Backward Glass

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Going backward, it only opens from eleven until midnight, only in the years that end in seven.

From an even-numbered decade, you can go back on even-numbered days. Same for odds.

Once you’ve gone back, you have to wait until midnight. After that, you can go home again anytime.

When you go uptime to your home, you can bring the chosen kid from the past with you.

The mirror only picks one kid every decade. It never picks anyone older than sixteen.

You can’t ever really change anything.

When you go downtime from your own mirror, you can take the kid from the future with you.

Here’s what you need to know: You’re my son and you’re something like negative twenty-two, because that’s how long it will be before you’re born. I have a story to tell you. Most of it happened right here in Scarborough, forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, but it happened to me. Last year. 1977. The year I turned fifteen.

I wish I could begin on that cold day in January when I met her, but I should tell you about the dead baby and the list with my name on it. A year and a half ago, my parents moved us into this house, the one the long-termers in the neighborhood call “the old Hollerith place,” far enough out of Toronto for me to call it the boonies.

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