The Mirror of Creation

They told us the river was only a river, but my mother called it a mouth—the place where the first breath rose from the dark and learned the shape of a body. When I was a child, I laughed at her stories and threw stones into the current to prove it was water and nothing more. The stones never came back. That was all the proof I wanted then.

My mother recited a line once, something she had carried home from a Sunday lecture and held in her heart as if it were scripture: “The human soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it, and serve it and revolve round it.” She spoke it with the hush of revelation. I mocked her then, because how could the stars serve me, a barefoot child throwing stones into the current? The stones never came back. That was all the proof I wanted then. And yet, secretly, I wondered: if the soul truly stands at the centre, what happens when it trembles? Do the heavens lean? Do the universes falter in their course?

I am not a child now. I am Neriah. I have seen my face rise from that black glass crowned in fire, and I have learned to fear the breath in my own lungs.

The night I went to the Wellspring, the air smelled of damp earth and iron, as though the ground had bled earlier and was pretending it had not. My breath ghosted before me, veiling the path in a thin fog that my hands had to part. No wind. The trees held their branches in a reverent stillness that made my heartbeat sound too loud, a drum in a temple where no priest dared speak.

The water lay still as a blade laid flat. Not silent—there was a sound at the very edge of hearing, the suggestion of an inhale waiting to be released. When I leaned over the surface, the cold gathered in my mouth, metallic, the way a key tastes when you foolishly press it to your tongue. I expected my ordinary reflection—the shallow ghost that follows without question. What I saw instead wore my face like a familiar mask. Light veiled it; shadow framed it. My stars in its eyes. My silence in its mouth – her fingers trembling on the water’s edge, a face thinner than she remembers, eyes dark-ringed with sleeplessness.

The surface quivered. The glass broke without splashing. My reflection rose from the water as a body steps through a curtain. Night clothed it. Fire crowned it. The smell of scorched cedar mingled with the river’s musk until I could not tell if I stood before a hearth or a grave.

I should have run. I did not. It reached; I reached. Our hands met. My skin felt both burned and frostbitten, a precise pain that knew my name.

“Quarry,” said the air, though its mouth did not move. The word pressed into my throat from within, as if I had spoken and only afterward realized the sound did not belong to me.

When I touched it—when it touched me—the Wellspring shattered without a noise, and flame and silence went into me as smoke finds a cracked window and makes a home where it should not. I gasped, and there was nothing to breathe. I blinked, and the trees folded into themselves like paper animals under a match. The fire went out of the world and into my chest.

As I staggered away, her words—or my mother’s—returned unbidden: “The human soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it.” Yet I could not tell whose centre I had become. Did the universes lean toward me, or toward her, now risen from the water?

I do not know how I found my way home. I remember my door opening to my hand as if it recognized a master who had only just arrived. I remember the brine of the river clinging to my hair, though I had not stepped into the water. The candle sputtered blue. The walls leaned in to listen.

I poured water in a basin to wash, and the scent of the Wellspring rose—dark and metallic, a cathedral of cold. I could not make myself touch it. The surface rippled, though my hand was nowhere near it. A single crack ran down the porcelain with a sound like a whispered no.

I turned to the small mirror above my desk—the only one not covered with cloth to quiet my vanity—and found my reflection lagging behind my movements, as if it had to be reminded of what came next. When I lifted my right hand, the woman in the glass considered, then lifted hers. She looked thoughtful, almost amused, as if we had discovered a game we might both enjoy.

My mother once whispered that to consider the soul was to consider the whole of time: man’s place in the tumult of worlds, the puzzle of death and continuance, the chemical ruin of the body set against the arrogance of identity that refuses to vanish. These questions circled me like moths singeing their wings against a flame. If dissolution is certain, what rises from the Wellspring? If identity is promised, is this double not proof? Perhaps she is my continuance, my immortality, though she wears hunger where I had worn fear.

The thought clung to me as I stared into the mirror, her face lagging behind mine as if she were deciding whether to follow. The taste of ash slicked the back of my tongue. I blew out the candle and went to bed, but the dark was another kind of light. Silence pressed on my skin—weight, texture, the sense of being submerged though the room was dry. When sleep came for me, it arrived like water, and I let it drown me because there was no other way to live through the night.

In the morning, the world pretended at ordinariness. The bell in the parish tower marked the hour with a voice like old copper. I felt its dull ring in my ribs. I thought of Father Alaric.

