degree_of_desire
e. jarvis 1999
edited 2/1/04

    She gazed at herself for several moments.  Her right hand rose slowly, reaching for the world beyond the image reflected in the mirror; her breath hissed in her teeth as her fingertips touched the glass and could go no farther.  "What have you done," she murmured, pressing her entire hand to the mirror's cold surface.
    "I did it," the boy said, mouth slack, his legs sprawled out in front of him.  He raked his hair out of his eyes and got up, swaying and staring. They spent several more moments not moving, breathing .. watching one another's reflection.  Then her eyes searched the surface of the mirror itself, looking, it seemed, for a crack or a crevice that would reveal the nature of the thing .. searching for a way to slip back through.  She bent and ran her fingers over the wood surrounding the glass; she looked behind the mirror itself.  The boy observed her for a few more shining bits of silence before he reached, pulling his robe from hanger in the closet.  It rattled noisily against the bar it hung on, and then fell to the floor with a soft thump.
    "No," she turned on her heel, delicate mouth twisted with pain.  The boy's eyes weren't blinking. "No, you must send me back.  There are others.  There are others!"  She strode to him and took him by the shoulders with her sun-darkened hands. "Why did you bring me here?"  He did not answer, gazing at her silently instead.  The shoulders of his tee-shirt bunched into her fists.  She pulled him closer and looked up into his face, searching his expression.  Something written on his face crept into her eyes; she released his shirt with one hand, touching at his cheek.  Her anxious and quiet fear became blind panic, as if she had expected her fingers to sink through him.  "You put me back," she whispered, her voice bottomless.  It grew louder and louder until her small voice was a bellow, ringing off of the basement walls.  Her fingers gripped him, shook him. "You are not the only one who needs me," she cried, sound tearing into his knowing silence.  "You are not the only one who saw!"  He threw out a hand to grip his desk, and easily pulled himself out of her grasp.  She seemed to waver in the air then, before she slipped to the floor.  Tears wove their way down her cheeks .. her shoulders shook.  She covered her face with her hands.  When he bent to touch her, she shrank from his fingers.  The moments before she spoke again were filled with her stained glass whimpers.
    "The mirror," she said slowly, her breath shivering, "is not one.  It is many."  Her eyes closed.  He knelt down and tried to see her face through the veil of her hair.
    "You're angry," the young man said, the robe clutched in a fist.  He tried to give it to her again, but she shook her head at it numbly. "But, I've only done you a favor."  She did not reply.  A sudden, irrational rage gripped him and he leaned forward, hissing: "You owe me."
    The boy gaped at his own words.  He watched as her expression fell out of every line, smooth and strange.  "I don't owe you anything," she whispered.  "Any of you."  She went to the bed and sat down, pushing herself backward and into the corner, into the shadows.
    The boy sat cross-legged on the floor of his basement bedroom, gazing at her, musing.  He didn't want there to be others .. but then, he didn't really know who she was.

    The room was confining.
    She moved her legs over the side of the bed and looked at them. She bent her knees, straightened them. She noticed her toes and carefully propped one foot on one knee;  she bent close to them, but then they wiggled and she stomped her foot back to the carpet.
    When they wiggled again, she noticed that they were attached to her leg that was attached to her chest that was attached to her head where she was looking out of, and the thing that was wiggling her toes was herself.  Unafraid, she propped her foot back up onto her knee and pushed them around with her fingers, which she noticed next.
    She held them out in front of herself and wiggled them too.  Her mouth smiled.  So this is what it is to be afraid of one’s-self, she thought.  She brought her hands close to her face and saw the texture of her fingernails .. they were smoother, rather than soft as her skin was.
    The square of sunlight from the basement window moved around the room as she noticed everything .. her eyelids and her earlobes, the bump on her ankle and the divot at the base of her throat.  She was familiar with the heaviness around her head .. hair, what they arranged while they and she were conversing.
    The sun moved .. the light in the basement window moved with it.  She stopped when she noticed that her toes were much warmer than the rest of her.  Not an unpleasant warmth, certainly, but a kind of swimming dancing warmth all over the skin of her foot.
    The sun, she realized, was sitting on her.  It was leaping through the basement window, painting a square of gold over the carpet, where it settled its chin finally onto her very own recently discovered foot and it's toes.  She wiggled her toes, and because the sensation sent thrills up her leg, she slid off the bed and pushed her legs into the square.  More twisting, delicious sensation.
    Using her toes to grip the carpet and her newfound hands to push her, she moved into the square.

