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

I wished she would leave me alone on my walk home from the clearing, ten years after she actually had left me alone. Even an enemy is company, a mouth to hear speaking, an ear to listen to you.

So I mourned her death when I was young, even though I hadn’t known her well. I forget why we hated each other. It had started the first day of kindergarten with something trivial, but, as is true for many conflicts between children, it had escalated into a full-on feud in a matter of days.

I don’t know when I stopped hating her. It certainly wasn’t when she died. If anything, for a time, that made me hate her more. It wasn’t really because I was a kid—kids understand the gravity of death when it happens to someone close to them, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Honestly, I think it was resentment that flooded me every so often when I was a child. Admitting that feels wrong, but it’s true, regardless. I don’t know whether I resented her or the world that took her, but everything about my memory of that ash on the breeze reeked of resentment.

Resentment and guilt.

There was still that guilt—why didn’t I charge at the man, or pull Vivi to my side, or something? But I never really mourned her. Maybe it’s difficult to mourn for someone you hated and then didn’t know, but I don’t think that’s true.

I wanted to shake the guilt off, but Vivi’s perpetual presence at my side made it impossible. She was always watching me, always next to me, always waiting for me to slip up. Whenever I did, she would give me the glance of a petulant eight-year-old—the kind of glance she’d given me when we were little and I screwed up an equation she’d gotten right.

Walking in front of me, she laughed, although I couldn’t hear her voice. I could never hear her voice. She led the way down the empty road toward my apartment, a studio room in a great hulking mass of crumbling early-1900s architecture that had been let at an exorbitant price to those of us who hadn’t managed to snag cheaper, better housing earlier. Some of us were students (high school and college), while others were older folks who had moved to California for retirement but had underestimated the competitive housing market.

I’d lived there for years—so long, my landlord hadn’t raised my rent when everyone else’s had been brought up by a couple hundred dollars. Maybe he favored me because I didn’t complain about the decrepit appearance of the building. Maybe it was because he thought I was pretty.

The decaying oak door squeaked open when I pushed it. It had always squeaked, no matter how much I oiled the hinges. Perhaps the squeak had been installed with the door. Whatever its origin, it had started out as a cute quirk but had quickly become insufferable.

The whole place was boxy, depressing, and the architecture looked as though it had risen out of the ashes of the 1910s. The unsturdy style of the pre-WWI architecture aside, the sea air had done a number on the paint, the siding, and the roof, and the salt that had swept in under the door had stained the closer half of the entryway’s hardwood floor a pale beige. The light flickered overhead, a product of the giant building’s nearly-dead circuit, and it cast a pale orange-yellow glow across the peeling blue wallpaper.

I plodded up the stairs, my feet dragging on the squeaking steps, and wished desperately that Vivi would leave. The previous night had been an unexpected moment of peace, even though I’d let a stranger into my apartment, and now that I was alone with the person—ghost? Imagined spirit?—who knew me best, my mind was turbulent once more.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

My door was on the third floor, almost directly opposite the landing. I took a seat on the top step of the stairs and stared at my door, at the railing, at my feet. Anything to keep from looking at Vivi.

She was judging me, I knew it. She couldn’t not be. I had rushed into the thing that had killed her. I had decided against every rational bone in my body to pursue knowledge with enough destructive power to turn a person to ash.

And I was excited for it. I couldn’t stop smiling, so I pressed my palm into my cheek until my teeth tore into the skin. Even then, the taste of blood in my mouth didn’t make me any more worried.

I’d been waiting for this.

Vivi stood in front of me, a mere foot away. I wanted to push her down the stairs, which was ridiculous. She was a child, sort of, and contrary to what you might have surmised from what I’ve said so far, I don’t hate children. Vivi didn’t look like a real child anymore, even though that was no excuse. She was still about eight years old in stature, but there was something about her eyes, about her expression, that reminded me of someone ten times her age.

Maybe death made you old, even if you weren’t old when you died.

Vivi looked at me for a long, long minute, then turned with a gliding spin to look at the door to my apartment. It was apartment number 48, even though there weren’t 48 apartments in the whole building.

Vivi lifted one childlike hand to point at the floor in front of my apartment, then looked back at me. I stood, brushed myself off, and tried to avoid a total breakdown as I headed for my door.

The envelope half-tucked beneath the door shimmered a pale, poisonous green. I picked it up and unlocked my door, but didn’t go inside. Instead, I just ripped open the envelope and leaned against my doorframe. Inside were two pieces of paper: a note and a torn-out page from what was probably a journal. When I pulled the note