection. Over his heart, on the pocket of his shirt, there was a fading spot of water, like what might have been left by melted snow.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Kat Howard: Mirrors have always seemed sort of magical to me. When I was a little girl, I used to play the same game with my mirror as the narrator plays with hers in the story’s opening. I would try to somehow outrun my reflection, wishing that if I just moved fast enough, I would be out of the frame of the mirror, and she would still be there. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen after that, but I knew it would be amazing. Then, right before I got the invitation to write a story for The Starlit Wood, I read a physics article about the possibility of time crystals (which, sadly, almost certainly don’t exist). So when I needed to think about rewriting a fairy tale, my brain mashed up mirrors and crystals and said, “Hey, let’s try ‘The Snow Queen’ with science in it.” My favorite part of “The Snow Queen” was always the mirror. That strange mirror that broke into pieces and fell like snow and changed what people saw, that melted like ice—I loved everything about it. I was shocked when I reread Andersen’s original, at how little page space the mirror took up, because in my memory, it was this huge thing, the focus of the story. So this was also my way of altering the story’s reflection to show my favorite pieces of it.

  SPINNING SILVER

  Naomi Novik

  he real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterwards he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. Then the miller’s disappointed daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early.

  Because that’s what the story’s really about: getting out of paying your debts. That’s not how they tell it, but I knew. My father was a moneylender, you see.

  He wasn’t very good at it. If someone didn’t pay him back on time, he never so much as mentioned it to them. Only if our cupboards were really bare, or our shoes were falling off our feet, and my mother spoke quietly with him after I was in bed: then he’d go, unhappy, and knock on a few doors, and make it sound like an apology when he asked for some of what they owed. And if there was money in the house and someone asked to borrow, he hated to say no, even if we didn’t really have enough ourselves. So all his money, most of which had been my mother’s money, her dowry, stayed in other people’s houses. And everyone else liked it that way, even though they knew they ought to be ashamed of themselves, so they told the story often, even or especially when I could hear it.

  My mother’s father was a moneylender too, but he was a very good one. He lived in the city, twenty miles away. She often took me on visits, when she could afford to pay someone to let us ride along at the back of a cart or a sledge, five or six changes along the way. My grandmother would always have a new dress for me, plain but warm and well made, and she would feed me to bursting, and the last night before we left she would always make cheesecake, her cheesecake, which was baked golden on the outside and thick and white and crumbly inside and tasted just a little bit of apples, and she would make decorations with sweet golden raisins on the top. After I had slowly and lingeringly eaten every last bite of a slice wider than the palm of my hand, they would put me to bed in the warmest corner of the big, cozy sitting room near the fireplace, and my mother would sit next to her mother, and put her head on her shoulder, and not say anything, but when I was a little older and didn’t fall asleep right away, I would see in the candlelight that both of them had a little wet track of tears down their faces.

  We could have stayed. But we always went home, because we loved my father. He was terrible with money, but he was endlessly warm and gentle, and he tried to make his failure up to us: he spent nearly all of every day out in the cold woods hunting for food and firewood, and when he was indoors, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to help my mother; no talk of woman’s work in my house, and when we did go hungry, he went hungriest, and snuck food from his plate to ours. When he sat by the fire in the evenings, his hands were always working, whittling some new little toy for me or something for my mother, a decoration on a chair or a wooden spoon.

  But winter was always bitter in our town, and every year seemed worse. The year I
turned sixteen, the ground froze early, and cold, sharp winds blew out of the forest every day, it seemed, carrying whirls of stinging snow. Our house stood a little bit apart from the rest anyway, without other walls nearby to share in breaking the wind, and we grew thin and hungry and shivering. My father kept making his excuses, avoiding the work he couldn’t bear to do. But even when my mother finally pressed him and he tried, he only came back with a scant handful of coins. It was midwinter, and everyone wanted to have something good on the table; something a little nice for the festival, their festival.

  So they put my father off, and while their lights shone out on the snow and the smell of roasting meat slipped out of the cracks, at home my mother made thin cabbage soup and scrounged together used cooking oil to light the lamp for the first night of our own celebration, coughing as she worked: another deep chill had rolled in from the woods, and it crept through every crack and eave of our run-down little house.

  By the eighth day, she was too tired from coughing to get out of bed. “She’ll be all right soon,” my father said, avoiding my eyes. “The cold will break.”

  He went out to gather some firewood. “Miryem,” my mother said, hoarsely, and I took her a cup of weak tea with a scraping of honey, all I had to comfort her. She sipped a little and lay back on the pillows and said, “When the winter breaks, I want you to go to my father’s house. He’ll take you to my father’s house.”

  I pressed my lips together hard, and then I kissed her forehead and told her to rest, and after she fell fitfully asleep, I went to the box next to the fireplace where my father kept his big ledger book. I took it out, and I took his worn pen out of its holder, and I mixed ink out of the ashes in the fireplace, and I made a list. A moneylender’s daughter, even a bad moneylender, learns her figures. I wrote and figured and wrote and figured, interest and time broken up by the scattered payments—because my father had every one of those written down; he was as scrupulous in making sure he didn’t cheat anyone as no one else was with him, and when I had my list finished, I took all the knitting out of my bag, put my shawl on, and went out into the cold morning.