Free Strange is the Night by Justine Sebastian Page B

light coming from nightlights that rested in each of the four outlets along the hallway. They pushed soft, warm light like candles into the bathroom and though the light didn’t reach too far past the door, it licked across the mirror hanging over the sink. As he walked by it, Robert saw his city again and it was clearer, more beautiful and his heart leaped with joy. He immediately stopped and turned. He stared into the deep velvet blue night of the alien city and watched strange, winged silhouettes— angels , he thought, angels! —soar through the sky. Dark flecks against the velvet sky shined like mica, winking and glittering despite their darkness and Robert yearned to go to that fantastic place.
    The rain stopped falling and dripped from the roof of the house into the puddles gathered around the eaves. The wind still blew, but inside it was still, quiet and softly warm like the air itself was melting. Robert pressed his sweating palms to the mirror and pushed, but nothing happened. The first slap against the glass was light, a soft thwack and not much else and Robert was hardly aware he’d moved. The second slap was a little harder. The third, a little harder than that. If he could go there he could be king or at least well-liked, and he’d have happily settled for that. So when on the sixth try, the mirror broke, Robert didn’t realize it at first; he didn’t feel the pain in his cut hands or the blood running down his arms. He wasn’t aware of anything more than the fact his city was scattered all over the bathroom tile in pieces both big and small like a maddening puzzle that needed putting back together.
    He was not even all that aware of the bathroom light coming on and hitting the shards to throw silver light into his eyes. Then his mother screamed and his father grabbed him and Robert bellowed for them to put him down because he had to go. They took him to the hospital, they had his arms stitched up and everyone—including Robert because then he believed in going along to get along—said he’d had a nightmare and sleepwalked into the bathroom where he must have flailed around and broken the mirror in his somnambulant agitation. With the passage of the days his wounds healed and his mind cleared and even Robert began to half believe it was the truth.
    But it wasn’t true and that night was only the first broken mirror, the first batch of scars, the first bunch of stitches to bristle from his hands because, no matter how many times he would promise himself he’d be smart about it, he usually wasn’t. It was hard to be smart about things when he couldn’t see anything past the looming walls of the city as it beckoned him closer and closer, but would not let him in.

II
    Despite his setbacks, Robert survived his childhood and early adolescence, though he did so begrudgingly at times. He made it through four stays at various mental hospitals where he was awarded a grab-bag of diagnoses: schizoaffective disorder and later schizoid personality disorder; then cyclothymia and after that clinical depression accompanied by comorbid OCD with schizo-like delusions.
    Robert didn’t stay fat, but he was fat long enough for the teasing to go beyond badly rhymed name-calling to being pantsed at school assemblies and having Skittles thrown at him in homeroom. Because of the scars on his arms that tallied up like poorly placed bets people called him “that cutter kid”. Robert spent a lot of his school career wishing his classmates would all simultaneously choke on their tongues and white-knuckled his way through school until at last came the day of his high school graduation.
    At his high school graduation, his parents both looked far older than he remembered them being and he knew that had something to do with him. But he couldn’t think too much about it because the city was there in the windshield of the car behind them. He could see the trunk of a tree, furry with lichen that moved up the trunk with the slow,