Farhad cried out in encouragement, his voice breaking with the pain. Zach, his naked face pinched and blistering from the cold, his hair in crown-like spikes from the wind and snow, did not hear him as he revved the motorcycle onward. He processed nothing but the factory.
. . .
The sound of Dominic’s shriek would haunt Lexi for as long as she lived. He pulled back from her, his fingerprints already darkening against her throat. He thrashed, reaching back with his hands to extract the piece of horn, his fingers trembling with pain and slippery with blood.
This time, when he looked at her, there was no denying the rage in his eyes.
Yang materialized once more, a black shadow that fell upon Dominic’s back and burrowed its fangs into his shoulder. For a second, the wolf looked at Lexi with anxious golden eyes that asked: Did he hurt you again? Are you alive still?
Dominic reached up. With inhuman strength, he grabbed Yang by the scruff of his neck and dragged the wolf over his shoulder. He rose to his feet, clutching the writhing animal in his embrace, and stumbled backwards away from Lexi and into the fire.
Every fiber within her body screamed in protest.
She fought against the numbness overtaking her—the weakness, the cold, the breathtaking pain—but could not stand. She did not even find the strength to thrash against the floor. She shifted her neck and righted her head to look up. Tears fell from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, and disappeared into her ears and hair.
The ceiling mirrors, hazy with the swirls of smoke that spiraled upward and snow that drifted downward, glinted back at her like the winking faces of old friends.
They showed her that an angel crouched beside her now, his knees stained from the pool of her blood. She closed her eyes as she felt his wings cup to press against her wounds. A jolt of cold when the feathers met her flesh. Zach’s arms and scent and voice, enveloping her, though she could not decipher the words he spoke. Her gasps for air, for she could suddenly breathe without pain. His body, warming hers as he picked her up and carried her from the tongues of flame until they crossed the threshold of the factory.
Snowfall cloaked the world and clasped it into a snow-globe of white fields and black trees, punctuated by the scarlet flames and crackling of a burning factory, peppered by shadowy figures of fallen men and discarded vehicles. Lexi registered the white flakes falling around them, pieces of snow some god was shoveling off his driveway and dumping down onto the world. They chilled her face like soft subtle caresses of icy fingers, soothing her, dousing the fire that encircled her throat.
“You’re all right,” Zach said. “It’s okay. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. Can you stand?”
Lexi gazed at him, a selfish little boy who’d grown into a man who cared for fragile things like underdogs and misfits and truths. Out in the open, his head was void of horns and his back carried no wings. A tear fell from his eye and dripped onto her mouth like a scalding hot kiss. She tried to ask: Is he dead? but the words would not emerge.
A creature dragged himself into Lexi’s line of vision, a black shadow against the fire’s copper brilliance. He collapsed a few feet away. The golden slits of his eyes shone at her, and she reached her hand towards him helplessly.
Zach rushed to Yang’s aid. He picked the wolf up and, stumbling, carried him the rest of the way to Lexi. He set him into her outstretched arms.
In Lexi’s embrace, Yang exhaled his love for her. He released it in the smoke of his dying breath so she could see it. I never had a doubt, she wanted to say. She clutched him to her tighter than she ever had before, begging his soul to stay. She buried her face in his fur, clotted with blood and singed by fire, fur that lined the flesh that belonged to a wolf with a lion’s heart and a mother’s love and a hunter’s jaws, this unfathomable balance of good and evil that had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember.
Lexi felt Yang go. She closed her eyes and tried to chase him.
She did not taste the falling snow that skimmed her face and sizzled as it kissed the blaze. She did not hear Zach’s words as he pried her hands from the corpse. She did not feel his tears burn her skin as they fell from his, each bead of water shrugging off her with the rollicking of her body as he held her close to his chest and stumbled away further from the factory and deeper out into the snow. And she did not hear the rattling creaks as the fire consumed the remains of the wooden rafters and the ceiling caved in behind them.
