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

The kettle buzzed on the stove, shivering atop the pale orange burner. I poured two mugs of tea and brought the mugs into the living room, spilling the tea across the tile as I went. Indigo had relaxed enough to move to the couch, so we sat almost shoulder to shoulder as we waited for the tea to steep.

The radiator clanked next to the windowsill as I tried to get used to sitting next to a magician in my living room.

The light flickered overhead and a car passed with a whoosh outside, but Indigo said nothing. He just stared at the ground, the books, and me.

“Do you know any magic?” he asked.

Maybe he wanted to see it as badly as I did. Maybe he was in this for the same reason I was: a morbid longing to better understand the enigma that had torn through our lives.

“I’ve read everything I could get my hands on,” I said, gesturing hopelessly with my mug. Tea stained the suede. “I’ve talked to delusional pseudo-psychics who spend their days trying to convince suckers on the Internet that there’s magic in their blood. I’ve filled notebooks—bookshelves—with research. Once, when I was ten and my parents were out on the weekend, I spent a night sleeping on the beach, hoping that something about the ocean and the moon would alchemize some kind of a...a hint for me. Just a little clue that I wasn’t crazy.”

“What happened?”

“I got low-level hypothermia,” I admitted. He laughed, and the sound filled the space. Indigo doesn’t laugh often—or, at least, he didn’t back then—but the sound is perfect, warm, loud.

“There’s something beautiful about it,” he said, and bumped his shoulder to mine. “The mystery of it. The beauty of magic is in its mystery.”

I didn’t say anything. That’s the beauty of Indigo: it’s easy to sit in silence with him. He’s most comfortable when nobody’s talking.

“What do you think the others will be like?” he mused. “Mint said there’d be three of them.”

“Three too many,” I grumbled.

He laughed again, a quiet chuckle this time.

I must have drifted off, because I woke up to the morning light on the pale wood floor of my apartment, my cheek pressed to Indigo’s shoulder, my fuzzy grey blanket around my shoulders. He must have gotten up at some point, because our mugs sat together on my desk, a few feet away.

“Hm,” I said, which translated roughly to, I am so exhausted, I could sleep for a month.

“Morning,” Indigo mumbled, sitting up and cracking his neck with two nauseating pops. “I forgot to say thanks for letting me stay.”

“Don’t thank me,” I told him. “Your world was on fire, and I like company. Are you…”

“Planning on going back? Yeah, I’ll check on my home today.”

“I was going to ask if you’re okay.”

“Okay? Why wouldn’t I be?” He grinned, hauled himself to his feet, and stretched. He offered me a hand and hauled me to my feet.

“You’ve got school?” he asked.

“Shit, yeah. What about you?”

He shrugged, oddly lethargic for a person who had come across so uptight the night before.

“School’s probably canceled because of the fire,” he said. “And if it’s not, whatever. I can afford to skip a day. Hey, you should show me your town. I’ve never been in another world before.”

“Sure, I’ll give you a tour after school. I’ve got an exam in Bio today.”

“You’re no fun.”

I shrugged and left him on the sofa as I headed to wash up. When I returned, dressed for school with my hair in a towel across my shoulders, I found him shell-shocked, staring blankly at the television screen.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”

Nothing.

I waved a hand in front of his face. Was he an android? That might make sense, considering what he’d said earlier about librarians, but he startled after a second and turned his eyes to me.

“What?”

He pointed at the screen.

“What, you’ve never seen a TV before?”

“No, dummy,” he muttered. “Look.”

I finally tuned in to the broadcaster’s voice. This was a local channel, put together by a bunch of retirees with a vigilante-esque self-righteousness and too much time on their hands. Usually, it just involved blurry phone videos of local teenagers ordering alcohol at Sam’s Chowder House or someone caught heading up to Pacifica for an affair, but this time, there was something actually wrong.

Neal Wallace, local gossip and my favorite member of Half Moon Bay’s retired population, was monologuing at record speed on the screen, the camera zoomed in on his face. If I was closer to the TV, I could have counted his nose hairs.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Neal…”

“Listen,” Indigo said.

“A pile of ash,” Neal was saying. “I can’t say exactly what happened to Marie, and it seems the local police department is involved in other matters. When we contacted them, they said—” he raised a piece of paper with a snap, turning it to the camera to reveal a printed email “—they said, ‘We will not investigate a clump of ash you found in a parking lot, Neal. Stop contacting us unless you’re having an emergency.’”

“Okay,” I said. “So Neal’s gone off the deep end. We all knew it was only a matter of—”

“Wait,” Indigo interjected.

Neal continued. “But I saw what I saw. If you look closely at this photo, you’ll see bits of bone in the ash. I’ve seen cremation before and—”

Indigo muted the TV as the picture flashed across the screen, helpfully labeled with a plethora of inscrutable symbols.

“Oh,” I said, and sunk to the ground next to the sofa.

“Oh indeed,” he agreed.

Ash and bone. I remembered ash and bone, ash and bone that looked just like that. If someone had shown me a photo of what happened ten years ago in the forest, if someone had shown me my memory of the ash—dark silver ash that sparkled the way no ash should—that blew away on the breeze, it would have looked just like that photograph.

We sat together like that for a few minutes before Indigo got to his feet,