Or was she hearing what she wanted to hear? Constructing a narrative where she was not a monster? Not an accomplice to an unfathomable crime. She saw the two of them on the beach for the next week. Clasping hands on the plane ride home. She saw the next semester, and all the ones after that. Life beyond college. The two of them, together, and she forever wondering whether it was really him in there.
Lightning struck, a long purple crack opening in the eggshell of the sky. So close, the thunder arrived almost immediately after.
“Teek,” she gasped, fear forcing her out of character.
“Who’s Teek?”
He’s upstairs, she thought. Gasping on the floor of a strange hotel room, trapped in a dying body. He’s trying to call for help. I’m his only hope. And I’m out here with this monster, trying to tell myself I’m crazy.
“You’re ludicrous!” she shouted, not to him. He laughed, and so did she. There was that warmth again, in their laughing together.
Lights trembled, down the coast. Other cities, full of other lives. She turned to face them. Three-quarter profile; cigarette behind the ear aimed at the camera. Mouth open slightly in apprehension, maybe exhilaration.
That’s the one, she thought, when she heard him (whoever he is) take the picture.
And soon we’ll be back in the hotel room. And bright fluorescent lights will whisk all this stupidity out of my head. We’ll make love and I’ll know for sure that it’s him. In the morning, we’ll post these pictures. Add captions in the voices of our supermodel and superstar photographer.
But would sex truly answer her question? They were still new enough to have surprises up their sleeves, to try a new trick from time to time that might delight or disappoint. If he behaved differently, could she be certain?
Well, even if it doesn’t convince me, in the morning the game will be over. I can quiz him, and he won’t have a fictional photographer to hide behind. I’ll find out if it’s really Teek.
And what would she do if it wasn’t? Or if she still wasn’t sure?
Thunder rumbled, an impenetrable answer.
“You’re magnificent,” the photographer said, lowering the camera. Again, their eyes locked. Something conspiratorial kindled. Love meant walking beside someone you would never truly know.
Her mom would have a fit when the pictures were posted, seeing her out on the breakwater with those waves crashing all around her. My helpless innocent girl. And her friends would all wonder how drunk she’d had to get to go out there. Strangers would comment on how her wet shirt clung to her.
They’ll all see someone different, she thought, but none of those women will be me.
* * *
Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more – and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.
Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy
By JY Neon Yang
THE CIRCUS GIRL
I was twenty-six when I started seeing Mirror Boy again. He showed up without warning on a Monday, as I stood over the sink scrubbing sleep from my eyes and stale whiskey from my mouth. It’s one of my favorite simple pleasures: the cold metallic tang of water, the clean bitter smell of soap. I straightened up for my towel, and there was his ugly mug in the mirror instead of mine. I dropped the towel. “Fuck!”
Mirror Boy had not changed in a decade. He was still gaunt and hollow-eyed and in bad need of a haircut. Patches of discoloration bloomed under the brown of his skin. “Hello, Lynette,” he whispered in his crushed-paper voice.
“No,” I said, and walked right out of the bathroom, my face still dripping wet.
“Did something happen?” asked my roommate, Shane, as I stomped into the kitchen, wiping myself dry on the cotton of my nightgown sleeve. “I heard you shouting.” She stood unwashed and uncombed over the counter, a ladle in one hand and curious concern etched on her thin features. Coffee sub boiled on the stove and the smell of fried egg lingered.
“I cut myself shaving,” I said. In my chest my heartbeat with the rhythm of a rail carriage, passing by.
“Ooooookay,” she said, and went back to spooning bean goop onto plates. Shane was an angel, used to the oceanic swing of my moods. She put up with far too much from me.
A dresser cabinet stood by the main door, marking the transition between the kitchen and living areas. Its top was choked with detritus: keyholders, loose coins, half-curdled tins of lip balm. On it sat an oval mirror, framed by a mosaic of recycled bottle glass. I went up to it, not straight on, but cautiously and sideways—as though flanking an enemy—and leaned until it caught my reflection. I prayed it would show my untamable curls and the eyebags I knew and loathed.
“I need to talk to you,” Mirror Boy said.
“Fuck off,” I said, to which Shane went, “Uh, what?”
“Nothing.” I shuffled away from the mirror and flounced down next to the dining table, trying not to breathe too harshly. After ten years spread over the tumult of late adolescence and early adulthood, I had thoroughly convinced myself that my year with Mirror Boy was all made up, an artifact of a traumatized mind. A coping mechanism. But I was better now. The broken girl I used to be had grown up into a functional adult. Why had he come back?
The boiling kettle whistled as Shane thumped breakfast in front of me, gelatinous and greasy. She poured the steaming sub into two oversized enamel mugs. “Here,” she said. “You look like you could use an extra helping.”
We ate. Or at least, Shane ate, while I mixed bean and egg into a brownish slurry on my plate. All was quiet except for the chittering of the newsprinter, spooling its thin scroll onto the dining table. When it stopped, Shane tore off the printout and scanned its fuss-less, tiny text. “Great squid. There’s been another murder.”
“Murder?” I said, not really processing the words.
