Chapter One

Day One

Mira woke up early, the sun faintly lighting up the horizon where ashen clouds roamed silently over the low, distant buildings of the still sleeping town. 

She felt peaceful as she inhaled and exhaled gently, her eyes drifting open to take in the blank ceiling overhead, austere but non-threatening.

Then, as if following some subtle rhythm that permeated the waters of the dream world, she closed her eyes again and drifted part way back to whatever place she had just come from, whatever dream journey she had just taken.

But she knew if she stayed that way too long, she’d just get drowsy… So she sighed, and pulled herself upright, imagining that she was Dracula in his coffin, and opened her eyes.

Her pink, wooden dresser and the oval mirror that her grandma gave her – ringed by an ornate lattice of metal, wrought into vines – loomed behind her outstretched arms, just past the foot of her bed. “Bleh!” she said, like Dracula.

And she imagined for a minute that she had never seen such things before: she imagined there were no mirrors or dressers where she came from, and that they were otherworldly ornaments of a dream-world she had just passed into.

And for a moment… they seemed to loom ethereally, neither here nor there.

Her mind slowly drew her figure out of the ethers, as she became aware that she was looking at herself in the mirror… in her blue pajamas with pink unicorns. 

Love can transcend so many fields and so many valleys, a thought came to her, saying.  

The thought made her heart race. She thought of Damian, at school. They were in the tenth grade together. He had a big, bright smile, and straight, white teeth that seemed to glisten and made his demeanor seem even more radiant. She remembered thinking that she didn’t have any interest in boys, until one day she found herself lost, looking at him.

And then the structure of her world, so set and proper, introduced a kind of mad alchemy to itself that upset the whole foundation and made her every endeavor in studying seem so pointless… because whatever they taught her, it had nothing to do with that feeling that coursed so mysteriously through her heart… nothing to do with the way that scintillation that plucked at her heart strings as it wended its way through those fields sown by all her memories, tantalizing the bulbs of all the flowers there that she didn’t even know could bloom… intimating that, one day... cast in amber by the roaming sun of the visiting love of the one some part of her had been waiting for since before she had even known... they would.

But her sister’s voice, in her mind, offered a riposte to the way her optimism painted so rosy a world. 

“You have to be careful of boys,” Lina had said, combing her long, blond hair, her green eyes lost in the world of her own features cast upon the mirror as Mira looked up at her from where she was seated, cross-legged on a shag rug. “They’re just not who you think a lot of the time, okay?”

“What do you mean?” Mira asked. 

“Well…” Lina paused pensively, the sound of her brush combing through her hair punctuating the momentary stillness. “They can be really passionate one day… and then… they’re onto something else.”

Mira remembered thinking about her father and how much he had wanted a Corvo Melo, a sports car with a big engine. It was all he could talk about it seemed. Until one morning she came into the little downstairs kitchen and he beamed at her, holding up a magazine, folded in half: “Mira look!” he’d said, “The Astaphalion!” 

And he didn’t talk about anything else after that.

“So…” Mira said to Lina, running her hands back and forth in the carpet as she spoke, “like dad with his cars?”

Mira remembered the way Lina laughed, saying, “Yeah, like dad with his cars… but dad just needs something to dream about. He’ll never get one of those cars. Some guys are like that, too.”

Mira’s mind came back to her own room, and her own mirror… She screwed up her lips slightly, and pulled the little blue unicorn she slept with closer to her. She never named it, and she didn’t know why. It just didn’t feel appropriate.

Her heart seemed to be meeting with waves, as if pulsating, crashing over it, and then subsiding…

She gazed away from the small figure marooned in the mirror, with her short black hair, sitting cross legged in her bed. And outside, she saw all the little houses, cast in golden light. And she heard the mourning doves. 

She smiled. 

And her mind seemed to go back and forth between the world and Damian, and she thought that maybe to people who were in love, it was like people who dreamed, and then awakened… so that when she went to one world, some part of her stayed always in the other, the way her imagination seemed to stay connected, always, to that place her dreams came from.

Maybe love was like that, she thought, her heart pounding harder and harder… Maybe when you loved…

Maybe it was a whole world unto itself. Maybe you had to learn to escape it, or you’d get stuck there, melting into that feeling forever. 

Mira felt her eyelids sticking together and rubbed the sleep out of them. Sand… words came to her, saying... cast off from the fields of the wildflowers...

... dotting the landscapes of my mind, she finished, as if following a train of thought from somewhere else that felt at once as if she had always known it, and as if it had come to her to be encountered for the first time.

-----> Chapter Two