Even a Dark Place Will Shine
by Christopher Green

The walls of the Mirrordome were made from broad corrugated steel, painted hellish, Barbie-aisle pink with purple accents. Even with a creeping moss patina and a few decades of sun they were still visible from a great distance, between the trunks of huge cedars as Mirian made her way through the grass, following in the wake of her friends. It had rained through the night and early morning of that day, and she had to keep her eyes mostly to the ground, watching out for thick streaks of mud that might suction off her sneakers, or for the telltale pattern of a copperhead between tufts of knee-high grass. But on the occasion that she glanced up, it swayed ahead of her, that distant place, as though it were loping toward them and not the other way around.

Ahead of her, Rich suddenly turned and gave Ainsleigh a mock shove. “Don’t fall,” he teased. Ainsleigh, spindly and tall, still learning how to wield herself, stumbled a few feet off to their right and then pivoted and shoved him back. “Turd,” she muttered. They had been going out for three months. This was one of their more intimate moments.

Mirian focused on keeping her hands from balling up into fists. She was caught up in a strange mixture of excitement and fear and embarrassment, plucking out strands of each to observe whether it was the strongest of the three in any given moment. No way to tell: her stomach was a roiling cauldron in which the three had been tossed in equal measure. She looked up. Thick purple lines ran vertically down the wall of the Mirrordome; in proximity to the name but oddly removed from it was a sinister-seeming jester head in belled cap and white makeup, frozen in the midst of a gaping, psychotic laugh. On purpose? she wondered. Or was it just too difficult to look at a picture of a jester and not see murderous intent? She was still staring at it when one foot skated suddenly out from under her and forced her into an impromptu side split, a position her often underused legs were not accustomed to. She stifled a pained grunt, reluctant to draw the attention of the other two, and dragged the rogue foot back in a series of straining pulls. Then she doubled over, feeling her inner thighs, asking herself, anything ripped? Can I walk? Have I trapped myself here? She had not—the legs had survived. She started forward again, trying to catch up without tipping over entirely.

It felt sudden: the building was distant, on the other side of the foliage, and then it was looming before them, at the end of a long double-lane gravel drive. Like a barn from some weird parallel dimension where things were garishly decorated for no reason. It felt so strange, seeing it out here in the backwoods of Oregon. Very, very much like the opening of a horror movie, although she had worked hard not to think too much about that. Everyone, really, seemed struck by it: there was a moment when all three had stopped to stare, hands in pockets, a caesura of awed silence.

Rich glanced at his overpriced digital watch and strode forward, his magnificent hair wind-tossed and movie-trailer-esque. “C’mon!” he prodded, a little too loudly. “I wanna skate!”

The doors were surprisingly difficult to breach. Mirian had assumed that any place not used in the last twenty years wouldn’t have much in the way of security, but it seemed that someone had locked the place up like they would any other night and then just left it to time that way. They would have had as little luck twenty years earlier, probably. Rich tried to break the chains over the door with a very large rock, but that was the sort of thing that only worked on TV. In the real world he just scraped his hands and got his jeans dirty. Ainsleigh stood by and shot amused glances at Mirian, occasionally egging him on with “Oh! That almost got it!” or “Maybe if you find an even bigger rock!” At last, his manhood properly sullied, Rich resorted to searching for unlocked windows, of which there was one fifteen feet from the front doors.

He and Ainsleigh hoisted themselves up and over the sill with minimal effort. Mirian, who was in possession of what her mother often referred to as a “video game gut,” had to ask them to haul her through, one friend to each arm. It was both painful and humiliating. She apologized, and they said it was no problem, and they all abruptly abandoned the memory of the event.

There was a lot about the the place that was surprising, but most surprising was that it was almost impossible to see anything for the first several minutes. There was no power, of course, and the windows were covered in thick layers of storm-swept detritus that served as blackout curtains. If not for the twin baby skylights in the ceiling they likely would have had to turn around and go home, so impenetrable was the gloom. Mirian felt an instinctive jolt of fear—wild animals, criminals on the lam maybe—but it faded as they delved further in and her eyes adjusted. There was a large central rink, of course, with tall carpeted walls for children to crash into. The floor, long since robbed of its waxy sheen, was at least remarkably clear, as were the terraced carpeted areas surrounding it. The walls were lost in darkness; Mirian could see the vague pale boxes of posters but nothing more than that. The ceiling, some eighty feet up, was likewise a mystery.

“Fuckin’ creepy,” Ainsleigh muttered, kicking the toes of her Converses against the rise of a stairstep. She swung her tiny backpack around to her stomach and retrieved a pack of gum, which she held out to Mirian.

