Read Online Wild Fell by Michael Rowe - Free Book Online Page B

independently. And yet, the name “Amanda” hadn’t come from me. I didn’t know anyone named Amanda.
    Excitedly I asked my reflection, “Is this my imagination, or is this real?”
    Maybe it’s both. Maybe I live in your head as well as in the mirror.
I felt my shoulders involuntarily rise and fall in a mechanical-looking facsimile of a shrug.
It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here now.
    “Who are you?”
    I told you. My name is Amanda.
    “Where did you come from?”
    From your mirror
.
    “No, before that.”
    There is no before, there’s only now.
    “Where’s Mirror Pal?”
    Mirror Pal has gone away. I’m here now.
    “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”
    I don’t know why you haven’t seen me before. I’ve always been here
.
    I asked again, “Who are you?”
    I already told you who I am. I’m just a girl. Stop asking me that
. A pause.
Where’s your bike?
    “How do you know about my bike?”
    I just know. Where is it?
    “A kid stole it. In the park. I was out with Hank and he came and . . . and . . .”
    Don’t cry. You’ll get it back, I promise.
    “How do you know?”
    I just know. You’ll see. You and your dad are going to go driving tomorrow to the place where you lost it. You’re going to look around the neighbourhood and see if the kid is there. Or if his brother is there. He has a younger brother, remember? He told you about him. He’s going to give his brother your bike as a present, and the brother is going to ride it all around. He’ll probably break it, then throw it away. Your bike. Yours.
    I felt my fury rise again. “It’s my bike! I want it back. My dad gave it to me for my birthday!”
    What do you want to have happen to him? The kid who took your bike?
    “What do you mean, what do I want to have happen to him? I want him to give my bike back! That’s what I want. I . . . I want him to
shut up!
I want him to shut up and stop being so mean to little kids that are smaller than him. I want him to shut his mouth and give me back my bike.”
    When Amanda spoke again, her voice—for I was now entirely thinking of it as
her
voice, the words choosing
me
, rather than
me
choosing
them
—had chilled perceptibly. But underneath the new frost I thought I heard a cruel sort of excitement, as though she was about to propose her own version of an adventure.
    He will. We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.
    Then the image in the mirror seemed to shimmer and sway. I tried to stand up, but stumbled and fell backward onto the bed. Hank had showed me a trick once: she told me to pinch my nose shut and hold my breath as long as I could. As the oxygen was depleted from my brain my head was full of giddy black stars and I’d felt like I was floating. It was like that now on the bed, except I could breathe easily. And my head wasn’t full of black stars, this time, it was full of gold ones, and there was a mighty hum in my brain as though I was lying on the grass beneath a tree alive with a swarm of furious bees hidden by thick branches. The hum rose in crescendo until there was simply nothing else. Near to losing consciousness, I reached for the switch and turned my nightlight on.
    With the sudden light came sudden clarity, and with the clarity came silence and the realization that I was quite alone. There was no humming in my head. There was no Amanda. In the mirror I saw myself and no one else. The only room reflected in it was my own—my own, from wall to wall, every corner present and accounted for, every border distinct, impermeable, linear and real.
    I felt something wet against my legs and looked down. The front of my pyjama bottoms were soaked with urine. A line of piss tracked down along the inside of my right leg all the way to the ankle.
    I pulled my pyjama pants off and wadded them into a ball. After I had used them to blot myself dry, I put them inside a plastic bag on the floor near my closet door. I tied the bag closed and stuffed it