Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 120 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: chinese, clarkesworld, fantasy, Hugo Nominee, magazine, novelette, science fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Bogi Takács is a disabled and neuroatypical Hungarian Jewish author currently living in the US. E writes both speculative fiction and poetry, and eir work has been published in a variety of venues like Lightspeed, Apex, and Strange Horizons. You can also find em on Twitter as @bogiperson.

The House of Half Mirrors

Thoraiya Dyer

My house is full of half mirrors.

Mam tells the tale like it’s an amusing anecdote: that time she brought a fiddler home from the Anchor, and he wasn’t a man but a fomoiri, and all the mirrors from the wardrobe doors to the polarized sunglasses on the sideboard cracked neatly into perfect halves.

At least, she used to tell it. Before cancer took her.

Who believed in fomoiri in 2042? At the time, I bit my tongue and charitably assumed it was her oblique warning about violent partners and the end of days. When fuel ran out, everyone who didn’t raise their own food relocated inside ration delivery zones. She moved in with me, bringing as many of the half mirrors as she could fit in a wagon hitched to the back of her pushbike.

Me old Mam, cycling sixty kilometers from Cahersiveen. Happy days.

She did always go on about the better halves of human nature, about seeing the good in things. Since Da was a useless tool, I’d tell her that when I looked in the half mirrors I could only see the half of me that came from her.

Mam’s half mirrors match what’s technically only half a house. Since she died, a young single mother got allocated the upstairs. That interloper’s two children thump around like live basketballs and she hogs the washing line down the side, but I’ve got a sunroom at the back with the windows all smashed where I hang my laundry to dry.

In a corner of that wrecked sunroom are three heavy, soil-filled pots with dead trees. Sad stick skeletons with the morning sun on them. I should be tossing them, but I can’t, any more than I can toss the half mirrors.

Mam dug up three hazel saplings and brought them inside when the next-door house collapsed on our garden. She loved those little trees, just like she loved the oak woodland by Lough Leane. I can’t even keep a plant alive. Lucky I never became a parent.

And now I’ve mooned about, gazing guiltily at them, for so long that I’m late for the lock-in. Can’t even be on time to save our besieged final scrap of wild.

Haven’t even called the hospital to let them know I won’t be at work today.

Sliding in my socks across the solid oak floorboards—they’re the only indestructible part of the whole shitty, falling-down house—I dump my tea dregs in the kitchen sink. It’s not backed up because of the mouse in the dried-up u-bend addicted to tea leaves.

The plumbing doesn’t work.

It hasn’t worked for fifty years, which is how I got the house so cheap. Which is fine, since these days the village tap water’s poison. It’s

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