He started as a dream, a glimmer of something she might’ve painted once, before she put those colors away for the mundane, before myth and magic faded from youthful vision, replaced by the immutable reality of car pools and soccer games. She had always loved mirrors, not in the shallow manner of vanity, but in the deepness of witching pools and scrying crystals, in the ancient, fey sense of touching realms.

She was old now, older than the ratty rattan furniture that was no longer even retro-chic, older than the tired cat that no longer pretended to chase mice. She had done her part, raised four healthy children who were all normal, productive members of society. She had lost her counterpart some years back, before the last of the children spread their wings and flew away: one to the west coast, the other to the east, one overseas and the youngest merrily having her own babies down south. Two now, or was it three? She was appallingly vague about such things, hardly the doting grandma. Distance did detract from attachment, didn’t it?

She had been dreaming him for years, glimmers, strands, a sliver of light bearing his face, a crown of thorns, or diamond ice. Religious myth mingled with pagan lore; she’d always been fairly far from shore.

Alone now, for the first time in years. With bright green eyes surprising in her aging face, she studied her attic with renewed attention, a virtual treasure-trove of junk, accumulated from a life of saving that which she’d never need again. Narrowing her eyes against the unexpected brightness of the eastern windows, oh, but she’d forgotten the brilliance from those windows. She’d once used this as a studio, before she laid down her brushes with a vague promise to pick them again one day.

Thirty years might be considered soon, by some definitions. She made her decision before descending those steep, steep stairs to the second floor. Her son had certainly scolded about her decision to keep the Cape Cod; he hadn’t the nerve to name her old or frail, but it was what he was thinking, true enough. She’d remained firm, though; no selling this house so long as she was able to live in it without anyone’s help. And she was.

At the time, she didn’t know the reason for her obstinacy. Any one of her children would be delighted if she moved closer. At least, she flattered herself they would. She’d never been the sort of mother to suffocate them with demands or expectations. In fact, upon attainment of her majority, her youngest daughter had chided her for that vague acceptance, as if her behavior was somehow lax, unnatural. Which was at least part of the problem, she supposed; she loved her children, but she was done with them. She had reared them to the best of her ability and loved them still, in a distant way, as if they were paintings she had sold. However, she was through with them, overall, had set them free to soar or smash as best they might.

Now, now she remembered what it was about this house from which she couldn’t be parted—these windows—her garret, she had once joked to her husband when they were both impassioned and newly-wed instead of tiredly affectionate. She went into her bedroom, also strangely removed from her. It looked like a nun’s cell, all white, immaculate, impersonal, all traces of herself eradicated. She had done that out of some compulsion shortly after her husband died, as if when she removed his effects she must perforce remove her own. She had not spoken of this to the children.

She picked up the telephone and dialed. It was touchtone, her daughters had insisted. She also owned an answering system and an espresso machine, neither of which had ever made it from their boxes, save that awful Christmas morning before Evan collapsed, and wherein she’d been forced to employ that dreadful smile, the “It’s wonderful, I love it” smile, when she hated devices of any sort.

The phone rang. She spoke with a young man more bored than polite, who promised to send someone with a truck the following day to clean out her attic, a charitable endeavor—proceeds would be donated. She tuned him out, as she tuned everyone out, and shortly disconnected the call in time to be greeted by an arthritic rub about the ankles from tired Tabby, mewing about dinner. She fixed a meal for them both, although the menus differed.

Then, and then, time was only time. And she was waiting for something, something… A knock at the door roused her. Morning. The man at the door was middle-aged with the look of one unsure of his welcome, as if he wasn’t sure he belonged in decent homes. There was a hard-scrubbed cleanliness about him, as if he were defying inward defamation with outward ablution.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.” He shuffled his feet, as uncomfortable with her courtesy as he would have been contempt. She was lovely in an ethereal way, almost willow slim, clad in willow skin, and he was mildly startled at this lyrical turn of thought. He had not been that man for years, that poet.

He was hungry and she knew it, but there was no point in belaboring the obvious. “The attic’s two flights up. Take everything. I want nothing left but floor.” She turned for the kitchen, the man already forgotten, but his voice stalled her, its very incredulity amusing.

“You’ve…surely you’ve already sorted through what you want?”

She gave a mute nod, the long linen dress brushing bare ankles as she stepped from sight. In silence, she ate her breakfast, tea and toast with orange marmalade, an affectation left from earlier days. Through her meal, she heard the serenade of his steps, the thumps and bumps of her life hefted over his shoulders, carried out the door, one box at a time.

