Vincenzi - Resurrections: Mirror Excerpt

I'm trying to figure out how magic works in this world I'm exploring. I want the magic to be believable, reminiscent of meditation or happenstance or that weird knowing that some people seem to have. I'm not interested in blasts of fire and mind control. I think about Aleister Crowley writing, “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”  Somewhere (possibly in Kenneth Grant's The Magical Revival)I remember reading a story of Crowley mimicking a hapless man on the street, then feigned a misstep, and the man "tripped" from Crowley's influence. It would also mirror my use of the Tarot as a form of meditation.

In this case, I have Alecia Castavettes, Vincenzi's niece who has fled her overbearing parents (and the prep school she attends) to haphazardly follow Lorenzo's profession. She is also adequately acquainted with his world to connect with the lecherous Cranston who is quietly practicing his own sorcery. Consider this itself a "found item" in the larger story of Resurrections, this page being introduced sometime after Alecia's return to the Vincenzi's world.

As I said, I want sorcery to exist here. I want it to be believable in a contemporary world. I draw from some of my own experiences and want to make the habit of identifying potential magical "found items" based on their connection to the larger story. This will give Alecia more "wiggle room" in the narrative space and ultimately provide her with the magical-linguistic prowess to contest the construction of a narrative world.

This probably all sounds like nonsense but it makes sense in my head.

...

A Torn Page in a Tight, Cursive Scrawl, [Undated]
Cranston has been teaching me. He calls it the "Study." We've been using found objects. He has a habit of snatching mirrors from women's purses. Why he is deft at pickpocketing from women is not especially my concern. I do keep a sharp eye on my few things and bring only the necessary to his shop.

There was a small, plastic Estée Lauder mirror I found on the sidewalk. Its ivory plastic frame is cheap and I worry that it hasn't been owned for long. The more time an owner has had an item, the more it retains. The more of what, I'm not exactly sure. The mirror has a small scratch along one corner. I focus on that scratch.

At first, it is just a damaged reflection. I am there, but cut or split or somehow not me. I relax and let the mirror show me what it is. Silver and sand, heat and industry; it is something of use and something unused. One moment I feel Cranston watching me with his impatient eyes, the next moment my breath catches in my throat and the perspective... slides.

The scratch isn't in the mirror anymore. It is in the world. The mirror shows the wholeness that is unclear. It is a crease in the folds in the origami of the room, of the folding fabric of the City; it is a thread in the world just beginning to fray. On the thread is a chord, a song of time and history. I follow the twine out into the world, into the labyrinth of time and space and roads; the trail of the mirror follows itself back to the sidewalk and back into the purse.

I hold it there, match step with the purse, its owner, the world of the purse and its owner. I am there. The street wraps around me/us/this, the people, and buildings a fisheye lens, a tidal wave on each side threatening, enveloping, warmed with previously lived life.

She is beautiful but does not walk confidently. She is made tall by wedge heels. The skirt of a dress--a cleaner shade of ivory than the mirror--whirls around her, casting her lightly tanned legs in soft, wavering shadows. The light around her is cleaner than the dingy street, the food carts and gutters muddle in grays. Her shoulders are almost bare, the straps contrasting softly with her delicate shoulders, and blonde hair dances just above them.

I see her from behind--a reflection, the past, the chase of what has gone. I see her as she sees herself, or how she wants to see herself. Mirrors, especially the throwaway variety, are fickle. It tells me this from behind my ear, from somewhere in the present. "I am fickle," it says, "I see what can be, what is desired."

The image shifts. It flattens.

The odd bits of litter--napkins, a straw, a fractured cup with a rounded double arches--clarify. A man sleeping in a doorway with a cardboard sign appears, as if hidden in a pocket suddenly inverted. A myriad of smells--hotdogs on sugary white bread buns, piss in humid alleys, the faint acridity of body odor at 5:23, the reek of a shattered whiskey bottle, greasy French fries emanating from a glass doorway--but all deadened and defined and cleaned by the silver and glass.

She has become... something else. The scrubbed stains of her dress glare. Her perfect hair is marred by undyed roots. A scar presses against her dress, a scar like a window left wide to the rattling wind, the crumpling leaves, the bits of broken glass and a single rusted knife; an open wound no longer concealed.

I see her face. Her eyes are light in darkness, Her face is weighed from hiding the stories of her skin.

I am following the thread, simultaneously in and out of the mirror. I know its truth and I know its limits. I am on the mirror's edge trying to see the world as it is while being shown the world as it is seen.

Or the mirror reflects the world I would see. I see the cheap food and the booze and the veteran being hollowed out from underneath his rags and skin. The light is dim, each line sharpened by its potential to cut, each face looks on with brutal intensity and obliviousness. The white bread is diabetes; the reshaped organ meat: heart disease; the phenols slowly stab a tired liver.

The world breaks from underneath/around me. It is not within. I feel the edge and my eyes open/close: open on the world of Cranston's shop/close on the thread and streets of the ivory dressed woman with shimmering crystal eyes.

The mirror lies broken in front of me. Broken mirror line a jagged maw. Cranston holds a hammer, comically large in his small-boned hand. My eyes blink, the afterimage of the street stands inverted on my eyelids.

"That is enough for today," he says. "Do better next time."