Free Black Mirror by Nancy Werlin

known?
    We had even talked about suicide once, Daniel and I.
    In one of my father’s early science fiction novels—written before his prose style got so convoluted that it was almost impossible to read—he had created a religious oracle who lived in seclusion. Very rarely, the oracle would be visited by a pilgrim with a desperate question. I say desperate because, if the oracle chose to answer, the price for the questioner was instant death.
    Think about it
, I’d said to Daniel after making him read the relevant passages. I’d wanted to talk about the book’s ideas, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask my father.
You’d be deciding that sometimes pure knowledge, just in the abstract, is more important than your own life.
    Is that what our dear parent says in the book? He’s full of it. You could have other reasons, even stupid ones, to go talk to this oracle.
    Like what?
I was a little indignant. After all, I’d read the entire book, and Daniel hadn’t.
    Curiosity. Plain curiosity about something.
    Oh, really? You’d choose to die just because you were curious?
    Curiosity killed the cat. Hey, I don’t know. Some people will do just about anything out of curiosity.
He laughed as I made a face.
Okay, not you, Frances.
    Not anyone! Not if you knew, knew for sure, that it would kill you.
    Daniel shrugged, not really caring.
Frances, you’re forgetting that some people can’t control themselves. But all right then. What about suicide?
    Huh?
    What if you went to visit this oracle because you didn’t want to live anyway? You’re picking death, not knowledge. You just don’t have the guts to do it yourself, or maybe you figure you might as well get some big answer on the way out.
    I was silenced. It was plausible. More than plausible.
    Gotcha.
Daniel tossed the book back at me.
    I’d caught it and gone away, brooding. And now I wondered, bitterly, if Daniel had gotten any big answers on his way out. I would never know. I put my mittened hands to my cheeks.
    And then, out of some animal instinct, I opened my eyes and sat up straight.
    “Frances!” Ms. Wiles said. “Hello!” She was standing before me, holding her keys in one gloved hand and a bag of groceries in the other. “You must be freezing! I’m so sorry I’m late—there was a longer line at the store than I’d expected.”
    I stood up hastily. “I was early,” I said apologetically.
    “Come in,” she said. “I bought us a lemon poppy seed cake.”
    “Yum,” I answered, following her gratefully into the warmth.
    I had been in Ms. Wiles’s cottage three or four times, but I always needed to look around and admire it all over again. It was small, yes; just a combined kitchen and living room, a tiny bathroom and bedroom, and a heated sun porch that she used as her art studio and that, unfortunately, had always been closed off when I visited. (“I’m sorry, Frances. I’ve never been comfortable showing my works in progress.”) But despite—or maybe partly because of—its size, Ms. Wiles had managed to make the cottage so vivid.
    She had painted the living room walls a deep rose; the bedroom was cameo blue. Most of her eclectic collection of wooden furniture (“nearly all scavenged off the street”) was painted white so that all the pieces looked intentional together. She had simply thrown loose fabric over the sofa and her ancient overstuffed chair. (“Lovely material? You think? Oh, I’m laughing—the one on the chair where you’re sitting is just a sheet from Kmart!”)
    And, she had such great
things.
She owned a sparkly turquoise floor lamp made from an old-fashioned, wheeled hair dryer, and a clock fashioned from a hubcap. (“My college lover was good at that kind of thing. Would you believe he’s in advertising now? Every now and again I see one of his commercials on TV. What a bloody waste.”) One whole wall was sturdy cement-block-and-pine-board shelving, crammed with wonderful art books (“It’s a terrible weakness of