Read The Mirror for Free Online

running water ... at the mirror without its crack sitting on the porch.
    Elton raised his hand in a halfhearted wave.

    6

    Shay watched the Gingerbread House grow smaller. The sad grouping of Brandy's family still had not moved from the street.
    Finally she turned to face Boulder, Colorado--most of which wasn't there.
    Locked in Brandy's body, she felt horribly afloat now, away from the house and the mirror.
    The wide brim of Corbin Strock's hat hid the upper portion of his face. But the set of his jaw below was grim.
    "This doesn't make much sense you know," she heard herself say in a small voice. "My mother's maiden name wasn't Strock." Her uncles, Remy and Dan, weren't named Strock either. Shay peered under Corbin's hat brim. "And you aren't the man in the wedding picture in the hall."
    "That's because Mrs. McCabe's name was Euler before she married, and we didn't take a wedding picture." He turned the horses to start down the hill. Corbin had the same lazy but careful way of speaking as the McCabes. It wasn't a Southern drawl, nor was it the speech affected by TV cowboys. It was just unhurried, the vowels drawn out, the consonants distinct.
    He thinks Brandy's crazy too. Whatever Shay said would be chalked up to that. And there was no place to run. The occupants of the Gingerbread House would refuse to take her back--for her own good.
    Over rooftops and low trees she could see the hill on which sat two or three buildings of the University of Colorado, out on barren prairie, alone and aloof. It bore little resemblance to the campus, crowded with buildings and trees, surrounded by city, that she'd attended until a few weeks ago.
    This slip in time couldn't last. Shay would go back to Marek and to school. It had been a freak thing.
    Small wooden houses, many unpainted and on large lots. Outhouses and orchards. An occasional cow, horses, chickens. A rangy dog at every lot to run into the street, bark at the horses, chase wagon wheels. The horses plodded on, paying no attention, their tails lashing flies. Corbin turned the buckboard onto Pearl Street, which was no longer blocked by an elegant downtown shopping mall.
    Whenever a carriage or wagon passed too close, flies rose from piles of horse dung that dotted the dirt street.
    "People are staring at us." Women with small waists and big hips, long hot skirts. Men in loose clothing with smirks to match. Everyone wearing hats. Not a bare arm to be seen in the summer's heat.
    "Don't stare back," Corbin ordered and stopped the buckboard in front of a brick building where Shay'd clerked the summer before. Painted on the brick above the second story now were the words H ARDWARE & S TOVES.
    Corbin tied the reins to a metal ring in a miniature stone obelisk and* disappeared into the store.
    Shay wanted to slouch in the heat but the corset wouldn't permit it. Removing the short suit jacket, she wished she could take off the long-sleeved blouse under it, wondered if she dared remove the hat and decided against it.
    If I had somewhere to go, now would be the time for a getaway.
    Smells of horse and dust instead of exhaust, and tar that oozed in the sun between great slabs of flagstone sidewalk. A vicious dogfight in the middle of the street. Overhead, a forest of power and telephone wires hanging on coarse tree-trunk poles stripped of bark and branches. A little boy in knee britches staring with round, frightened eyes.
    Shay made a face and he ran off. She found an ironed, folded handkerchief smelling of lavender in the beaded bag and wiped moisture from Brandy's forehead.
    A man with a broom swept dirt from metal rails in the streets.
    Boisterous laughter across the street and three men emerged from a doorway. The sign above read, W ERELY'S S ALOON. They stopped when they saw her. "Looks like Strock made it to the wedding after all, gentlemen. Pay up," one of them said.
    Shay turned away in embarrassment to find the little boy peering around the corner of the hardware store and the man