43 / Lazarus
“The only difference between me
and a madman is I’m not mad.”
–Salvador Dali
Lexi had not known how it would be to see her family again. Zach reminded her that the nightmare was over, for now, till the proverbial Sandman returned. He said they had a right to know, to come. For Pappou. And El Greco had been theirs first, after all.
Together, she and Zach begged for and won her father’s humanitarian parole. Solitary confinement had painted Elias’ hair as white as Pappou’s and had lined his face beyond his years; at first sight, Lexi mistook him for her grandfather, and her heart pounded with a sudden belief in resurrection. Her father’s mustache grew wet with tears when he saw her, and for a time it did not matter that neither could speak. Yiayia Marina, summoned by Farhad, flew in with Sophia from Quebec a day later; Sophia’s brave teenage front melted as soon as she saw her sister. And Lexi’s heart nearly burst when Zach appeared at her family’s home and helped her mother from a van, wheelchair and all. Anastasia held her daughter so tightly that Lexi’s wounds burned. She hugged her mother back tighter, embracing the hurt that reminded her that she lived.
That was what it felt like, the glue that pieced people back together.
. . .
Snows melted, as snows do. The town may well have been Narnia, freed of its White Witch and her statue-solid evils. Sunshine and smiles glittered like masks, hiding horrors like grass growing over graves. Yet sometimes the sun warmed Lexi’s skin, and some of the smiles seemed real.
Dominic was dead and the immediate risk of the agencies knowing of Lexi’s nature—something he’d apparently kept, inexplicably, to himself—died with him. She was safe now, shopping in grocery stores and riding the metro like any other person, picking up her old invisibility cloak of normalcy with surprising ease. She returned to the university, applying for and taking up a job offer in its finances sector, a job that was quiet and unassuming and did not demand a voice. And then there was Zach, who made room for her in his D.C. apartment and mused that he needed someone around to help him wash the dishes and listen to him recite chemical formulas and ensure he didn’t burn down the kitchen when he had one of his experimental cooking epiphanies.
Lexi agreed. There was peace to be found in the fold of unselfish arms, in the paintings of a motherland akin to that of her family’s, in the fragrance of pesto sprinkled over pasta. There was more than peace, too.
Yiayia Marina would be taking Sophia back up North, and Elias and Anastasia would be going with her for a while. Lexi could not join them, but she could not blame them either for leaving her. They’d returned to a world too different from the one they’d left.
Pappou’s body had never been discovered, but they’d found his favorite scarf near a tree wreathed in dead fireflies. He’d been reported missing; after a few weeks, he’d been reported dead. And they gave him a proper burial, placing the scarf in a casket and staking a stone cross into the earth. They’d gathered in South Astoria, in the cemetery, a sea of faces Lexi knew and many whom she didn’t, a déjà vu of the rites spoken for Jerry and for Adam. The air had been cold and the crows had been silent, and the priest chanted hymns that drowned in the tears of those who had loved Gabriel.
And then there was the matter of El Greco.
During the weekends, Lexi drove with Zach to the valley, always careful not to be followed. The darkness of El Greco seemed kinder in the spring, with its charred bones brightened by the flurry of wildflowers that sprawled around and through its r
uins, as if revealing its true beauty in this renewal, as if the fire had just burnt through and shed the snakeskin to show that hope lurked beneath it all still.
Lexi was riding the metro home one breezy evening when Khalil stepped into the metro car, wearing jeans and a white shirt that billowed like a flag. Their eyes met. Her heart stopped, sputtering. He strode towards her with the determination of a soldier walking into no man’s land and scooped her into his embrace. Her tears speckled his shirt-sleeves.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “What have you been doing?”
In the fifteen minutes it took to get to her stop, she wrote to him a condensed version of her story. He met her and Zach at El Greco that same weekend; he brought Sonya and Ibrahim with him.