His study is always the same—wax and mildew in the curtains, incense crushed into the stone, a narrow window that lets the light in as if light were a sin that wanted confession. Alaric was broad in the shoulders, a man built for sermons and baptisms, yet his heavy hands worried the edge of his sleeve as if the fabric might fray under his doubt. His eyes darted often to the crucifix on the wall. He reached for my hands when I told him I was unwell. The skin on my palms flaked like paper held too near a flame; small blisters had risen in the night, pearl-pale and tender. He frowned the way a man frowns when he knows the right prayer but suspects it will not help.

“You are fevered,” he said, and my name sounded unfamiliar in his mouth, as if he were addressing a stranger standing slightly to my left. “Neriah, have you eaten? You’re pale.”

“Bread is dust,” I said. “Water is…wrong.”

He let go to fetch a cup, and I felt the loss of his hands as a loss of heat. He returned with wine and watched to see whether I would drink. I brought the cup to my lips, and the scent rose, rich and faithful, but the taste turned to rust as soon as it touched my tongue. I swallowed anyway, because he was watching.

When I told him about the river, he pressed his lips together in the shape of an old, unspoken word. “We have always called it a river,” he said finally, rubbing at a bead of wax hardened to the arm of his chair. “Wellspring is a poet’s name. People put too much on a name.”

“My mother called it the Wellspring,” I said. “The mouth where the first breath rose. She taught me that the soul is braided of four strands: body, spirit, mind, and the part we dare not name. She said the fourth is the shadow and waits at the water’s root. And she also said, the human soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it. Do you not see, Father? If the soul is torn, the universes do not know where to turn.”

“Parables,” he said. The word was bitter on his tongue; I could smell the sharp tang of sweat behind his collar, the human fear he tried to drown in incense. His lips shaped authority, but his eyes betrayed a man who half-believed the stories he condemned. He glanced at the crucifix again, as though it might decide the truth for him. “Stories do not change water.” He rubbed his thumb against the bead of his rosary, the motion compulsive, as though the prayer would start itself if only his skin remembered the words.

“Then perhaps water changes stories,” I said, and he flinched as if I had blasphemed.

He gave me a blessing anyway, the familiar words laid like warm cloth across a cold body. He urged prayer and sleep and broth and patience. I took the blessing and left the rest. On the path home, the bell tolled again. The sound passed through me and left a hollow ringing in its wake.

Days wandered without direction. Night found me, again and again.

I woke to the sound of dripping in a room with no vessel. The air chilled so deeply my breath became mist, and yet sweat drenched my back with a sour, animal smell that made me ashamed, though I was alone. Shadows gathered at the edges of the chamber, and once I saw—no, I think I saw—them stretching toward the bed, a slow pulse like a heartbeat not mine. I pressed my palms to the floorboards to push myself upright, and moisture beaded on my skin as if the river were rising through the wood to greet me. My mouth filled with the taste of iron.

In the mirror—I should have covered it—I watched myself sleep, my face slack with a peace I did not feel. A moment later, I watched myself wake. The woman in the glass lifted her head a breath before I did and tilted it, curious, as if she were studying an animal she meant to tame without bruising.

Hunger found me, but it was not for food. Bread turned to chalk and would not be swallowed. Apples smelled like bitten pennies. My skin clung too tightly to bone; my cheeks hollowed. In the mirror, I saw myself not only doubled, but diminished, as if I were ceding flesh to her. Meat made my throat shut against me. What I wanted had no name in the kitchen. I dreamed I drank from the Wellspring and woke with my mouth flooded by flame that did not burn, only filled.

“The human soul stands in the centre…” The words circled me in the dark, but when they returned, it was in my own tongue: “The soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it.” If so, then mine was split, one half hungering in the shadows, the other shrinking in the light. Which centre did the universes serve? Did they bow to her now, while I starved in my own skin?

When I tried to pray, the words lifted and broke apart like ash lifted from a brazier by a draft. My mother’s stories came back to me in pieces. The soul is braided of four. The fourth strand waits at the water’s root. The fourth—call it shadow if you must, though that is a thin name for something that wears your hunger to the bone—rises when you look too long. Then you must choose: to be consumed, to consume, or to join.

And always the line returned in my own tongue: “The soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it.” But what if the soul is split? Do the universes fracture, or do they learn to bow to both?

I did not want to choose. I wanted to haggle at market, brush dust from my skirts, and sleep without dreams. But ordinary wants slid off me as rain slides off oil.

Perhaps I should say now that there were others who noticed. Dame Ilona, who sells bread that tastes like a safe morning, asked if I had lost someone, because sorrow had me by the shoulders the way grief does. I nodded because it was true; I had lost a woman named Neriah and did not know how to mourn her with the proper rites.

