Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [41]
But sometimes you have a friend to rescue. And so you take a deep breath and then step over the line and into the darkness ahead.
Chapter Thirteen
Splinters
Once upon a time, a demonlike creature with a forty-seven-syllable name made an enchanted mirror. The mirror shattered in the sky. The splinters took to the wind and scattered for hundreds of miles. When they fell to the earth, things began to change.
You might be swimming in a lake and come upon a spot that is cold and murky, and it feels like you have swum through a ghost. You might be walking in a grassy field and find a hard bit of dirt where nothing grows. You might be in a forest and find yourself in a patch of silence, as if no birds dare sing there. This is where the splinters fell.
Some went into the sand, and that sand became glass again, and that glass became all kinds of things, creating mischief beyond what even Mal could have imagined.
A woman got a new pair of eyeglasses. She left her husband the next day. She told him that she just needed to find herself, but it was a lie. “It was like I was seeing him through new eyes,” she told a friend.
The president of a small corporation had a bathroom with a mirror installed just off his office. Within a week, he confessed to dumping chemicals in a nearby river. Within two weeks, he’d resigned and spent the rest of his days in a small cabin writing confessional poetry.
An astronomer looked through his new telescope into the stars one morning and then refused to ever look to the heavens again. When questioned, he said, “Some things we are better off not knowing.”
No one who tried on clothes in the third dressing room to the right of a certain department store ever bought anything. One observant employee suggested the room might be haunted. She was fired.
Every person who bought a particular model of television came to believe that TV shows had become particularly mean-spirited of late, and they all canceled their cable and took to other hobbies.
A certain shiny new subdivision featured windows made of the most state-of-the-art material. The neighbors peek out the window through closed curtains and keep to themselves.
Most of the splinters that fell were as tiny as dust. But there were a few larger pieces as well. The biggest one was about the size of your hand. It fell near the woods and a woman picked it up and carried it in with her. She dropped it when the wolves scared her, and it was picked up several days later by a girl who lived nearby. This girl did not need an enchanted mirror to show her that the world could be an ugly place, so to her it spoke the truth. She kept the mirror in her apron pocket, where it could be secret and safe.
A boy got a splinter in his eye, and his heart turned cold. Only two people noticed. One was a witch, and she took him for her own. The other was his best friend. And she went after him in ill-considered shoes, brave and completely unprepared.
Chapter Fourteen
Into the Woods
Hazel stepped into the woods gingerly, expecting to land in a thick cushion of snow. So she stumbled when her foot went all the way to solid ground. It was not winter in the woods—at least in these woods.
She stood, rooted to the spot like the mammoth trees that surrounded her. Dark trunks traveled up into the distant sky, connecting this world to the one above. The distant roof was a tangle of budding branches. Decaying leaves clung fiercely to the floor among tiny green sprouts that aspired toward the world above. A cloud of mist hung in the sky like the aftereffects of a spell. The air was a tangible thing, rushing into Hazel’s lungs as she breathed, touching her skin like a curious ghost. It carried with it the smell of old leaves and wide open sky. She was in the wood at the end of the world, or perhaps at the beginning.
She looked behind her, to remind herself