Soundmirror

There is a time slip in Puget Sound. A temporal leak in the shape of a tide pool on a rock in a petite bay off the edge of one of the islands. You can only find it if you listen very quietly and if you know the sound of your own breathing, for this pool is a mirror, and its reflection is your voice.

The song you must sing is a secret in five-part harmony. It can only be sung when the moon is full, or the pool cannot become silver enough to transmit the waves across the time slip to your other selves. Tonight is the fifth full moon. Your grandmother lays dying in a small cedar cabin on the edge of the rain forest and you have taken her old kayak without permission again. Not that she would deny you. She knows what you are doing. Has done it herself before you were born, has never denied you anything, may actually be you from long ago in the future, in fact.

Tonight you paddle softly, silently, so as not to draw the attention of the moon. Fearing she may hide her face or summon a siren to drown you out before you can complete the song. Your four mirror-selves are waiting. You can hear your own voices humming over the soft laps of the water, warming up in the center of all this wet salt.

Your grandmother’s kayak bumps against the rock in the bay off the edge of the island. The moon pretends not to see you, or perhaps she is cheering you on. The only sounds out here are yours and yours and yours and yours.

And finally: yours.

You open your throat and dip your harmonic line into the mirror pool made of sound. You catch your selves all up in the song. The mirror is a door. You dive in. In the small cedar cabin, your grandmother releases her last breath into the atmosphere, remembering a song of her own. The song that brought her to this shore, many fives of moons ago.