Black bordering on deep midnight purple stretches out in every direction. Varying shades of darkness ruffle and flutter in the forest as the car pushes deeper into night. Headlights scan ahead a familiar but empty road, flanked by forest and broad open fields, extending out straight for miles and miles to come. The first slight white speckles fall from the sky in a slow stunted progression as if only a single flake were being churned out per minute high, high above. Back on earth, the road ever so slowly grows a thin membrane film of crystalline frost.
The couple cut the night driving home, happy in their together. The heat system, past need of a check up, sputters and trickles a luke warm gift. Heat emerges from the vents in the same fashion that the flakes fall from the sky, slow and hardly noticeable. Traveling these conditions is an accepted reality. There is simply no extra money to put into the car. They are happy that it starts, travels, parks, and can repeat the process everyday. Part of this accepted reality is layers and lots of them. They wear at least two pairs of everything. In this manner, individually and collectively, they fashion their personal warmth. On his hands, above thin liners are cloaked in thick black gloves, a Christmas gift from his wife.
Comfortable and content in a world of familiars, he takes advantage without notice of this everyday night. He and the wheels, complicit in the spin and turn, press a bit more speed than normal for the trip home. Small anomalous details of the world are filtered out of his autopilot, unconscious driving mind. Little details, like the geometry of headlights that fail to strike far enough into the cold black night, far enough to see clearly, far enough to make due for certain instant irredeemable moments.
A flash of shadow bursts from the woods and shoots across the road. It stops in an instant at the yellow line mid-road. Eyes glow back and reflect headlights. Time stops. Time freezes. In a fury, time lurches back into place. The dark shifting reflection jumps back to the woods in the direction it came.
Jarring reality and adrenaline explode the unconscious mind upright. Reactions forward twist a grip of the wheel and a slight turn tracts the car right, shifts inches, and veers from the asphalt. The right tires hit the dirt and shake the car with violent throbbing jerks. From nothing a telephone pole appears and runs a straight line toward the headlights.
She wakes screaming as the car tears through frozen dust and near death, slicing within two inches of the telephone pole. As in a dream, the pole disappears while metal screeches and scrapes ears and nerves. A loud explosion blows all extremes of the night wide open. The angled telephone wires rip and propel the passenger side mirror from the car. Madness ensues. He tries to regain control of the car, again over compensating. He can’t feel or find the steering wheel much less make sense of it, make it work properly. His hands, encased in spandex cloth and black fuzz, slide all over the wheel. Darkness and the sudden, split-second nature of the night assert control. The car lurches back across the road. The back passenger side spins forward. Senses fail. BOOOOOM. Thunder claps and echoes across the dark, dark night.
The car rips in two. The passenger side curls around a giant old wood tree like a hand around a tool, like a hand holding a scythe. The wife explodes through her seatbelt and is thrown from the car spilling forth all her earthly potential. She smashes into another tree and dies instantly. The man lies unconscious, almost lifeless, buckled into the pathetic remains of his vehicle. Presently stripped of his home, happiness, love, and life. The car is no more a car, the wife is no longer a living person, no longer a companion, and the man is no longer a husband. The cold, quiet black night takes over, snow begins to fall and freeze every last recognizable aspect of what was once normal, everyday life.
Two
Morning, beautiful and free to craft and create, is welcomed into the budding home. Its clarity and potential can’t be denied, nor can work-a-day rituals that precede entrance to a public world.
Nathanial and Kora work their everyday, practical morning magic applying clothes and fragrance together. Proceeding towards a busy day, they neither box each other in nor annoy the other with an early morning presence. This is their time together in many ways. Though never articulated they look forward to this time together. Here they help each other dawn respective armors and place game faces for all the day’s people and events to come. If put to describe it they’d say they can’t be the person everyone and everything meets and encounters, if first they can’t be who they are to each other in the quiet still simplicity of a shared morning.
They are no storyboard perfect couple, but neither are they sarcastic or antagonist. They have the interior complications and contradictions that respect, years of deep companionship, and way too much information provide. Married three years ago, they hold and reflect a reverential but playful love for each other that persists throughout all hours, seasons, and years.
This morning is no different. Brushing his teeth in the small, cramped bathroom, Nate, rises up from the sink and pulls Kor’s curler from the back of the toilet. In the process knocking her hand mirror to the ground. Her reflection stepping from the shower and jutting behind him, in the early waking confusion, scrambles the exact place of her dripping body and what he mistakenly thinks traces before him. Jumping back to make room for her he lands on her hand mirror forever spider-webbing the images it holds.