“Yes. In Darlingfort. Probably that same serial killer that’s been going around.” She turned the chit towards me. “Here, look. Seem like anyone you know?”
I squinted at the victim’s picture, monochrome and pixelated, only slightly larger than a toenail. It looked vaguely like a man, possibly brown-haired, maybe thirty, probably white. I shrugged.
Shane’s expression softened. “You used to live in Darlingfort, didn’t you?”
“That was a long time back.” When I used to be a circus girl. When I last had Mirror Boy as my reflection. I shifted uneasily in my chair. The glare of the mirror on the dresser had a weight to it, as though the kid was trying to claw his way out. “Listen, I’d better get going.”
“What, to work?” Shane looked at the kitchen clock. “Is the salon even open?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, pushing my chair back.
“You haven’t eaten anything.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Shane’s worry peaked. “Hey. Is something wrong?”
“I’m fine,” I said. It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie.
I had to stand by the dresser while I put on my boots. “Why are you avoiding me?” Mirror Boy asked from his corner. “You know I’m here.”
“Shut up,” I hissed, soft enough to keep it from Shane. “Shut up shut up shut up.”
It was clear outside, the air as crisp as winters ever get anymore. A soft breeze teased hair and fabrics. I took the midlevel network, high enough above the water the reflections wouldn’t bother me. Back in Darlingfort the canals were sludge, so I never had this problem.
Back in Darlingfort, my relationship with Mirror Boy was different.
Once upon a time I was a circus girl, just like my mother. Once upon
a time I had an apple-cheeked face and an easy, gap-toothed smile. Once upon a time I used to throw knives and juggle and spin fire.
Then my mother died when I was fourteen, and I was like a dinghy cast out into an icy ocean. The other women in the circus tried to protect me as much as they could, but I eventually found out what people were willing to do to young girls when they no longer had the protection of a lion tamer.
There was an escape artist, Alfous: almost forty, with a slow-growing belly and a grease-slicked moustache. He tried to hold himself up as a gentleman around me, but I tried not to be around him at all. Until one day the desire burst from him like a swollen river, turbulent and inescapable. He chased me down in the damp of night when the others had gone out to get drunk, and pinned me against the knifeboard.
But I was stronger than I looked, and I kicked and screamed and cracked a cheekbone with my heel. So he clubbed me over the head, slapped me in chains, and threw me in the water tank. I woke with my lungs burning and a wall of green murk crushing me. I thought I was going to die, until I saw that there was a boy in the water. He looked my age, with dark eyes and dark hair and skin yellow as the moon. “You can do it,” he said. I didn’t know him, but seeing I wasn’t alone calmed my panic. It was then I found out how far I could bend my elbows, and how easy it was, with my thin wrists, to slip from the vise of the chains. I got my hands free, I got out of the tank, and I survived.
I survived, and a week later Alfous mysteriously disappeared. No notes left behind, nor any evidence. The rumor around the circus was that he’d been sent to feed Kraken, hungry in the sludgy deep. If anyone suspected the scrawny girl with the purpling across her forehead might have been involved, they said nothing. I volunteered to be the new escape artist, because it turns out I had a natural talent for it. I was sixteen.
Anyway, that’s how I met Mirror Boy. When I climbed out of that tank, furious and dripping and bruised in the head, I found that my reflection had disappeared entirely. In its place was the boy who had been in the water with me. Every mirror or glass pane I looked at was graced by his presence, narrow and morose and slightly misshapen. I bled from the palms stealing a shard of factory window for my room, and in that sacred space where no one else was allowed—or no one else dared to go—I spent hours with Mirror Boy. I would sit by the cold glass in the afternoons, in between rehearsals and the start of the night’s performances, and I would let spill all the petty grievances of the day. Who had looked at me the wrong way, who had wounded me with cutting words. Mirror Boy never said much. He listened and told me I was right, or that he agreed with me. And I needed that. As time went on I started talking about my hopes for the future, about how I wanted to leave the circus and leave Darlingfort before it broke me like it broke everyone else. And he would just smile and nod and say he believed I could do it.
Some days, I missed knowing what my face looked like. Some days, I was glad I didn’t have to.
But I got older, and I got out of the circus. Escaping was my forte, after all, and I found I could bend my mind and will as easily as I could my body. People were willing to pay a lot of money to spend nights with me. I saved that money and used it to find a new and better place to live. To buy a new name and history. I got out of Darlingfort. Slowly—or perhaps all at once, I don’t remember anymore— Mirror Boy left me. I got my reflection back. I became a whole person again.
Until now.
The salon wasn’t open, and it wouldn’t be open until eleven. On the edge of posh Helbride, it was party to a stream of older women, powdered and primped, who delicately sashayed in from rooflevel with all the confidence I wished I was born with. They came to get their hair done and their faces done and their nails done while they filled the air with stories of their expensive vacations and expensive heliships and expensive children. They had names and, arguably, personalities, and I recognized most of the regulars by sight, but I could not tell them apart. As a lowly beauty technician, I hadn’t been given the salon keys, but the toilets in the building weren’t locked. They were fancy and empty, appointed in gilt and upholstery and soft underlighting.
