Plague in the Mirror by Deborah Noyes Page B

think he’s pretty,
bella,
don’t you? I thought so, when I saw you together.”
    Gazing into the shadows of the workshop, where chickens peck at the dust, May grows hypnotized, watching as Cristofana watches, for the young man is alone inside, lost in dark thoughts, mourning someone perhaps — maybe his two friends, whose easels have been covered with dark cloth — staring fixedly at his drawing board.
    May becomes so absorbed in his stillness that she doesn’t notice Cristofana move. She doesn’t see or sense the other girl’s approach until her twin reaches around as if in embrace and tilts a coarse blade toward her neck, its tip extending between phantom May and the unshuttered window. “Do you remember this dagger?”
    The knife doesn’t rise, doesn’t move but for the slightest tremble, but May shifts her focus from far to near, staring as if at a snake rising from its basket.
    For a second, she holds her breath, waiting for Cristofana to run the blade across her tender neck with all her spite, do what those viper eyes promise (now that May’s had the sense to turn around and face her), but what’s worse than the look in her eye or the knife now vanished into her layers is the terror of what might lurk in her stolen clothing, of the microbes swarming, of death in the weave. Even in ghost form, with logic on her side (if her flesh and cells aren’t active and present, then they can’t be cut; they can’t be infected), it’s impossible not to panic.
    May’s done some reading since her last visit to Old Florence, and the Black Death — in an age without antibiotics — is about the scariest thing she can imagine.
    The streets are more silent even than before, apart from the soft noise of the kitten on its haunches lapping from a bucket of filthy rainwater at the curb. Inside, the beautiful man stares, unmoving at his easel, but her gaze darts back to where the knife is concealed, in the contagion of her double.
    “Relax,
bella.
You know by now that my knife cannot hurt you,” Cristofana says, as if reading her thoughts. “You don’t yet know or believe it, but you are the merest kind of visitor here, a traveler without footprints.”
    May looks in anxiously at the artist with the dark, sad eyes — alone, unaware of them outside his window.
    “You worry for your flesh, but have you ever touched anything here, besides the ground you walk upon? Have you ever moved or altered anything or eaten a fig or”— she winks, gesturing —“stolen a kiss? You leave no mark, just as I leave none in your world. None is left on you.”
    May winces, remembering her knees, the blood, the strength and gentleness in the artist’s hands, his smell.
You’re wrong. I have.
    But what if Cristofana’s right? What if passing through all ghostlike and leaving no mark is the real story of May’s life — in Old Florence or New — in Vermont or Boston or anywhere else? Leave no mark and bear none.
He had touched her. He touched her and made her shimmer.
    “But we can change that,” Cristofana offers, her voice hypnotic.
    May shakes her head.
    “Or do you imagine, as I sometimes do, that it was all just a very powerful dream — our trade before? Your meeting with Marco? For in dreams we have all we require.”
    May’s eyes widen, and Cristofana continues cheerily, “Yes, I know him. I learned his name after you last left us. I made him notice me. Or helped him notice you? I should like very much to see your face when you cannot feel his lovely flesh as I can.” She sighs as if the whole subject is profoundly tedious. “As I will. To distract from all this”— she waves an impatient hand —“death and sorrow.
    “I have tried again, as flesh, to find your world. . . . I have labored without your selfish help. Sometimes, my fingers brush its edges. I hear its echoes.
Strega,
I say to myself, you have only to give back what you take. That is the rule. Until then you’ll keep nothing. You don’t believe me? In