(another installment in the saga of Mirror girl)

Mirror girl had a feeling that she wasn’t telling the truth. At times, it is true that one can really be unsure. In our world, there exists a rare person every now and again that can bury the truth and rewrite it. Some might call them compulsive liars but they are not simply that. For their own sake, let us consider them to be the “truth re-writers.” Their powers are really quite notable for they are able to erase the truth, yet keep the facts, and write a whole new story of their lives. Many excel so much at this task that they do not even recognize it themselves. Most seem only able to revise happy memories, to make them even happier for, even as a truth rewriter, it is impossible to forget one’s own faults. This is why they are not liars. They are simply natural-born storytellers that often keep their best stories for themselves. Though this sparse crew might seem quite powerful, it is a sad fact of their lot that they often do not know that they are, in fact, a truth re-writer. This is why Mirror girl was so unsure. She believed that there was never an absolute truth, for we are all human beings with different eyes and many kinds of ears and we all see and hear things differently. It is the old philosophy: Imagine if there is an object and everybody calls it a “red object.” When one looks at the object, he sees its color and when another does, she sees its color. When the two look at other “red objects,” they see the same or a similar color. But, who is to say that the two are seeing the same color? Now, imagine if one saw a “red object” but looked so quickly at it that she forgot how it appeared as soon as she turned away. These are the things that Mirror girl would often think about when she was alone. Now, what if this person glanced quickly, turned away and then someone later told her that what she saw was in fact a “red object.” The truth, as well, can also mingle in such a hazardous way with perception.

One more thing about our friend: Mirror girl loved words and the challenge to string them all together in the most perfect order. Like beads on a necklace, if one were to fall off, it would look like a different necklace. It would certainly feel like a different necklace and then perhaps whoever was the owner of the necklace might not like it anymore, so they would throw it away. The truth is such a string of words and, to the rewriters, they are at times unknowingly tempted to take it all apart and string it up again, creating a new necklace. The tricky thing about the rewriters though, is that they never lose the pieces.
Here are some of Mirror girl’s pieces: a tiny kitten, a squeaky screen door and a brown paper bag. It wasn’t her kitten - or her paper bag for that matter - but it was her screen door. It wasn’t the kitten’s business to have anything to do with the screen door but Mirror girl had thought, It is small and needs more space than a paper bag to play in. She did recall in her fuzzied memory that somehow, and it might as well have been by magic, the screen door had allowed the cat to escape.

Now Mirror girl was being asked to tell the story of how the young cat escaped. As the pieces of truth fell into a heap on her tongue, she said, It was an accident…of the postman’s. He opened the door and the paper bag – so close to the screen – went tumbling out. Surely, the cat went after it, like all kittens would, she said. Soon enough, she said, the kitten was gone and we could not keep up to catch him. At that point, her companion was worried about the small kitten, dreaming up nightmares of screeching cars, garbage dumpsters and mountain lions. As she wished and wished for the small kitten to return soon, Mirror girl reviewed the details of the rewritten truth and had completely forgotten the original. It really does happen much like this for the truth rewriters. So fast, so undetectable and, as it should be repeated, so unknown to the rewriter herself. As they always say, A mirror never lies. In the blink of a grasshopper’s eyelash, Mirror girl wound herself fully around the new truth and it was then impossible to recall the moment that she picked up the brown paper bag with the little kitten nestled inside its cave, opened the screen door with its metallic squeak and tipped the little one out into the world.