“Uh-oh...bad luck for you”, she said.
“For me, it’s your mirror.”
“Ever the optimist,…how about we share it, split the difference.”
“Naa’ you know I don’t believe in bad luck.”
“Yea well you know me, and my mama, and my grandma, and everybody else back in the roots of my family are pursued by that nonsense. Are you really gonna make me shoulder this alone?”
“Don’t worry about it. I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Three
Morning, relentless and spiteful, pushes into this place. In varying periods paces, stares, paces, sits, stands, lies down mumbles inner thoughts to himself, and rises again wondering what to do and where to go because this was not working. This building he once called home, which once was a seat of comfort and a table for a shared loving cup now was as empty a receptacle as he himself felt. “I can’t hold it back, I can’t keep the morning back,” to the walls he spoke. Nathanial put up shudders, blinds, curtains and still light creeps. Worse than the slivers that crack the defenses, he knows, exactly what is going on outside and worse still, how much he once loved the morning life. “Never again, Never again,” occasionally breaks the isolated silence between the walls, as he tells himself can he can never again feel, taste, or enjoy the morning.
Nights are no better. Nights now are a combination of visual pressure and anxiety. He no longer sleeps in any fashion considered rest. The swelling contradictions pelting his mind and body are too much. He begins fleeing the house before the sun rises, as if being outside ready and waiting for the sun in sheer intimidation might halt the ancient cycle. This battle is fruitless. Yet some determination remains that he’d again take control of things that can’t bring himself to name. Nathanial enters the languid shift to dawn in that he might fight the ill fit and misery within those confining walls. He moves on his feet rather than unravel inside. Nathanial flees the world by blindly entering into it. No longer recognizing morning, he walks in a dream that is a nightmare, which he has not the ability to see or understand. He is a born-again ghost, the only ghost in the world that requires food and water to continue its morbid haunt.
Within two months, the genuinely concerned and the morbidly interested stop dropping by to “see how he’s doing.” He spends all his time in long walks or long drives to nowhere. Sometime about five months after being released from the hospital, without prior thought or intention he drives directly to the scene of the accident. Driving in a sort of mental blank state Nathanial returns to that most desolate and lonely of places.
There were once times, lying naked in embrace of Kora, pulling her body tight to him, warm and soft and with a smile she whispered in his ear, “This is the best place to be right now in the entire world.” Walking in cold silence to the tree that extinguished her life he thinks for a moment, “this is not that place Kor,” in an instant the maddening, stronger parts of his brain bury the thought.
Walking in the woods, everywhere he sees bits and pieces of metal, plastic, and glass. He remembers no definite scent related to the accident, but he swears he can smell melted fuselage perfuming the late spring air. Nathanial loses track of time and himself in the woods until blinding splinters of light jut up from the ground and jar his trance. Bending down, he picks up the broken remains of his car’s rear view mirror, turns from the tree and walks from the woods with mirror in hand.
Four
“Bring on the evolutions, bring on world spins, let this whole fucking thing play out,” yelling to the quick shifting skies his arms strike at the air while feet relentlessly pursue each other. No longer did any form of direction play into his life. What still stuck, the only thing that had conquered and remained of his previous existence was Nathanial’s instinctive belief that there was no such thing as bad luck. There is only what happens.
Defiance of bad luck takes Nathanial in a strange direction. It leads him to a stubborn, driven affinity for broken and smashed mirrors bits. He becomes a collector. He becomes an artist, a master collage craftsman. His first brush strokes come from the fragments of the broken rear view mirror that exited the car with his wife.
He cements the shrapnel mirror fragments to the square middle of the shed in his backyard. During his walks growing in length, intensity, and duration he begins to collect broken fragments of mirror and glass in all shapes, color, and size when ever he comes across them. He walks and finds pieces, picks them up, and stores them in an old worn leather tobacco satchel. Returning home he cements the found pieces to the side of the shed in an ever-widening circle. His growing fixation to build this thing begins to feed itself. He walks more and more, still rising before the sun, he continues all day searching to find what he regards as growing personal therapy. Nathanial comes to believe that the broken pieces lay out there waiting for him, calling to him, begging him to restore them back to their once coveted glory, their place of reflection, their palace of raw revelation. In a year the entire shed and half the circumference of the fence bordering his property is an intricate gypsy jigsaw mirror patchwork. A monument to something he is growing to recognize, to something that when he looks into it recognizes him.
