Magic Mirror | Amy Barnes

There’s a fire raging in Romper Room. My sister and I watch the show everyday after school as Miss Alice says hi to boys and girls through her magic mirror. On this day, smoke rises over her face and her magic mirror is cloudy-smoky too. Fire truck sirens approach and she’s babbling unsettled names Sujenny and Ambrian and Joemily.

Firemen arrive with hoses filled with glitter and PlayDoh water that makes a clumpy blue mess on construction paper flames. They try to open up the folding ladder of Miss Alice’s Fire Engine Playset ($9.98 + tax) but it snaps like ribbon candy.

The chosen, special Shirley Temple audience members are screaming as flames lick their black patent shoes. I feel suddenly lucky; I sent in my application but wasn’t chosen to be there or called out by Miss Alice either. The firemen try to put out their curls with seltzer water from clown-sized bottles. 

I have to let the children know I’m watching. Miss Alice hot breath breathes at our television. We watch her paper dress fill with memory words. Flame. Fire. Smoke. The fire is finally put with the glitter hoses. Miss Alice holds the paper mirror in bandaged hands and tries to read our names in the ashes. Alice she crow-voiced calls out, can you hear me?

Do you see me, Miss Alice? I call as she is carried away on a popsicle stretcher. My fingerprints spell out her name on the flickering magic screen. 

Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites including: FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, JMMW, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, and others. She is an Associate Editor at Fractured Lit and reads for CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD, The MacGuffin, and Narratively. Her flash collection, "Mother Figures" is forthcoming in 2021.