Five Stories for the Dark Months by Katherine Traylor Page B

it.
    “I’m still mad,” she said quickly,
lest her mother wrongly assume that all was forgiven. “But... I’ll
come downstairs.”
    “All right,” said her mother,
looking bemused. “Go wash your hands and come set the
table.”
    Adie approached the bathroom as if
it were a dragon’s cave. Her heart was pounding. The bathroom light
was out, and since the room had no windows it was as dark as a real
cave would have been. She snaked her arm around the doorframe and
felt for the switch. For one harrowing second she was sure that
something was going to bite her hand off—but then she found the
switch, and light flooded the bathroom.
    There was something wrong with the
mirror. At first she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. It was a
strange crosshatching over the surface of the glass, so thick in
places that it almost looked frosted. It covered the whole surface
of the mirror, from top to bottom and left to right.
    After a moment, Adie realized that
the marks were scratches, gouged into the surface of the glass as
if with a screw or a nail. They grew larger and wilder the further
down they went, until at the bottom they became a nest of angry
gouges that took up half the mirror.
    She reached out automatically to
touch the glass. The scratches were quite deep, almost rough to the
touch. It would have taken someone a lot of work—and a lot of
anger—to produce them so quickly. Gradually, her mind found
patterns in the chaos—and then it all clicked into place. From top
to bottom, side to side, the scratches spelled out the same two
words over and over again, until they culminated in a ragged scrawl
across the bottom:
    FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK
YOU
    Something moved behind the glass,
drawing Adie’s eyes to her reflection. The girl behind the mirror
was almost hidden behind the destruction she had wrought, but it
was clear that she was pleased with herself. She smirked at Adie
and mouthed two words. Though Adie couldn’t hear them, she
understood them quite clearly.
     
    “I just don’t see how you did it,”
her mother said the next Saturday. “You were only up there for an
hour—some of those scratches were a quarter of an inch deep!” She
was leaning against the kitchen counter, overseeing Adie’s
punishment breakfast of cold cereal and milk. For Adie’s parents
there were pancakes and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The
smells in the kitchen were an exquisite torture to Adie, who
usually looked forward to Saturday breakfast all week.
    She watched wistfully as her mother
sliced fresh cantaloupe and poured real maple syrup into a jug for
the table. “I didn’t do it,” she muttered for the thousandth
time.
    “Then who did,
Adie?” her mother snapped. She had clearly lost patience with
Adie’s protestations of innocence. “Only you and I were in the
house, and I promise you that I didn’t carve ‘Fuck you’ all over your mirror. Are
you suggesting that some criminal broke in and did it?” She looked as if she wanted
to throw something.
    Adie rather wanted to throw
something, too. She shrugged, looking down at her plate. What could
she say?
     
    The new mirror for her bathroom was
delivered within a week of the old one’s demise. Under her mother’s
direction, Adie had cleaned and polished the room to a sparkling
sheen, and the air was heavy with the remnants of chemical vapors.
The mirror itself was larger and more elaborate than the other one
had been. It had a beveled edge where the other had been plain, and
a border of frosted-glass roses that Adie longed to run her
fingertips over. She stole glances at the glass as her father
installed it, and watched as her mother polished it to brilliant
clarity. There was nothing unusual in their reflections. She began
to hope.
    After dinner that night, she crept
towards the bathroom with butterflies in her stomach. Once again
she reached through the doorway first to turn on the light. New
mirror or not, there was no way she would