Free The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

doesn’t return for days, and I can not help but to imagine that she must have other unfortunates trapped in other dingy rooms scattered throughout the city. I stare back at my reflection, watching myself from the cracked mirror mounted crookedly on the dressing table. Perhaps, I think, she is gathering to her an army of puppets, and at the last she will have us take up filming brands and march against her wizard father, locked in his palace of ice and baling Mire. I raise the cup to my lips, and the woman in the mirror obligingly does the same. I’ve seen corpses floating in the harbour that looked more alive than her, more alive than me. I could have aged ten years in these few weeks. My lover his stolen more from me than simple warmth, of that I am certain. She’s diminished me with every successive freeze and thaw, and this reflection is little more than a ghost of the woman who arrived here from San Francisco last summer. I came to hide and drink and maybe die, for there would never be any return to that former life of privilege and reward which had been so hastily, so thoughtlessly, traded for hurried trysts with one of my first-year students, a yellow-haired girl whose name I can hardly now recollect. I only came here to be a drunkard and, in time, a suicide, to drift farther and farther away from the world which would have no more of me. I thought surely that would be penance enough for all my sins. I never dared conceive of any punishment so sublime as the wizard’s daughter. No, I do not believe she is the daughter of a wizard, but how else would I name her? One might, I tried to make a game of guessing at some other appellation, whether Christian or heathen, but she waved away every suggestion I made. Hundreds or thousands of names dismissed, and there was never anything in her wet oyster eyes but truth. But I may be a poor, poor judge of truth, and we should keep that in mind. After all, remember, some fraction of me believed the yellow-haired girl in San Francisco when she promised that she’d never so much as whisper even the most nebulous hint of our nights together to another living soul. Indeed, I may be no fit judge of truth at all. The woman in the mirror who looks exactly like my corpse takes another sip of gin, realizes the cup is almost empty, and reaches for the quart bottle on the floor. She fills my cup halfway, and I thank her for such boundless generosity. The wizard’s daughter, she won’t ever deign to drink with me, though she sometimes returns from her disappearances with the gift of a fresh bottle—gin or rye whiskey or the peaty brown ale they brew down by the waterfront. She says she doesn’t drink with anyone or alone, so I don’t take it personally.
    “Aren’t you a sorry sight,” the woman in the mirror says to me. “A shame the way you’ve let yourself go. Can you even remember the last time you bathed? Or took a comb to your hair, perhaps?” And so I tell her to go fuck herself.
    Then there are footsteps in the hallway, and I listen, expecting them to stop outside my door, expecting the dry rattle of a key in the lock, and then the cut-glass knob will turn and—
    “The Tolowa Indians have a story about a crazy woman who talks to her reflection—”
    Shut up, I hiss at my own face in the dressing-table mirror and almost drop the tin cup, my heart pounding and hands shaking so badly that no small measure of gin splashes over the rim and darkens the grimy floor at my feet. Such a waste , I think, such a pointless, goddamned waste , and by then the footsteps in question have come and gone, and it isn’t the wizard’s daughter, after all. Only another lodger or someone else, a prostitute or sneak thief or a dutiful officer of the law, coming to call upon another lodger. I reach for the gin bottle before the woman in the mirror does it for me. She gives me dreams , I say and, having refilled my cup, shove the cork firmly back into the mouth of the bottle. I can not afford