“Oh, no,” Mirian said, raising one hand, “I’m—”

“Oh that’s right, you don’t do sugar,” Ainsleigh interrupted, opening the pack and pulling out a flat stick of corn syrup and glycerin and riboflavin (whatever that was). She’d been hanging around the two of them a lot since she and Rich started dating, and while Mirian didn’t dislike her, would, if pressed, categorize her as friend, she often found herself ambivalent about the way that Ainsleigh skirted over the things that Rich understood so intimately: issues of weight and body; a mostly absent mother and older brother; social trauma in 7th grade, which had caused Mirian to leave Coos County, where Rich and Ainsleigh still went. If she were a plate, Rich would know how to keep her spinning. Ainsleigh, it sometimes seemed, would eat a salad off of her.

“C’mon,” Rich said, jogging away from the pair of them. “I wanna see if there’s still skates.”

“I’m not skating on that shit,” Ainsleigh called after him, stuffing the stick in her mouth. “Ith all dirry.”

“You walked through mud to get here!” his voice reminded her from the abyss.

Ainsleigh sighed and cocked her head at Mirian. “Do you want to skate?”

Mirian shrugged. “I want to not be at home. I’m already getting what I want.”

That seemed to take her aback, which was the goal. But Ainsleigh quickly blinked and shrugged, as though this were within the range of expected responses. “I don’t want to skate,” she muttered. “I don’t even know if the last person to wear stuff here is dead or not.”

“It only closed in like 2000.”

“Whatever, I mean—people die every year,” Ainsleigh said, somewhat haltingly, like she could tell how dumb it was as it exited her mouth. The gum clicked in her cheek. “Anyway I don’t like it here.”

Mirian didn’t reply. Her own personal jury was still out. Now that it was more or less established that they wouldn’t get murdered here, she was starting to think the stillness was kind of nice.

Rich did find the skate room. It was tucked away behind a peeling linoleum counter, still somehow smelling faintly of feet. A lot of the skate cubbies were empty, pillaged, no doubt, by generations of delinquent explorers. But there were pairs that fit Rich and Ainsleigh well enough. Ainsleigh, in the end, required only minimal convincing to try out the rink, and when she discovered that it was still in tolerable condition her resistance dissolved. The two of them started to roll across the floor, cautiously at first, and then with more confidence. The sound reverberated around the empty space in a way that surprised Mirian. She wasn’t sure she’d ever actually heard this sound before; it had always been masked by shouts and music. Quiet roar of the wheels, like tiny boulders, and the muted thump when they guided their bodies into the wall. A few times, Ainsleigh’s laughter. Rich held her sometimes, offering her more help than she needed. Most of these times, she let him.

Mirian set herself to exploring the Mirrordome. Why call it that? She asked herself. It was clear from the exterior that there was no dome, and she hadn’t seen any  mirrors, although admittedly she hadn’t seen much of anything. The creepy jester head was conspicuously and blessedly absent, and she wondered if perhaps it had been added after the fact by older kids. The carpets were petrified by a generation of disuse, but their black and purple crosshatch was still vibrant beneath the beam of her cell phone flashlight. There was a sort of mezzanine-like area overlooking the rink, and she might have remained mystified about its purpose if it didn’t have a single artifact remaining: a dormant, dust-browned cabinet of something called Missile Command. Its flank was all hot-colored geometric shapes and numbers, vaguely mathematical in the way that an elementary schooler might envision. Mirian ran a hand over the console, just to see how much dust she’d come away with. It was a lot. She felt disappointed by how little this impressed her.

Arcades were tough to come by these days. She knew there was one in the mall on the southeast side of town, the last mall remaining, already halfway to a state of decomposition similar to the Mirrordome’s. She had last seen it when she was eleven, two years earlier, on a day trip during a weekend with her mom. Danny was at work, folding pairs of jeans at a warehouse twenty miles up the interstate for twelve and a half more hours, and it was just the two of them. What do you want, her mom asked, which was different from asking what do you want to do. Mirian shrugged, and her mom sighed, and it was as though the car found its own way to the mall, settling into a parking space like a nickel tumbling through the coin sorting machine her dad got her when she was eight.

Many of the spaces were empty, either closed stores or just decrepit caverns with for rent signs in the windows. Mothers and young children floated up and down escalators and across food court floors, looking haggard and resentful. More than any other place in the world, it felt both suffocatingly packed with stuff and also empty enough to drain a girl of all hope for the future of man. Mirian had never been a mallgoer, but her mom seemed insistent that this was a holdover from some cherished childhood tradition. “You want a corn dog?” she asked, and when Mirian said sure with insufficient vigor she shook her head and said, “Forget it.” Later, she asked if Mirian wanted to get their nails done together, mom’s treat, and this time when she said yes it was like she was pushing down some plunger into the back of her throat so the words came out grateful and enthusiastic. This bought her a solid forty-five minutes of Okay Mom, but the effect was limited, as it always was.