When he was finished, she brought him a muffin, banana walnut, not baked by her own hand. She had never been terribly domestic and was becoming less so as time wore on. Soon she would be one of the eccentric, reclusive artists about whom stories are told with great inaccuracy in unauthorized biographies, except the sweetest, or the bitterest irony was that she was no longer an artist, merely eccentric.

Plainly, she puzzled him. He accepted the muffin with an arc of brow that would’ve been elegant except that it was marred by an ugly scar. “Thank you for cleaning out the attic,” she said. “And whatever it was you did couldn’t have been so bad.” Non-sequiturs, of course, but she’d quite lost the knack for conversation, if she’d ever owned it.

What had she and Evan talked about, those thirty-three years? The children, of course, and the house, the cars, the bills, his job, her lack of one, a hundred thousand hours of banality, logged with imprecise fondness. She’d loved him, she must’ve done, at some point, or perhaps, towards the end, it was more accurate to say, she hadn’t disliked him. He simply was, as she was, and they were, together. His death was not so much a tragedy as a surprise, as one waking suddenly in that predawn, not-quite light, a hand stretching towards the far edge of the bed and finding only cool linen - an “oh” of a moment.

The man stared at her with worried eyes, muffin forgotten, as if she were quite mad. And perhaps she was, except it was a serene sort of madness. She made herself smile at him, a thing of bright sadness, and it hurt him to see it, that glint of bone in this willow woman’s face. He had no words, and she knew that somehow, going to the door, as if there was nothing more to be said, as if they had spoken all. He went away with a lump in his throat, feeling peculiar, changed. The door fell to behind him with a final snick, strengthening her sense of exile.

The attic was gloriously empty, streaming with light. Before she fully knew what she intended, she hurried down the stairs. To the car, to the store, it had been days since she’d been out, but now, there was urgency; there was desire. She drove not to the grocer’s or any of the quaint shops that comprised downtown, stuffed with too-trendy merchandise from one coast or other. The tiny art store summoned her; paints, she needed, colors in all hues, palette, brush, canvas. She bought passion, that day. She bought youth.

Her house sat empty, a canvas unpainted, worn from years of silence and compromise. She left it without looking back. And drove. Drove. To the place she’d gone once and vaguely remembered only in dreams, like so many voiceless dead who haunt and touch with wispy fingertips. A life interrupted, broken by the everyday, and now, she reached Land’s End.

The girl at the desk smiled at her, seeming vaguely familiar. Genevieve’s niece, perhaps? Who knew, the woman had so many. And she took a room upstairs. Full of light. Promise. She scrawled Mrs. Evan Winters for the last time in the registry. The receptionist said nothing of her boxes, the artist’s kit. If there would be a mess, she didn’t seem to mind.

Days or weeks, she painted, canvas after canvas, furious activity, followed by equally furious bouts of weeping, of destruction. So angry, she was, with this failure; she felt possessed by this drive, yet utterly unable to commit her vision to form. She came to herself stabbing, stabbing away at a canvas in a liquid rush of excitement. It was dreadful; it was exhilaration. She had never known her Shiva.

She found a mirror, or a mirror found her—the same result, in the end. Her face was flushed, almost fevered, and terribly thin - gaunt. Her silver hair spattered with this shade and that; she was an artist’s study of herself.

She was old, still. And tired. Amid her rags and paints, her brushes and bottles, she fell asleep. And dreamed. She dreamed of him again, as she had when she was young, an artisan of truth, and this time, she knew him, her sovereign, and her mate. When she awoke, there was clarity. Her purpose, crystal - and she saw, now, that her surface was wrong, blankly ignorant. She went out again, painted in the glorious shades of seeming insanity and bought mirrors. Hundreds of them, and once more, she began to paint, faces within faces, and shapes within shapes. And as her body of work grew, time ran liquid, her physical self secondary.

Her face and his painted in shadow hue, misted, twisting into infinite reflections, two mirrors turned to themselves, that spiral into eternity. It was night, and there were stars, but the light came, at first slowly, but glowing within that unbounded gate, that crystal heart of dreams. She smiled then, Circe, Medea and more, madness and witchery immortal. She stepped through and went to him, at last.

• Sarah At The Desk
• Genevieve Dreams
• Madness And Witchery Immortal
• Nothing Left But Floor

- Ann Aguirre