An electric chime sounds overhead. The door pulls closed in pneumatic huff. With it goes the sun. That light still exists out there on the other side of blinds and windows and tangled chicken wire, a thing pale and ferocious tearing through even to this place, but what it may touch here is not warmed by that light. Overheads yellow and buzzing illuminate this place. Racks of miscellany stand floor to ceiling in that saturated gloom. Boxes stacked, paintings, electronics caked in dust. A cathedral of oddments.
James Fairfield moves slow, stopping to touch or just look as he passes these bric-a-brac treasures. He lifts a canvas and then another. Watercolor kitsch, nursing home landscapes each dotted with a singular distant figure. He lets the frames fall back into place and moves on.
Beyond the rows of shelves a man stands waiting at a counter that divides the room. The proprietor leans in perpetual shrug. He wears the coat of an older man, fabric thick and patched. Hair the yellow of straw is combed in thin strings away from a face unlined by its years. His grin is perfected across a thousand thousand encounters. He does not offer a hand or a word but only nods and goes on smiling.
A tray of cards sits on the counter. James fingers the topmost. Words are stamped there. CONSTANCE SALT, and beneath that, SALES. He puts the card back. The man is still staring.
“I have a ring.”
The proprietor knocks on the counter.
“I like rings.”
“It’s old.”
“How old?”
“A hundred years at least. I don’t know.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Say what?”
“A hundred years.”
“It belonged to my great-grandmother.”
“A hundred years.”
James nods.
“Well. Let’s have us a look.”
James nods again. He digs in a pocket and straightens and he sets a ring on the counter between the proprietor’s hands. A band of gold with a single green stone setting. The proprietor turns it over like he’s sorting refuse. He picks it up and bounces it in his palm. He sets it back on the counter.
“I’ll give you a hundred.”
“A hundred?”
Words in a huff. The proprietor nods.
“It’s worth more. The jewel alone.”
“Take it to a jeweler and get more then.”
James stares down at the ring. He makes no move to pick it up, only goes on looking. The proprietor waits . Then.
“Tell you what,” he says. “What’s its story?”
“Story.”
“Its provenance. Yours?”
“Great-grandmother.”
“Great-grandmother. She got the ring somewhere. Wow me. Tell me how it got here.”
James looks again at the ring. He’s shaking his head no.
“My mom might know.”
“Shall we wait for her to arrive?”
“I’m gonna, um. I’ll call her.”
The proprietor stares.
Sidewalk now. The electric chime follows the door shut at his back. James scrolls his phone. MOM. He presses the screen and waits. Click.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, baby boy. What’s wrong?”
“I’m at a pawn shop.”
“Hmm.”
“Remember Great-Grandmother George’s ring?”
“Oh good, you’re selling it.”
“Mom.”
“That ring was hideous.”
“Jackie said the same thing in the divorce.”
“Wise girl.”
And.
“Did they offer you paper money for that ugly thing?”
“The man in the shop wanted to know more about it.”
“More about it? Is he not the one who’d know? They have glasses. Loupes.”
“He asked where Great-Grandmother George got it from.”
“How in the world would I know that?”
“I thought you might know.”
“I don’t.”
“Grandma Joe never said anything?”
“Joey gave it to you. I hated that thing.”
It goes on this way, and then it does not. Talk stalls and wanders on. How is work? Where’s your brother? Then.
“Bessie’s still alive. She might know. About the ring, I mean.”
“Bessie’s old.”
“She was close with George.”
“Mom, she’s very old.”
“You’re gonna get there too. Not every old person loses a step. Go talk to her. At worst you make her day.”
He nods at the phone, he says okay I’ll go.
“Good boy,” she says.
***
He parks at driveway’s edge. Twin ruts mark where tires come and go. Weeds sprout through where these have begun to fill in. The blue of the sky is unaltered by detail’s intrusion. No clouds, no trees, no homes. Only this place exists.
How long since he’s been here? He cannot know. Some years gone by. Maybe Grandma Joe’s funeral. Maybe longer. He begins to walk but stops. He stares. All the windows are dark. Blinds are closed, curtains hold out the sun. A cat watches from the tall grass. James waves but the cat does not move. He says hey, hey cat. Nothing. James goes on up the drive.
