io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “It Might Be He Returns” by Fatima Taqvi. Enjoy!
It Might Be He Returns
By Fatima Taqvi
What you need to know about the boy in this story is he is always hungry and the sun is always too hot for him, and he would save the world if he could. This is what he tells himself as he sits opposite the tailor’s shop, looking at the clothes sway in the breeze of the air conditioner within. Fawad would save the world, he would change fate itself. He would give his parents the best of the best. March into any school he wants. Get any kind of education he needs to feel like the person he knows he could be.
The mirror in Master Jee’s shop has always stretched itself up at a tilt behind the counter, framed by the stitched clothes that hang around it. A thin crack smiles across its grime. The fast approaching and departing shapes of Karachi’s blurred traffic reflect on its surface in unsettling bursts. Perhaps it would have been better had it been facing somewhere else. But then none of what was to come would have happened.
The first time Fawad saw the mirror’s true intentions, he was sitting cross-legged against a wall of the shops opposite the tailor’s shop, scratching a map of all he knew into the dirt. He was thinking, always thinking. What to do? Where to go? One of his sandals was about to break, should he spend time looking for a new pair? Pangs of hunger assailed him and the world grew and contracted over the emptiness, shimmering at the edges, radiating unintelligible truths only he felt the impact of.
Opposite the road, the mirror beamed the sun’s reflection back so brilliantly that for the moment that Fawad stopped, his gaze dragged up towards its face where it shone through the glass behind the crouched figure of the tailor over a sewing machine.
Just in time to see the tailor’s reflection peel away from the rest of its flat mirror world and stand up.
Fawad had wobbled where he was sitting, almost passing out. The tailor’s reflection paused for the longest moment, before giving a defeated shrug and sitting down again in faithful imitation of Master Jee as both tailors shook out a length of white cotton.
The next time it happened, he couldn’t breathe, and the last time he almost lost control of his bladder. The reflection had taken to tilting its head, shading its eyes with one hand as it peered out from the shop window. Craning over its doppelganger’s shoulder, face hidden in a flash of light. One arm reaching up. Pointing straight at him.
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