Father Alaric came once more. He stood in my doorway with the sunlight at his back and looked smaller than he had ever looked in his vestments. “You haven’t come to Mass,” he said, and I could not answer because his face had doubled for me—two Alarics at once, one stern and one frightened, sliding over each other like reflections in a shallow pool. He crossed himself as if crossing a distance. “Open your windows. Let the air in,” he said, as if air were only air.

I tried. The outside came in with the smell of crushed grass and warm stone and the faint sweetness of something blooming. For a moment, the room remembered how to be a room. Then a gust carried another scent—sulfur, and underneath it a sweetness so ripe it was nearly rot—and the floorboards hummed with a low vibration that made my teeth ache. I shut the windows. The air went back to being wrong.

I do not know how long it was before the Wellspring called my name in a voice that had never learned to form sound. I only know I rose, put on my cloak though the night was mild, and walked without a lantern because there was light already: a thin, persistent light that lived somewhere behind my eyes and made the world look like a memory of itself.

The path remembered me. The trees made a small corridor with their bodies. The Wellspring—listen, it was not a river then. It was a wound in the earth, a mouth parted to take a breath it had been denied. Mist curled at its edges. The smell of burning cedar wove with the sweetness of decay until I could not tell whether I stood at a birthbed or a pyre.

It—she—rose from the water, and I understood then that calling this thing “she” or “I” or “it” was to dress a storm in a cloak and pretend it had chosen a color. The double stood on the far bank and did not ripple the surface at all. Her hair drifted as though it still swam, black strands wavering in an invisible current. Her eyes caught starlight and held it, constellations pulsing where pupils should be. When I lifted my hand, hers rose a heartbeat late, a shadow-play too precise to be chance. The delay made the mimicry worse than if it had been instant, as though she savored the choice to follow. When she smiled, it was too slow, too deliberate, the mimicry of tenderness with none of its warmth. Frost feathered the ground beneath my feet while heat prickled the skin of my forearms as if I had stood too near a forge. My breath made no mist.

“Quarry,” said the silence inside me. “Hunter.” The words came like strokes from both directions. I could not say which of us was which.

She stood across the water, light veiled in shadow, shadow veiled in light. Do you think me evil? the silence asked. Then know this: evil is no accident, but half of the infinite scheme. Without me, your universe limps, incomplete. Without me, your centre falters, and the universes that minister to you collapse in confusion. I am your other half, Neriah. I am your continuance beyond chemical ruin, beyond the grave, beyond the silence of God. I am not fleeing you. I am completing you.

“You were always meant for the river,” the not-voice told me. The trees recoiled. I felt the withdrawal of their leaves like a hiss.

I should like to tell you what decision I made, so that you might decide whether to despise or pity me. I cannot. I do not remember a decision. I remember stepping forward and the world stepping with me; I remember the ground disliking my weight and then forgiving it. I remember light—the wrong kind of light that shows everything too well—and I remember darkness—honest darkness, the kind that keeps your secrets. I remember reaching and being reached for. Flame in my mouth. Silence in my lungs. Water running in my bones as if my skeleton were a channel carved precisely for it, long before I had elbows or a spine.

Afterward, I woke in my own bed with my hands pressed to the floor as if I had been praying to the wood. My palms no longer blistered. My scars had learned a new language and lay smooth, like a page rewritten. In the mirror—yes, I had covered it, but cloth is only cloth when something wants to see—you could have watched a woman breathe and thought it ordinary. She lifted her hand when I did, not a heartbeat before.

Now the room smells of damp stone, though I have banished water from it. I poured out the basins. I sold the silver cups and the comb with the good teeth. I nailed the shutters because I thought perhaps the river came in through the light. I keep a little fire going, and it burns without smoke as if it were ashamed to be seen.

Sometimes I wake with the taste of sulfur in my throat, a burnt sweetness that makes me think of overripe fruit left in the sun. Sometimes my mouth fills with ash as if I had licked the rim of a hearth. I tell myself these are common things, that other people have strange tastes sometimes and do not write about them in a trembling hand. I do not believe myself.

When the house is quiet—true quiet, not the quiet that hums with a second voice—I can feel him in the street, Father Alaric going about his faithful rounds. I think of stopping him, of confessing properly, of asking him to name what I am so that I might know whether to repent or rejoice. But I cannot decide which sin I should bring him. Pride? Blasphemy? Theft? If I have stolen anything, it is from myself.