    The boy rushed home in a panic.  The way she'd stroked the pillow he offered her rather than lay her head into it, leaning close to hear the whisper of her skin against the fabric - it had spawned a thousand worries.  He thought of her "feeling" an electric socket, or "feeling" the envelope opener he kept in his desk drawer .. He thanked the gods over and over again that he had thought to lock the door behind him.  She couldn't have gotten into anything worse than the light socket.
    He tore down the stairs to the basement door, tried two wrong keys, and when the doorknob finally turned his heart seemed to stop. For a strained heartbeat he doubted if she would even be there.  The door swung open soundlessly.
    She sat in the middle of the floor, limbs bundled into a ball.  Her face was turned up.  Her mouth curved, her skin .. luminous.

    She sat in the corner of his bed and his bedroom, hugging blankets and pillows to herself with slender-pale arms.  She was shivering, the movements of her body small and pained.  The boy stood in the doorway.
    "I'm home."
    "I know."
    "Are you cold?"
    "I'm always cold."  She pulled her knees closer to her chin.
    "You need more blankets."
    "It won't help."
    "Do you --"
    "I need to go home."
    "It's out of the question."
    Her eyes blinked wearily and then closed.  The boy stepped to the foot of the bed.  "You're sure there's nothing I can do for you."  She shook her head.
    The boy let his backpack slip off of his shoulder, down his arm, and to the floor.  Her skin, he noticed, had lost its bronze and had become sallow, a jaundiced yellow.  He pulled his computer chair to her side.
    "What did you see, while you were in the mirrors?"  he asked after a moment.
    "What do you want to hear about?" she replied.  Her eyes opened.  They were as clear as and as bitter as vinegar.  "I have seen much."
    "I want to hear about the past.  Tell me a story about the past."
    "A story of the past?  or a story from the past?  For there are truths, things that were and now are not;  and then there are stories -- things that might never have been."  Her voice was flat.
    "Surprise me," the boy said.  He got up, took a sweatshirt off of a hanger in his closet and reached over the bed with it in his hand.  She looked at it, and then at him.  He stood there for a moment before he put two and two together.  "Here," he said, bunching the sweatshirt in two fists, "you put your .. head in there .. " He stretched it over her head, and then helped her slip her arms into the sleeves. Six inches of fabric hung over her hands.
    "It won't -- "
    "I know," he said, and he sat down.
    "If you wish." He watched her pinch the shirt cuff.  He watched her feeling the fleecy inside with her fingerprints.  When she finally began, her voice startled him out of a kind of hypnosis.

    "The rajah saw her first in the market.  She was extraordinary, but not any more beautiful than a harem girl in her better days .. She occurred to him more than she struck him.
    "She was buying fruit beneath a banner of green, very close to the tables he was standing at, while his guards waited in the sun. Whatever he wanted, he had.  And he began to want this girl.  He went to her, and when she saw him coming she knealt and put her face into the dust.
     'Stand, please,' he said to her.  The courtesy surprised the girl, and it was a moment before she straightened.  'Look at me,' he told her.  She did.  'Ride with me.'  When he spoke this third time, this girl's .. lovely eyes lost their light.  A pebble in her mouth that was fear - she swallowed it, and then she went.  She took his hand and they walked together to the caravaan.  When they sat, it was in a curtained litter .. as they rose on the shoulders of slaves he removed a golden ring from his little finger.  He placed it on her small thumb and kissed it.  'So that everyone will know the gift I give you today,' he whispered.  She smiled and began to take down her hair.  Her hands shook as she did it.
    "These things I saw in the mirror the rajah's eyes."

    "I don't like it," the boy said suddenly.
    "Then put me back," she whispered, tears as diamonds clinging to the fringe of her thick, dark lashes.  The boy's back curved, his chin falling, rich color seeping from his dark knuckles and his dark cheeks.  "You have taken something from me that you do not know how to return."
    "You're just full of fables and fairy tales, aren't you," the boy snapped, rising from his chair.  His fingers peeled through his hair.  Her stare burned his back. "Nothing real to say, just reflections.  Reflections of humanity, reflections of meaning--"
    "Reflections.  That is who I am. All that I am.  I do not change within because I am visible!  Do you think I do not feel your pain?" she breathed.  "Do you think I did not hear your words?"  She had risen partially from the blankets, her hands thrust forward, fingers reaching, plaintive.  "What do you want from me, boy?" she begged.
    "I thought you could tell me the secret," he said loudly in reply, frightening her so that she seemed to shrink.  The silence that came after its echoes died was numb and ugly.  She didn't understand.
    "What 'secret.'"
    "What you know about me .. about us," This cry came less the shriek the boy thought it had been, more a strangled sob broiling up from his stomach, tasting of bile.
    "You brought me here because .. because you want to know something about humans you think that only I know?"
    "That you must know."  The faint comprehension in her expression calmed him.
    "There is nothing that I know that you do not, or cannot learn for yourself .. all of humanity's secrets have been plundered, the stories told already.  If you were quiet and if you paid enough attention, you would hear and see those secrets for yourself.  You have to listen for them."   She paused, her hands coming to rest against the sheets.  "Try to hear, as I have heard."
    "I don't see those things you do, hear those things!  That's why you have to tell me."
    "You want a spirit to tell you the answers, boy?" she said, with a tiny smile.
    "Yes."
    "I am not a goddess.  You are not a king.  I do not have to tell you anything."  She replied, settling back into her pillows.

