Madeleine Morningist

There was a large, gold-framed mirror in Matilda’s room, reaching from the floor to several feet above the young girl’s head. It reflected Matilda’s room with crisp exactness; the lush four-poster bed with the gauzy canopy she had begged for at Christmas, and the pictures of ballerinas that her mother had put up after painting the frames a delicate pink. The desk and lamp stood just the same in the mirror as they did in Matilda’s room, exactly the same colors and with the same little cracks and imperfections. The only thing that the mirror did not reflect loyally was Matilda herself. Sitting on her bed, stroking the bedcovers absent-mindedly, Matilda watched her reflection twirl around her mirror-room. The Other Matilda had her long, dark hair, and the same blue ribbon as the one Matilda’s nanny had tied in her own hair that day. “I wish we could dance together,” the Other Matilda said longingly as she did a shaky arabesque. “Or go outside. It’s lone...

Something long and sharp, maybe a piece of glass, sliced through the tender skin on the bottom of Charlotte’s bare foot, causing her to give a tiny cry of shock, which was immediately lost in the wind. She had been wandering up and down the beach searching for sea-glass, her long dark hair whipping across her face in the salty air. Sam, laying on a towel a little ways up the beach, hadn't looked over in a while. In his pocket was the diamond ring he planned to present her with in just a few minutes, and he was imagining what her reaction to it would be.         Shock, probably. Tears, maybe laughter. Sam had known Charlotte since she'd been 16, the younger sister of his college roommate. He had watched her grow into a woman, been on the phone with her when she was accepted into her dream university, held her sobbing in his arms for hours after she had accidentally run over her childhood dog. He knew her reactions to most things, knew each variety of laugh she ha...

There were four people in the train cabin at the time, only four because the tall man with the beard had left ten minutes earlier for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The group had practically forgotten about him at this point, what with all the confusion, but his bags sat neatly under theirs, his newspaper still on his seat. He had read this newspaper quietly in the hour before, while casually glancing to his right at the pretty young woman by the window. No one had judged him for looking, but they all noticed it. The cabin felt a little bigger without him in it, and the older woman across from him had stopped fanning herself, and the pretty girl had sat up a little straighter, but in the end they didn’t even remember he’d been there until much later.  The young woman had vivid red hair that was pinned up securely, and she wore a blue sleeveless dress with elegant little white gloves. People looked at her and forgot for a moment that it was not actually summer, bu...