The arcade was the one place Mirian felt any sort of affinity for: dimly lit, strobing with CRT displays older than her brother. A haven for quick and easy escape. Bright colors in 30 frames a second, something about that animation speed exciting her occipital lobe in a way real life never could. But her mom only rolled her eyes and hitched her purse farther up her shoulder. “You play enough games at home,” she muttered. They kept walking, the arcade kept slipping further behind them, and Mirian felt a momentary hot rage that she normally managed to keep covered up, like that supervolcano under Yellowstone that would probably kill everybody in fifty years. The only thing that kept her silent was knowing that a fight ran the risk of drawing this trip out longer than it already was.

“Stop, you asshole!” Ainsleigh shrieked, and Mirian snapped her head down to the rink. Rich was tickling her, and she was struggling to keep her balance on the wheels of her skates. But she didn’t seem angry. Mirian was about to shout down to them until she realized how happy they both seemed. It occurred to her to shout anyway; Rich hadn’t said a word to her since they stopped by to pick her up from her apartment. She might have done it, except that the tickling then transitioned almost seamlessly into a kiss. It was so sudden, the gunshot of romantic gestures. Mirian had never seen them do it before, but it was happening now, right now, and she had to avert her eyes, the way Ainsleigh did when they watched Hellraiser or American Horror Story.

By chance her escape route was up, and it was somewhere in up that she found the sliver of light against the ceiling. It was striking, hovering as it did in nothingness, like a sci-fi portal to elsewhere. She followed the path of the light off to her right and saw, from this angle, that the wall was arrayed with a long sequence of incredibly high vertical blinds, one of which was askew. She could see it sticking out from the neat line of its comrades, defiant and brilliantly illuminated. She trotted across the mezzanine and down the steps in near total silence, feeling her way to the edge of the blinds for the tiny beads of the chain. It didn’t take long, only minimal clumsy fumbling. She half expected that the chain, like everything else, would half-work or not work at all. But it circulated with an irritable, gravelly hiss, and little by little, pull by pull, the blinds rotated enough to let in more of the cloudless moonlight.

“Yooooo!” she heard Rich call behind her. “What you find up  there?” But she didn’t reply. When she turned to inspect the results of her discovery, she started almost violently. The far side of the ceiling had become a blinding checkerboard of luminescent squares.

Mirrors. The ceiling was covered, maybe down to the inch, in large mirrors.

“Ugh!” Ainsleigh groused, squinting and holding a palm up dramatically to shield her eyes. “What the hell?” But Mirian didn’t reply to her, either. The light reflected off the dome cast down over the rest of the rink, lighting up the ridges of the carpeted walls, the lacquered tabletops, even the black metal quarter machine. She may as well have fired up a few rows of dim fluorescent row lights. The place was transformed.

A couple things went through her head. The first was a vision of the Mirrodome as it must once have looked: vivid and glittering, always in motion, a joyful spiraling galaxy. At one time it must have seemed a permanent fixture, for some generation of kids long since morphed into grownups, skating their way across a vast gulf of time to a world where they were now the parents, and the landmarks of their youth were now just mausoleums. Nothing lasts, she thought to herself—but then again, here it was, still hosting kids being kids.

And this made her think about that saying. Nothing lasts. It was tempting to believe that the second half of this truth was because it dies out. After all, here she was: out of Coos County, out of Rich’s life, watching them both evolve away from her from a distance. Next year she’d switch schools again, for 9th grade. Her brother would move out. The mall would shutter. Her mom would stop feeling the need to humor her. Not to mention that most days the world outside her little town seemed like it was burning down around her. Sometimes she felt like everything she knew was destined to wither and fade to nothing.

But Rich wasn’t gone yet, and neither was she. The Mirrordome was still here, and still pretty if you stuck around and gave it a chance. Maybe nothing lasted because everything was just meant to be something else. Dusty skates sitting in a darkened corner, waiting for someone to pull them out again. Same floor, different feet.

She didn’t notice for some time that Rich and Ainsleigh had resumed skating. They weren’t nearly so impressed by the mirrors’ light show. But Mirian sat down cross-legged in the middle of the carpet and waited for them to finish, watching the moon play off the panels over their heads. She left the blinds open when they left. Future trespassers deserved to know what they’d come all the way out here for.

“You all right?” Rich asked her as they traipsed back toward the road. The way he said this it was clear that he thought he knew the answer, and that he thought he knew why.

But Mirian shrugged and smiled. She didn’t say anything back. She stopped to tighten the laces on her sneakers, to keep them firmly in place through the mud ahead, and marched into the tall grasses toward home.

© Christopher Green, 2020

Christopher Green is a current New Yorker, or so he tells people who care about that sort of thing. His work has been published in The Rumpus, The Baltimore Review, and on this very lovely show. His debut novel, Us In Pieces, co-written with Tasha Cotter, was published in July 2019 by Shadelandhouse Modern Press. He works as a Special Education teacher in the Bronx. He lives in Harlem with a cat whom he named TS Eliot for reasons that are incredibly pedestrian but also too long to explain here.

Even a Dark Place Will Shine was read by Kristen Calgaro on Wednesday, 5th February 2020 for Intimacy & Isolation