    "I brought you something." The boy took his right hand from behind his back and thrust out in front of himself.  The roses' fat blossomed heads bowed and shivered.  "Here," he said.
    Her dull eyes flashed wide -- she turned her head.  "Take them away," she cried.  The boy thrust them closer to her.
    "Take them.  I bought them for you."  She turned her head back only slightly, saw the proximity of the bouquet, and her arms leapt up to shield her face.
    "They're horrible .. horrible!  Take them away .. p-please .."
    "Why?" the boy asked, his arm dipping slightly.
    "You've cut them .." she choked.  "They're suffocating .. dying .. and you give them as gifts?"  She shivered.  "Corpses as gifts?"
    "They aren't corpses.  They're flowers.  I was trying to .. to make you happy." Her arms lowered a little, enough for him to see her eyes and cheeks, again wet with tears.
    "When you die to slake the thirst of someone else's vanity .. then you will know the pain of those flowers you show to me!" She jabbed a bony fingertip at him and then covered her mouth with both hands.  It was the boy's turn to prolong the quiet.
    "More morals," he murmured, tossing the roses to the carpet.  "More, trite, stupid, tired lessons? What is the fucking matter with you?"  He felt the question’s idiocy before it entirely left his mouth.  The roses met the side of the desk with force, then the floor.
    He threw himself into a beaten Lazy Boy on the other side of the room without looking at her again.

    The town around him was sleeping.
    It was a community of clones, living in identical white houses with little porches and cedar swings.  None of them thought much on anything.  They whispered about him in their sewing circles, in their weekly poker games .. his mother was ashamed to call him her son. Her son, the one who listened.
    He fell asleep in the library once, after curfew had rung.  They never let him forget it.  Maybe he read too much, maybe he started to wonder if it was strange to have this domestic uniformity .. but after they caught him that morning, nobody ever forgot the boy who broke the curfew. T hey called him a lunatic, sitting on a park bench past the lunch hour, feeding the pigeons, watching the white men sweep the sidewalk.  He'd tried to explain to them.
    That's why he started to talk to the mirror.  It had had an open heart.  It had known what he knew.  Things happened quickly, after that;  he saw the face, and then he started to look for a way to bring her out.  Out to him.  Selfish.
    Now, the boy watched her sleep.
    He'd brought down one of his mother's sundresses for her to wear, and now, after being awake for two days, she'd finally let herself rest.  Her beauty filled the dark.  Her hands were small, and her face was small.  Her starvation was tangible.  Awful.
    She was right.  He didn't know how to put her back.  It required a degree of desire.  He'd wanted her to come.  He wanted her to stay, but he didn't want her to die.  He wanted her to love him, too;  but she couldn't, not now that she considered him her captor and not her savior.  This wasn't how he'd wanted it to be.
    He hadn't planned on what she wold take for sustinance .. He hadn't even thought of it.  She didn't eat meat, vegetables .. she didn't get nourishment from the sun or the soil, as though she were a flower.
    She had stopped talking about being sent back.  She had given up, resigned herself to end her life in a basement bedroom.   He'd tried to make it a home for her.  He'd put things away, vacuumed, dusted.  He'd put up curtains .. little things.  She couldn't have cared.
    Someone, somewhere, was talking to himself in the mirror, wondering why it didn't seem to be listening.  And it was the boy's fault.
    Moonlight seeped through the high, small window, stretching itself across her body.  He was jealous of the moonlight, following the lines her cheek and her hip.  Though even the moonlight could not reach into the blue hollows of her face .. The sundress settled into the depressions between her ribs.  Her fingers looked like twigs.
 Slowly, the light turned to caress his face.

    He dreams about the spell.  He hadn't known how powerful it was, or he would have stood away from the mirror.  The splinters stab at his arms.  She falls out the thin air, as if she had been pressing her ear to a door and someone had thrown it open.  The glass doesn’t cut her.   A mermaid stripped of her tail.  Her hair is long, iridescent.  Her eyes are, at first glance, as black as crude oil.  She cants her head backward;  they gain illumination, the irises fading, an Antarctic blue.  She looks frightened.  The moment the light splinters in shards surrounding her, she begins to scream. The sound bursts his eardrums; a tender drop of blood leaks down his cheek. Tender ..

    The boy woke with a start, his breath squeezed from his lungs - her face - her hand, darting back, a fingertip lifting from his cheek -
    "I'm s-sorry," she said. The moonlight made her pupils - "Your face .. it was just .."  Her eyes: "Forgive me."

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