Mirror Boy was waiting for me there, pacing between columns of dark marble in the looking-glass toilet, the one that had a copy of him and didn’t have a copy of me. “I want my reflection back,” I told him.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him. Honestly, I’d missed him, and I hadn’t realized how much until now. His familiar shape and hunch sent ambient warmth through odd corners of my chest. At one point in my life, his existence—just for me, and me alone—had brought great comfort. But the truth was, I no longer needed him. And I didn’t want to go back to being that child who did.
Mirror Boy glanced sideways at me and continued pacing. “It’s not important.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I think it’s fucking important.”
“No,” he said. “You’re in danger.”
He looked a little different from what I remembered. He was skittish, fingers twisting over knuckles, shoulders tight and drawn. Like a prey animal. It gave me pause, because I’d never seen him this tense before. And he was so young. O Formless Deep, he was so young. “What kind of danger?”
“There’s a man, a hunter. He’s killed all of my refuges. You’re the last one.”
“I don’t understand.”
He stopped pacing and stared, eyes intense and frightened. “Those murders in Darlingfort. He killed them all. They died the same way, slit by the same knife.”
He was right about that, at least according to the news. The weapon link was how the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands. But they couldn’t figure out his MO, his motivations. All seven victims were of different ages, different genders, and different backgrounds. They didn’t know one another. Nothing linked them except that they all lived in Darlingfort, in coffin-rooms smaller than a whale’s heart. So they said the killer was a sadist, picking off random targets in the neighborhood because they were poor and nobody cared.
“You’re the last of my refuges,” Mirror Boy repeated. “When the hunter kills you, I’ll be dead too.”
“What does that mean? Are you tied to me? Are you like some kind of cancer?” It was the easiest comparison in reach, plucking down the name of Mother’s disease.
“Yes. A cancer. That’s a good way of putting it.” Mirror Boy rubbed his bony hands together. “I’m a cancer. You were . . . my first. Site of metastasis, I mean.”
A shiver passed through me at the way he said it. “I’m trying to understand. Who is this man? Why is he coming after you?”
“I’m unnatural,” Mirror Boy said. “I’m dangerous.”
“You weren’t dangerous to me,” I said cautiously. Did this unnamed killer know something I didn’t? Mirror Boy did nothing to me except take my reflection, which I cared nothing for at that point in time. And then he gave it back. “It’s because you’re a spirit, isn’t it?”
Some people have problems with spirits; they can’t accept they’re part of the world we live in now. It’s mostly a particular sort of people, because when you’re poor and desperate, sometimes spirits are the only ones who can help you. Or will help you, for that matter.
I’ve never been afraid of spirits. My mother, when she was alive, used to put me on her knee and tell me that my father was one. A boy with lips like coral and skin like ice, who smelled of ocean and evanesced from her bed in the light of the next morning, never to be seen again. I never found out if she’d just made it up: she didn’t like it when I asked around the circus. After she died I took her story and folded it into the fiber of my being, like all the half-truths I had assimilated over the years. I’m good at taking stories at face value.
“Did you choose me because my father was a spirit?” I asked Mirror Boy.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “The man who hunts me has found you. You have to run. He’ll kill you.”
I thought of Alfous’s hot breath on my neck. “Run, how?” And where cou
ld I run to? Back to Darlingfort, where everyone else had died? I didn’t want to run. I wanted to fight. “There’s got to be something I can do.”
Mirror Boy pushed the flat of his palms against the barrier of the glass. “You have to run. Run and hide, the way you did when you left the circus. Become someone else so he can’t find you again. He won’t stop, and you can’t stop him, and you can’t get rid of me.”
“I got rid of you once,” I said, bristling at this litany of negatives.
He looked sad. “But you didn’t.”
I wasn’t planning to leave this life that I’d built purely on some intangible warning from a boy who was half a dream. I liked what I had now: the mindless, fuss-free job; a roommate who was reasonably clean and had no drunk boyfriends to bring over; the little pockets of weird I’d found in the neighborhood, places where I didn’t feel quite out of place. For the first time in my life I could see myself continuing down this path towards the future, gray in my hair, a box flat to call a home, a collection of books, half a dozen cats. A tidy and quiet picture that brought me little jolts of pleasure when I thought of it.
At nine-thirty I went up to the salon, passing a man in a gray leather jacket smoking in one of the turrets, tossing something pear-shaped up and down in one hand. I frowned, because it was a no-smoking building and whatever he had rolled smelled vile, but I said nothing, because I avoid talking to strange men when I can. His face, hidden in shadow, was turned away from me.
Our manager, Jinnie, was already in, sprawled in the receptionist’s chair with a beat-up book. Our shifts started at ten, but she always arrived ahead of time to unlock the doors. She looked surprised to see me. “Well, someone’s early.”
I put on my most harried face. “Jinnie, I’m sorry but I’ve got to beg off for today. I know it’s late notice, but something’s come up that I’ve really got to take care of.”
Jinnie’s expression slid from suspicion to displeasure at a documentable speed. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious,” I said.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 17