With spring again firmly in root and growing with each day Nathanial’s walks transition to a more sedentary pursuit. His mornings and afternoons turn to sitting in the backyard staring into the spider web looking glass. During the day, light bounces in every direction as he sits vacantly still staring into his construction. In the process of applying the looking coat to the shed and fence he begins more and more to think of it as a door or gate as opposed to a mirror. He loses track of the difference between where his world ends and the fractured mirror world begins. With the semi-oblong oval complete, he digs a six-foot wide concave hole in the yard and begins burning huge fires at night. The fires dance all night swaying and flickering in the face of the mirrors. What he sees nightly holds him in utter rapture.
It’s beautiful, he thinks looking into the reflected fire. The fire, at once a thousand different roaring entities in the individual mirror pieces and at once a single collected creature, it plays a wholly original theatre for him endlessly engaging and inviting. Every night he builds the fire. Every night he stares into the contrast of light and dark. Every night he stares back into himself.
He soon grows aware of the various and different Nathanials that exist in the looking night. Every night they all come to parade before him. A whole universe of changeling Nathanials shifting beautiful and grotesque and everything of every order between come to pay a sick homage to the stage he created, the newly erected common ground limbo he built. Other things come too and darkly transition in the background of these nightly waking dreams. Strange shadows, figures, and creatures grow bolder and more pronounced with each night. They come from the background periphery closer and closer to the foreground, slowly encroaching on the Nathanials who become harder and harder to parse out of the terrifying ebony menagerie eager for center stage. In time no more Nathanials come out to play at all, only the stuff of forgotten mythology and ageless nightmare remain and dance and ask invitation to come closer still and join him within him. “We know you,” they begin to whisper, “we see you,” they call, “we are you, you are we,” they echo into his unblinking eyes.
Reflections and shadows wave back at him smiling wild wide-eyed with drunk wet broad grins and seething delicious teeth. One night, a Nathanial strikes clear from the dark kaleidoscopic animal circus. He stirs from his enchantment, yelling, “What?” Is this a guide, a map, he thinks? “A clear path shown,” he says out loud. The words he hears surprise him, as if they came from someone else. It took time to see and understand the figure approaching from the shimmer and flicker of orange blaze. The emerging figure set to drop its markers.
“What,” he asks. “Is this me?”
“I’m lost, are you going to help me.” He waits then yells, “Why,… why do you stand in silence? I give in. I don’t know anymore. I don’t understand which way to go or what to do. I’m not gonna make it much longer.” At this a real, true smile first begin to crack in the broken mirror’s reflection?
“You are divided, don’t fight it,” comes in response. “Embrace the life direction that approaches in the morning,” repeats several times. “We have shadows for a reason. The sun is a tool to bring the plants and flowers life, why not you? You should use it well. Use it well.”
“Shadow play is hiding,” Nathanial says.
“How can you hide from yourself? Impossible,” it yelled back. “Salvation lies waiting for you to divide and conquer. The only opposing force that stands in your way is you. Do you know why sun and shadow is powerful, what the true nature of it all comes to?”
“No.”
“It’s to make a natural division between the things you refuse to recognize.”
“What do I refuse, I hold no sacred cow.”
“Liar,” echoes. “You hold a tight house rigidly divided, which you are afraid to enter. She is dead, but not gone. You can go to her anytime you want. Nothing can take from you, not even death, which you have made out of nothing. Our relationships are beautiful as they literally, are made from nothing. What comes from nothing is original construction and no power, heaven or earth, can take that from you.”
“Take from me,” irate and fuming, burbling words and tears, Nathanial’s lungs rend the reflection demanding answers. “Take from me…there’s not a fucking thing to return to.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“What?”
“Who are you talking to? What is there to deny? Look at what you have created, actively sought out. You set to make something consciously broken at its inception. Why is that alluring to you? What does it provide and simultaneously shadow? Puzzle maker what game do you seek?”
“I am no maker. I control nothing,” Nathanial yells at himself. “I am the puzzle. I’m broken and missing pieces.”
“Yes, and?”
“The pieces are my life.”
“Yes, and?”
“And, what?”
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“No, you live and though you have lost, that is the constructive nature of life. It’s a give and take with more on the take the further along you go. It’s a natural, normal, inescapable process. Fair has no place in the equation.”
“The pieces are made of my life?”
“Yes, and?”
“The game is not over.”
“Yes.”
The faces and bodies one and all recede into the dark. Light and colorful imagery congeal into a single dying fire. Nathanial sits down and drifts off to a fast, heavy sleep, a deeper understanding of the rising best reflected in the looking glass.
