I tried to watch some of the Perseid meteor shower late last night, but cloud cover — and what was probably not the best vantage point anyway — meant I didn’t see anything. (Beyond, y’know, clouds.) It’s okay, but I keep hearing such wonderful things about them and yet don’t think I’ve ever seen them for myself.
I didn’t sleep terrifically after that, for whatever reason, and it took a little while this morning to get Sunday firmly under my feet.
The crossword puzzle wasn’t much of a challenge this week, though clever enough. After lunch, I joined my weekly writing group and came up with this:
“Why are you so afraid?” the woman in the mirror asked.
The old witch stared back, anger coiling in her throat. She choked back what she was tempted to say, held back the rage knotting in her fists. Fury would not serve her well here, and she would not be goaded by this bothersome spirit.
“I am not afraid,” she said after a moment. “And you would do well to remember your place, djinn, lest you wish to gather dust in the tower for another thousand years.”
“I meant no disrespect, my queen,” said the golden-haired face hovering in the glass. Her face, reflecting all the beauty she had lost, showing none of the age and wear that ran like dusty rivers across the visage she now wore. The spirit dared mock her with this image.
“Then show your true form,” she spat, “and tell me why the girl yet lives. She ate of the poisoned apple, and you said — ”
“Which formula did you use?” the djinn asked.
A swirl of mist clouded the mirror, grayed it over like thin frost on a windowpane, then was just as quickly gone. The face was no longer the witch in her stolen youth, but was now the featureless, stony blank of the djinn’s true form — or what it had claimed was its true form. It had claimed many things, hadn’t it? Told her secrets of the dark crafts, spoken of prophecy and revelation, shown her the key to that meddlesome girl’s downfall. And yet where had it gotten her? The girl had not died, and she, the queen, was now a hag, hunched-back and broken, caught in this glamour, in no way the fairest of them all. She should have left the mirror where she found it, listened to the servants’ warnings rather than the riddles and rhymes so favored by the mirror’s sole inhabitant.
But the girl… It was bad enough that she should vie with the queen for her father’s attention, but that her beauty should be said (in some corners) to rival the queen’s own? No, that was intolerable. And that stupid huntsman had done nothing, had spared the girl’s life, bloodied his axe on a stoat or wolf rather than the girl’s slender neck. And the girl — her step-daughter, she thought with some revulsion — had escaped into the woods. And she lived. If the djinn could promise to undo all that, then what other choice did the queen have?
“What formula?” she asked. “The very one you spoke of, in the old books. I spoke the ancient spell, and she ate from the apple, but all she does is sleep.”
“Ah,” said the djinn. “Just another lesson learned.”
The ending doesn’t quite work — I was rushed trying to squeeze in that final sentence prompt — but I had fun with it.
Afterward, we went to see The Bourne Legacy…whose ending also doesn’t quite work, and which doesn’t do anything too remarkably. But what it does, it does intelligently, and I think it’s a solid B-minus.