They continued what they’d started, first rebuilding the factory, then creating the mirrors. Two makers, four students. Three furnaces. A drafty, patched-up building that had seen its share of fire and ice. This was their fight now, to keep their world awake. Lexi looked within the mirrors to see her face stare back, shadowed by her own horns and halo. Sometimes she saw Zach, standing behind her with his arms around her waist and his wings shielding them from the rest of the world as his tongue dueled with hers. Sometimes she thought she saw Dominic smiling at her over her shoulder, as much a part of her as the scar he’d left on her cheek and the bruises he’d imprinted around her throat, the ones that had left her voiceless.
. . .
She visited her grandfather’s grave one afternoon, on Lazarus Saturday. The sunset crouched behind the peach trees that fringed South Astoria’s cemetery. Shafts of light ignited the trees, gilding in gold their jade-green leaves and rose-white blossoms. Lexi breathed in the beauty as she breathed in the fragrance of the flowers. Her heart was full; tomorrow she’d be on a plane headed to Canada to spend a week with her family, and the only thing she prayed for was that her grandfather’s spirit would be with them, too.
Zach found her, as he always did. He came and sat next to her on the grass, cross-legged, his knee against her thigh.
Lexi nodded at the grave. She took out her notebook and pen. That could have been you, she wrote. She thought of El Greco, a place where Gabriel’s voice would never again echo. It may soon be me. You never had to get involved.
Zach gave her a sidelong look. “Cheery today, aren’t we?”
It’s good to keep ourselves grounded.
“It’s good to be surrounded by the people you love,” he said.
Don’t you regret it?
“It was never a choice.”
Lexi smiled. She reached forward to brush away a cocoon propped up against Gabriel’s cross, then thought the better of it. It wasn’t respectful, having a creature just plop up its house against Gabriel’s cross, yet the caterpillar holed up within hadn’t acted with bad intentions. Pappou would likely appreciate the company anyway.
She picked up her pen again. How do you think it will end?
Zach extended his hand between them. Lexi took it. She traced the lines of his palm, wondering how long the crease of his life-line was, wondering if it even mattered. Few people who waged wars lived to see the end of them. Some of them lived on in stories, in ballads, in text-books. Most did not. None of them ever returned to revise the falsehoods that their successors wrote; only survivors write history.
He squeezed her hand. “Let’s hope like this.”
Word would trickle out of El Greco, silent and unmistakable and unretract-able as tears from an eye, borne on mirrors delivered in the dead of night and during the nonchalance of midday, positioned in all the right places. Perhaps the mirrors would serve their purpose, unsettling those whom they were meant to unsettle, inspiring those whom they were meant to inspire, and summoning those whom they were meant to attract. And perhaps they would come unceremoniously, quietly, wise from a lifetime of covering up their tracks. Perhaps they would become the Revisionists.
People loved a revolution when they were ready for it. They had to suffocate first, pinned within their cocoons with the choice to burst free or die. Change came only when the pain of stagnation trumped the fear of animation. If anyone had told Lexi, two years ago, that the black market of mirrors could rival the black market of opioids, she’d have stabbed them to death with her pencil because she’d be laughing so hard she’d be punching that other person’s arm, inadvertently forgetting she held a pencil. She had always craved that type of laughter. But she was not laughing now.
It took many swords to cut off a hydra’s multiple heads. Lexi squeezed Zach’s hand in turn. She knew, deep down: since the ménage-a-trois of loyalties in Eden, this was what it had always been, what perhaps it would always be.
War.
As they rose to their feet, the cocoon began to tremble. Lexi watched as the tiny brown coffin cracked open. Ever so slowly, the slit widened. The cocoon trembled. The butterfly emerged. It unfurled its brilliant gold wings, antennae testing the air. Its legs wobbled as they clung to the transparent shell of its home. Its wings twitched.
The insect let her watch for a moment. Then it flew away.
. . .
