A Mirror Mended （Fractured Fables #2）
Alix E. Harrow
to everyone who is doing their very best just to live, happily
1
I LIKE A good happily ever after as much as the next girl, but after sitting through forty-eight different iterations of the same one—forty-nine, if you count my （former） best friends’ wedding—I have to say the shine is wearing off a little.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I worked hard for all forty-nine of those happy endings. I’ve spent the last five years of my life diving through every iteration of Sleeping Beauty, chasing the echoes of my own shitty narrative through time and space and making it a little less shitty, like a cross between Doctor Who and a good editor. I’ve rescued princesses from space colonies and castles and caves; I’ve burned spindles and blessed babies; I’ve gotten drunk with at least twenty good fairies and made out with every member of the royal family. I’ve seen my story in the past and the future and the never-was-or-will-be; I’ve seen it gender-flipped, modern, comedic, childish, whimsical, tragic, terrifying, as allegory and fable; I’ve seen it played out with talking woodland creatures, in rhyming meter, and more than once, God help me, with choreography.
Sure, sometimes I get a little tired of it. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where or when I am, and feel all the stories blurring into a single, endless cycle of pricked fingers and doomed girls. Sometimes I hesitate on the precipice of the next story, exhausted on some fundamental, molecular level, as if my very atoms are worn thin from fighting the laws of physics so hard. Sometimes I would do anything—anything at all—not to know what happens next.
But I spent the first twenty-one years of my life being Zinnia Gray the Dying Girl, killing time until my story ended. I’m still technically dying （hey, aren’t we all）， and my home-world life isn’t making headlines （I pick up substitute teaching shifts between adventures, and have spent the last couple of summers working the Bristol Ren Faire, where I sell the world’s most convincing medieval fashion and ephemera）。 But I’m also Zinnia Gray the Dimension-Hopping, Damsel-Saving Badass, and I can’t quit now. I may not have much of a happily ever after, but I’m going to give away as many as I can before I go.
I just skip the after-parties, that’s all. You know—the weddings, the receptions, the balls, the final celebratory scenes before the credits roll. I used to love them, but lately they just feel saccharine, tedious. Like an act of collective denial, because everybody knows that happily is never really ever after. The truth is buried in the phrase itself, if you look it up. The original version was “happy in the ever after,” which meant something like “hey, everybody dies and goes to heaven in the end, so does it really matter what miseries and disasters befall us on this mortal plane?” Cut out two little words, cover the gap with an -ly, and voilà: The inevitability of death is replaced by the promise of endless, rosy life.
If Charmaine Baldwin （former best friend） heard me talking like that, she’d punch me slightly too hard for it to be a joke and cordially invite me to chill the fuck out. Primrose （former Sleeping Beauty, now part-time ballroom dancing instructor） would fret and wring her pale hands. She might remind me, bracingly, that I’d been granted a miraculous reprieve and ought to count myself lucky! With an audible exclamation point!
Then Charm might casually mention my five years of missed appointments with radiology, the too-many prescriptions I’d left unfilled. At some point the two of them might exchange one of their looks, ten thousand megawatts of love so true its passage would leave my eyelashes singed, as if I’d stood too close to a comet.
And I would remember sitting at their wedding reception while they slow danced to that spacey, ironic Lana Del Rey cover of “Once Upon a Dream,” looking at each other as if they were the only thing in the only universe that mattered, as if they had forever to look. I would remember getting up and going to the bathroom, meeting my own eyes in the mirror before I pricked my finger on a shard of spindle and vanished.
And hey, before you get the wrong idea, this isn’t a love triangle thing. If it were, I could simply say “throuple” three times in the mirror and summon Charm to my bedroom like lesbian Beetlejuice. I’m not jealous of their romance—they love me and I love them, and when they moved to Madison for Charm’s internship, they rented a two-bedroom apartment without any discussion at all, even though the rent is ridiculous.
It’s just that they’re so damn happy. I doubt they’ve ever lain awake at night, feeling the bounds of their narratives like hot wires pressing into their skin, counting each breath and wondering how many are left, wishing—uselessly, stupidly—they’d been born into a better once upon a time.