"The Museum of Mirrors and the (Mostly) Dead, Pt. 11" - A Surrealist Story in Serialized Form (CONCLUSION)
Since I write so much fiction, I figured I'd try out a new piece on all you Steemers out there. It's dark (like nearly all of my stuff) and long (like a great deal of my stuff). It's one of six stories that will be included in my third collection coming out late next year. You can find my other (fully) posted non-fiction story "Colfax Place" on Steemit here:
https://steemit.com/nonfiction/@bucho/colfax-place-a-piece-of-non-fiction-about-the-midwest
I figure if the first couple of installments of this one pique some interest, I'll keep posting up new sections daily. Per usual, all critiques welcome as long as they're constructive. I'll also keep a running list of links at the bottom of each entry so you can play catch up a little easier.
Mirror #10
“The Three Truths”
Estimated at Nearly 250 Years Old;
Date Unconfirmed
Found in 1977
Materials Used:
Ovular Bronze, Silver Mirror
Type of Reflection:
Augury, Past-Reader, Now-Knower
Convex Style
What You See:
The long, ovular mirror is framed in tarnished bronze. You guess its dimensions to be two feet from top to bottom and six feet long from side to side. Your head appears on the left side of the mirror as you round the bisecting wall in the middle of the room. Your visage is that of a younger you, a more youthful you, but most certainly a you that once was.
As you move to the center of the mirror, your face changes in subtle ways, ages and elongates until you have reached the far right side of the mirror. Your face changes more noticeably now. Your hair thins, your face tightens up and then begins to sag in areas. Wrinkles appear.
You walk backwards toward the right side of the mirror, never letting your gaze waver from it surface. You do this over and over, watching your face age and then become youthful; become youthful and then age again.
On the right side of the mirror, a placard hangs:
“While the provenance of this particular mirror is completely unknown, it was crated up and delivered with two pieces of information: the name of the mirror and a copy of Alain Silvanestri’s full page letter in the Chicago Tribune mere months before his death. Because there was no immediate provenance to be found for the mirror and due to Silvanestri’s puzzling death, we felt the final mirror should be displayed with the full page ad he wrote in the hopes that maybe viewers will leave knowing the fullest story we have. Perhaps someone will come along with information about what actually happened to the famed mirror collector in the days leading up to his untimely demise.
July 7th, 1999
Chicago, Illinois.
Dear Patron Saints of the Windy City,
I’m here. I still exist. I am a thing in which purity reigns, even after 103 years of transient life upon this earth. Despite my constant running from the phantoms that have chased after me through the shadows of Middle Eastern markets and Slavic churches, across mirage-filled deserts and fever-dream inducing cityscapes…
I. Am. Still. Here.
There aren’t many who will understand what it takes to give one’s life over fully to the passion, to get drunk on it, and then to find one’s self suckling of its bottle from first waking moment to last. Here is where I am, a drunkard of my lusts, unable to part ways with the things that I have sought after for so much of my life.
But I suppose it’s easier when it’s forced upon you rather than simple life-as-happenstance. To watch your home be overtaken by fascists, to have your home uprooted and turned inside out into something completely unrecognizable. To become a foreigner in your homeland does strange things to a man. Little slivers of the bravery façade break off and fall, smashing on the ground to leave trails of glittery gleam in your wake.
And yet we’ve still not yet figured out how to rid the world of its evil. We conquer one threat and five more (all worse than the first) pop up to replace it, multiplying like vaccine-resistant strains that never seem to remember how things played out before. They never seem to realize that the history books are close at hand and so easily referenced with just a little effort, and yet…still they make the same movements, say the same things, act in the same subversive ways. We don’t always see them for what they are in the beginning, but they often make themselves easily spotted. Their impatience makes them stupid; their lust for power makes them weak.
But too long I’ve remained silent and must now speak out against forces that, through my travels and worldly learnings, I now know actually exist. They are constant, perpetual, ever-present, timeless. They bow to no man that I’ve ever met and still they press onward and inward, wishing to curdle all the goodness the world has to offer.
We. Cannot. Allow. That.
It is time for us to stand up and fight back against these accursed spirits that so easily warp our views of the world and of its people. Perhaps I knew at an early age that my purpose would one day find me standing steadfast in their path, a lone man fighting against the often intangible. Perhaps I have always been drawn to the struggle, that it has been a birthright I carried upon my shoulders like a yoke from sun up to sundown.
But I’m an old man now. My bones are frail and my skin no longer pliable. It is time for someone else to pick up where I’ve left off, to run headlong into danger with no sense of self-preservation left inside them.
Someone, anyone. Please.
Sincerely,
Alain M. Silvanestri.
And then, inexplicably, you were back out on the sidewalk, staring at the green door that seemed to have grown up out of the ground between two apartment buildings in the middle of a bustling city block. The sun felt blazing hot against the back of your neck as you tried to remember how you left the museum. You stared up into the sky, across the street, down the sidewalk, confused.
You walked back up to the door and tried to open it again, wondering if you’d simply missed something or if time had gone funny on you and warped your sense of place. The doorknob didn’t budge. The door wouldn’t even shake in its frame for you, like the museum had been sealed shut like a tomb to keep its secrets hidden from passersby. Without any specific destination in mind, you took off down the sidewalk and wondered if you had simply imagined it all. You’d stop by tomorrow just to be sure.
But one of two things would happen tomorrow: you’d forget the location of the museum’s entrance or you’d no longer remember the experience, save for the leftover emotions that bubbled and gurgled inside you each time you saw a mirror from that day forward.
Either way, you would never look at your reflection the same way again.
Previous Sections:
Part 1 - https://steemit.com/fiction/@bucho/the-museum-of-mirrors-and-the-mostly-dead-pt-1-a-surrealist-story-in-serialized-form