Dominic Lazaro gazed at his reflection as he straightened his tie. Strange to think that half a year ago he’d seized just such a bathroom mirror from its wall hook and had smashed it against the floor in a rage. This jagged mirror shard didn’t reveal much, being no larger than his hand’s width, but he’d carried it with him—miraculously intact—since the night he’d meant to kill Lexi. He’d propped it up on the ledge above the bathroom sink of this new apartment, spacious and sunny and gifted to him as instructed in his father’s will.
Stranger still, perhaps, was that the bloodstains on the mirror wouldn’t wipe off.
This three-piece gray suit, a gift from his godfather to be worn to church in Washington D.C. this Lazarus Saturday, accented his whittled silhouette and hid the scars that lined his body. He’d gone to the best plastic surgeons in the nation to fix his face. They’d done their jobs well; better than he’d expected, and as good as what he’d paid for. The eye patch would take some getting used to, of course. No one had been able to replace his left eye.
Sometimes, fascinatingly reflected in the darkness of his remaining eye, he could still see the fires of El Greco. He could see Lexi’s face, tight and white with pain, facing his horns with the same blind faith with which she’d faced his love. He could see the golden eyes of the wolf that had taken the lamb’s stead. He could see the Devil, too, as if embodied within him, his own handsome face melting away to reveal—
And there Dominic would close his eyes in fear.
Lexi had believed that Heaven and Hell were states of being, not destinations. They are worlds we carry within, she’d written in her diary. She’d shown him as much, in the mirrors she’d made. Dominic just hadn’t wanted to see it.
And so it had come to see him, instead.
As the days and weeks and months bled by, however, he was no longer sure of what he had seen. He got heart palpitations whenever he tried to remember, and so he began to blank out the memory. But a man—a figure—a creature had appeared, of that he was sure, parting those curtains of snowfall with his flaming tail, forbidding Dominic to die. A handsome man with a beautiful face, whose mask had melted in the heat of the fire to reveal an all-consuming darkness. Had it been real? Or had it been a hallucination of pain? A near-death experience, when the wolf’s body bore the brunt of the explosion as the chemicals ignited and the factory caved? The irrefutable fact remained that Dominic had emerged, a scarred and broken man covered in fragments of flesh and fur—alive.
Bad boys don’t get to go to Heaven, the Devil had hissed in his ear before vanishing.
The clanging of Dominic’s cellphone made him jump. He cursed and canceled the incoming call. His godfather, probably dying to yell at him for being late to lunch. Daimon didn’t like to be kept waiting. Dominic grabbed his car keys on the way to the door. A last tug on his tie. A last glance at the mirror. The horned head smiled
back.
Run along, said the smile. I’ll be right here.
Thank you for taking the time to read this book! If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to leave a review on Amazon / Goodreads and tell me! You’ll have my undying gratitude, promise. :)
Stephen King explains writing in three words: “Writing is telepathy.” You and I are not in the same room. Perhaps we don’t live in the same country or time zone or even the same year. But we’re together as you read these words. We’re having a conversation, “a meeting of the minds”: we both delved in and out of a world in which mirrors reflect character. I love that.
People sometimes ask me: “Why write? Nothing is original anymore.” Maybe creativity is the art of picking up life’s unoriginal patterns and pieces and warping them into original frequencies—personalizing them, if you prefer. Then again, there are some patterns that are too perfect to mess with. Take this other quote by Stephen King, for example, because I just can’t say it better:
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? […] Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
– Stephen King, On Writing
About The Author
Angela Panayotopulos…
…is a Greek-American storyteller and unapologetic coffeeholic.
…began writing short stories when she was five years old and earned her Creative Writing M.F.A. from George Mason University when she was 22.
…has also written The Art of War: a Novel, inspired by her grandparents’ ordeals during WWII and listed as one of The National Herald’s Top Books in Dec. 2017, and The Cardiology of Broken Things, coauthored with the wonderful Dr. Lars J. Østergaard.
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