The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

man walked through her on his way to some other store. I’d learned long ago not to pull her out of the way of passers-by, but even after a decade, I felt tempted to move her aside.

“What?” I snapped at her.

She shrugged and gestured a sarcastic, Get on with it.

I glanced from the hardware store to the sushi place across the street to the kitschy candle shop nearby. All closed. It was, after all, barely five in the morning. Who except the hardworking and the deranged would be awake at this time?

I suppose I was both hardworking and deranged.

I ignored Vivi as best I could (difficult when she liked to walk in front of or beside me) and turned toward home.

It was a long walk, and I hadn’t brought my bike. I wished desperately that I had a car, or even a scooter, but both would be impossible to get up to the clearing. My bike couldn’t manage the steep hill, either.

So I was stuck walking home at five in the morning in the thick billow of fog. My shirt’s creases had long since disappeared, my thick blue coat was spotted with precipitation, and my gloves had been soaked through, too. As warm as California should have been, NorCal nights are practically products of the Pacific Northwest.

Vivi strolled along next to me. For a while, we walked in silence, but I’ve never been good at walking in silence with a ghost.

“I didn’t mean to,” I started. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Vivi didn’t say anything. I wished she would, then wished she wouldn’t. The sprinklers turned on at full force down the road, spritzing the fields. Beyond them, the blue hills turned into even bluer mountains. The trees stuck their claws into the fog and made it bleed pale grey.

“I don’t know what it was,” I said. “But it wasn’t me. I didn’t want to.”

She glanced at me again, then back at the artichokes. I saw her grimace out of the corner of my eye—a disturbingly mature expression for someone who was supposed to be so young.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. Sometimes she hopped through the field that stretched next to the road, floating from pumpkin to pumpkin. The pumpkins were barely turning a yellow-green, still no larger than my two fists put together. Vivi was so blue-grey, she might as well have been the fog.

I wished she’d turn into fog and disappear when the morning light came.

That kind of luck was unlikely.

Vivi had died almost exactly ten years ago. It had been dark that morning, the sky a deep grey, tinged with white around the edges. I’d known it would storm.

I liked going out in the storms as a child. I very nearly gave my lovely mother a heart attack the first time I returned from school soaked through from head to toe, coated in mud and leaves as though I’d just clawed my way out from the Underworld. She hadn’t been able to get me to sit still. Claire had to grab me and make me sit before my mom could get a washcloth within an inch of my face.

Even my mom’s lecture hadn’t been a deterrent for her storm-chasing daughter.

When the storm came on the day Vivi died, I walked right out into it in the middle of recess. We had both turned eight mere weeks before, and I felt very well-qualified to handle anything nature could throw at me.

She followed me, but she didn’t want to. We hated each other so much we couldn’t stand to sit in the same row of desks. For some reason, our teacher—a helpless but well-meaning woman who always smelled of orange rinds and odeur de chat—had sent Vivi after me. Maybe it was to get us to bond.

It didn’t work.

She found me at the top of the hill near school, staring out over the forest. I was focusing on the sound of the ocean at the time, waiting for rain to supersede the slow thrum of the waves. The ocean was too far away to hear well, but it’s always been the heartbeat of the town; no matter where you are in Half Moon Bay, you can hear it, even if the sound is just inside your head.

I remember Vivi shouting at me from across the clearing—something petty and not-quite-witty, as you might expect from an eight-year-old. I shouted something back, but I didn’t take my eyes off the great expanse of trees. The redwoods came alive in the storm, alive in the same way that a wild animal is alive right after it is struck by a hunter, but before it falls.

I didn’t see anyone near her. There was no voice from the trees, no shadow between the trees. One second, we were both standing, muddy and irate, across from each other. I don’t remember what she was shouting at me about.

She was on the breeze the next moment. I wish I could say something about how beautiful it was or how mournful it was, but it was just petrifying. I didn’t do anything. I just ran.

I slid down the muddy hill back to school and tumbled inside, panting and screeching like a madwoman. When they sent me to the school counselor lately, she couldn’t figure out what trauma would create such a strange delusion in a child. I think she eventually concluded that it was stress and sent me home with an ice pack.

They had to take me more seriously when nobody could find Vivi later on.

Still, there was no evidence that I’d had anything to do with her disappearance in the woods. Eventually, my insistence that she had floated away like dust on the breeze was passed off as my rationalization of a traumatic experience; perhaps she had been kidnapped in front of me, the counselor said.

I let them go with that. If there was anything I learned growing up, it’s to never attract too much attention to your own madness unless it’s