They say the soul is braided of four, and the fourth is a silence with teeth. I say the braiding was more fragile than I knew. You unravel one strand to look at it closely, to admire the sheen of your own mind or spirit or flesh, and then you realize the braid has learned another pattern while your fingers were distracted.

Sometimes I am whole. I wake. I grind spices the way my mother taught me, the little wheel rocking in its bowl, the warm fragrance rising—cardamom, clove, a memory of mornings. I step into the sun. Children run past and ignore me, which is a sort of salvation. I almost laugh when I think how dramatic I have been, how easy it is to frighten oneself with shadows when the world continues to cook and eat and argue and make love without interference.

Sometimes I am not whole. I stand in the same sun and feel another pair of eyes narrow against the light from inside my skull, the way one squints when a torch is brought too close. Then the floor hums with the old vibration, and the air takes on that faint iron taste, and I can hear the Wellspring breathing under the ordinary river noises, the way you can hear your own pulse when you lie too long on your ear.

I do not think the double is outside me now. I do not think she is waiting with wet feet at the edge of the trees. I think she learned my gait and wears it well. I think I learned her hunger and pretended it was mine. I do not know whether this is possession or marriage.

Once, not long ago, Dame Ilona pressed a round of bread into my hand without asking for coin. Her palms were broad, flour-dusted, and warm with work. She smelled faintly of yeast and woodsmoke. Her gaze lingered on me, tilting her head as if weighing the shadow I carried with me, though she asked no questions aloud. Her hand enclosed mine, and I saw how thin my wrist looked in her grasp, as if a child’s bone had been wrapped in a woman’s skin. I felt ashamed of my hollowness, but I could not remember when I had last been full. “For your strength,” she said, and her fingers were warm in a forgiving way I had almost forgotten. I lifted the bread and smelled safe morning. I thought, perhaps. I bit. The first chew was sweet with grain and salt. The second tasted of chalk. The third turned to air. I swallowed anyway, and a tear ran down my cheek because my body remembered gratitude even when it could not remember how to receive it.

If I am writing to warn you, I have failed. No warning could keep you from water if water has called your name. If I am writing to praise what has become of me, I do not have the right words. Praise belongs to what is larger than a mouth can hold, and I cannot tell whether the larger thing is light or hunger.

There is one truth I can set down without trembling: the Wellspring is not a place you visit. It is a place that learns the shape of you and keeps it. You think you are leaving, and perhaps your feet carry you away. But when you press your palms to the floorboards in the dark, and the wood is damp as if a river is rising through it, you will understand that doors and distances are for those who have not yet learned to be water.

And so I return to the question that has haunted all men: what is the soul? How does it survive the procession of time, the contradiction of history, the certainty of death? How do we fuse dissolution with continuance, matter with immortality, evil with good, shadow with light? If the universes truly revolve round the soul, then let this page be my testament: there are two centres now, or perhaps one centre split, spinning upon itself. Which you serve, you must decide when you stand at the Wellspring.

And still the line returns, as it did in my mother’s voice: “The soul stands in the centre, and all the universes minister to it.” But there are two centres now. Two gravities. Two hungers. And I do not know which one you orbit as you read these words.

If I have been consumed, I am still writing. If I have consumed, I am still hungry. If I have joined, then this is the first page of a new gospel I do not know how to preach.

Father Alaric knocks sometimes. I do not answer. I picture him outside, hand heavy on the wood, his cassock stretched over his bulk, sweat dampening his collar. He clears his throat once, twice, a man trying to summon liturgy but finding only silence. It is not fear. It is that my mouth is full of silence, and silence takes time to swallow. I tell myself I will open the door when the hum in the floor is only my own blood, when the ash taste is gone, when the mirror woman and I move at exactly the same instant without having to consider it first. I tell myself many things.

The candle is guttering. The blue flame holds its shape, unwilling to die, as if it knows it is being watched. The room smells of damp stone and something sweet that should not be sweet. The bell will ring the hour soon. The sound will pass through me. Perhaps it will leave a space I can fill with prayer. Perhaps it will echo in the Wellspring where voices go to learn to be quiet.

If you find these pages, do not bring them to the priest. Do not read them aloud. Fold them small and keep them beneath your tongue like a host you refuse to swallow. Learn their shape. Learn mine. If you ever stand where the trees hold their breath and the water lies like glass, if you lean and see a face wearing a crown of fire and a veil of shadow, do not ask which of you is the hunter.

Ask whether the soul can be braided again after the fourth strand has learned to sing alone. If you hear an answer, do not write it here.

I would like to be surprised when I see which face rises from the water.