The Glassmonger’s Bargain¶
Listen close. I’ve sold three of them now. Each time, the same flicker in the buyer’s eyes—as if they’ve glimpsed their own face in a river and mistook it for a stranger’s.
First was the weaver from Samarkand. She haggled under the date palms, her fingers stained with indigo. The mirror I gave her showed a version of her workshop where looms wove shadows into cloth. She paid in silver and a single pomegranate seed. Told me she’d bury it to grow a tree that bears seeds of "other possibilities." I didn’t laugh. Not then.
Three summers later, a boy no older than twelve, his tunic frayed at the cuffs, pointed at the smallest mirror. “That one,” he said, though it was hidden beneath a cloth. He claimed it whispered his name in a language his mother used before she drowned. When he looked into it, his reflection smiled. His real mouth didn’t. He traded a bronze key and a vial of river water. Said his father kept a lock only the water could open. I didn’t ask which father.
Last week, a woman with a scar dividing her brow into two moons. She wore men’s boots and carried a sword under her cloak. “Show me the one that lies,” she said. The largest mirror, clouded with age, reflected her as a child, kneeling beside a pyre. She didn’t flinch. “How much?” I named a price in saffron and stories. She agreed, but as she turned to leave, the mirror showed me her back, the sword at her hip, and behind her—the faint outline of a fourth mirror. One I’d never carved.
Here’s where the truth bends: the woman’s scar was on the wrong side. All the histories say she died with it on the left. But I know better. My father’s brother kept a tapestry showing her last battle, the scar a crimson slash across her right. So either the mirror lied, or I’ve been selling reflections of reflections, and somewhere, the original is bleeding into our world.
Tonight, the market burns incense to ward off the plague. My stall reeks of myrrh. The mirrors hum when the wind shifts, though I’ve never heard them myself. Buyers come, but I sell only trinkets now. The mirrors stay covered.
Except one.
The fourth one.
It arrived this morning, nestled in a crate of papyrus. No note. No sender. When I look into it, it shows this very stall, empty, the cushions bare, the dates overripe. And behind the counter, a figure with my face but his father’s hands, polishing a mirror that holds a market where no one buys and the sky is always dusk.
I’ll keep it. For now.
But if you see a woman with a scar that shouldn’t be there, or a boy who knows the weight of a key that fits nothing, don’t speak to them. Turn away. The mirrors don’t show lies. They show what breathes in the spaces between truths. And what they want is to be seen.
Go home. Bar your doors.
And whatever you do, don’t bury any seeds.