Conjured

I am within the tent again, on the stage. Streaks of moonlight filter through slits and holes in the fabric. The stage is ringed with candles. They shed their light upward, twisting the Magician’s face into grotesque shadows, which he has highlighted with makeup.

“You are the blank card, of course,” he says.

Behind him is a silver mirror as tall as he is. It’s warped, and the curves elongate his reflection so that he stretches into a skeletal figure. His hat narrows into a slit.

I walk toward the mirror and stop in front of it. It is metal, not glass, and the candle flames flicker in it. I look into it, and a girl with brown hair and antlers looks back at me. I raise my hand toward the girl’s face. She raises her hand. I stop. She stops.

It’s me. She’s me.

But I have green eyes, I think.

And then I am pushed into the mirror.

I melt into the silver. It swirls around me, and coolness sweeps through me. In an instant, it’s over. I emerge from the mirror into a meadow. I am beside a lake that glitters in the sun. A wagon waits for me. On its steps is the Storyteller, knitting a red ribbon.

* * *

Eve sucked in air, and her eyes popped open. Harsh white light filled her vision and flooded her mind as if it wanted to sear away every thought. Her eyes watered as she tried to see shapes in the whiteness. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. She felt straps bite into her skin as she strained. She was lying flat on her back. She smelled antiseptic, and the smell triggered a memory—tubes in her veins, pain flowering over her skin, eyes burning. She heard a steady beep, shrill and insistent.

Hospital, she thought.

She remembered in a rush: The tubes. The pain. The voices. The dreams. The way her muscles had seemed to stretch until they snapped, the way her skin had felt peeled from her body like the skin of an apple, the way her blood had seemed to burn through her veins as if it were gasoline that had been lit on fire.

Last time, they had taken her old body and reshaped it into this new body, this stranger’s body. She had woken with only emptiness inside.

No! Eve thought.

She couldn’t lose herself again.

She tried to flail, but the straps held her down. She arched her back, and alarms began to wail. She heard footsteps race toward the hospital room.

Out! she thought. Out through the windows. Out into the world. Out. Away. Far away and never come back. Never be found. Never be unsafe. Never be lost. Never be broken again. She strained to the side and threw her magic at the hospital bed bars, the straps that held her, and at the windows with the drawn shades.

All the windows in the room shattered at once.

Darkness claimed her again.

* * *

I am sitting in the wagon, and the Storyteller’s arm is around me. “Shh, shh,” she tells me. “Hush.” She strokes my hair. “It won’t hurt. Not one bit.”

The Storyteller smells of Vaseline and greasepaint. Her cheeks have been painted with red circles, and a clown’s smile stretches over her real lips. The paint has cracked where her skin is wrinkled. I lean against her and let her comfort me, a child in a mother’s arms.

I think perhaps I sleep.

When I wake, she is gone.