He knocks and rings both. When she opens the door she steps back and smiles. An airy hello comes out of her. Some kind of joyful sigh. She touches his chest with a paper thin hand. Come in, come in. He follows her into the house.
The kitchen is lit with old lamps. Yellow light pours out. He sits at a long table with too many chairs. A tablecloth thick like a carpet.
“Great-Aunt Bessie.”
“It’s good of you to come.”
“Mom said I should visit.”
“Your mother did?”
“I had a question about your mom.”
“My mom.”
She turns in place, patting at the table, at the counter. She says a word like oh and retrieves an opaque plastic tub.
“You’re having a cookie.”
The lid pops. Sugar and butter fragrance blooms. He wipes his hands on his pants and he reaches in. Oblong shapes. He bites the cookie and the other hand catches crumbs and now she sits. He lays down the remainder on the tub’s lid.
“My mom,” she says again.
“I asked Mom where George got her ring. She said you might know.”
“That ring is still bouncing around? That’s some kind of luck.”
“You know then?”
“Sure. She told me. She got it from her cousin Benny after the war. You know about Benny?”
James shakes his head no.
“He looked just like her. In the face, I mean. Of course he was quite a bit older, and she was madly in love, in the way girls do when a boy doesn’t know she’s alive. When he would come around she’d ask if she could wear the ring, and him being oblivious, he would oblige, and she’d show it off to all the other girls, as if they were engaged.
“And then the war came, and off he went with the other boys. Him and that ring. She followed the papers, and she wrote to him, but he had other things on his mind. And time went on, and the war ended, but still he was gone. Eventually word came, such as it was. He wouldn’t be coming home. There was a story, whatever story they told all the families with a boy gone forever, but what really happened was Cousin Benny was lost in some mud pit in France, bulldozed into a trench tomb forever. Lasting peacetime had come to Europe. La-di-da.”
Silence pools. He touches the cookie for something to do but he does not pick it up. He wipes his hands on his pants. Then.
“That’s awful.”
“It’s how she told it. Mind you, I wasn’t born for years after. She lived a whole life in between. She might’ve filled in all kinds of details. The mind does things.”
“But the ring.”
“Yes?”
“He was buried in France.”
“Oh, the ring. When she saw him again he had a different name.”
“Benny?”
“She called him the mirror man.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He’d come to see her. If she stared long enough he’d be there. They’d visit, carry on.”
“Aunt Bessie.”
“I know.”
“He appeared in the mirror?”
“It’s the story she told us girls. Me and your grandma. I thought it was something she said to give us comfort. She never married, you know. That didn’t go unnoticed in those days.”
“The mirror?”
She shrugs.
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“I didn’t then. But the longer you’re in this world, the more of it you start to see.”
He smiles but soon this falters. He leans against the table. He asks if she’s had her pills. She stares, she frowns.
“That’s rude,” she says.
“People get old.”
“Yes they do. And then they die. They’re all gone. Your grandma Joe. Our mother George. All but Benny. That one, he’ll never go.”
He smiles again but she shakes her head. She doesn’t speak, and he sits this way in quiet. He touches the cookie again, and he wipes his hands again.
“I need to go to the bathroom. My hands.”
She points the way down a hall. He remembers in a vague manner, a childhood wisp of a memory. The door latch snaps. He exhales a breath held. He flips the light switch, he turns on the tap. He is wetting hands and shaking his head and he laughs to himself, he speaks half a thought aloud. Then he sees the mirror. Slivers still held in place, remnants. Lines show in a paper backing, the impression of a long ago destruction. He shuts off the tap, he leans. A hand reaches to touch the veins of that shattering. He flinches, he knows not why. He looks at his finger as if he might have sliced it on a glass shard, but no blood wells there. He holds the finger anyway, and he looks, and there in the sparse fragments left behind of a mirror peeled away there shows the pieces of a reflection not his own.
-- Craig Rodgers is the name appearing on several books ghostwritten by a gaggle of long dead Victorian spirits.