It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.
Once upon a time...
Grey hands gripped the hammer and swung it, striking the post so hard that it sank a foot into the soft earth.
Two more blows and it was fixed immovably.
From the trees around the clearing the snakes and birds watched silently. In the swamp the alligators drifted like patches of bad-assed water.
Grey hands took up the crosspiece and fixed it in place, tying it with creepers, pulling them so tight that they creaked.
She watched him. And then she took up a fragment of mirror and tied it to the top of the post.
"The coat," she said.
He took up the coat and fitted it over the crosspiece. The pole wasn't long enough, so that the last few inches of sleeve draped emptily.
"And the hat," she said.
It was tall, and round, and black. It glistened.
The piece of mirror gleamed between the darkness of the hat and the coat.
"Will it work?" he said.
"Yes," she said. "Even mirrors have their reflection. We got to fight mirrors with mirrors." She glared up through the trees to a slim white tower in the distance. "We've got to find her reflection."
"It'll have to reach out a long way, then."
"Yes. We need all the help we can get."
She looked around the clearing.
She had called upon Mister Safe Way, Lady Bon Anna, Hotaloga Andrews and Stride Wide Man. They probably weren't very good gods.
But they were the best she'd been able to make.
This is a story about stories.
Or what it really means to be a fairy godmother.
But it's also, particularly, about reflections and mirrors.
All across the multiverse there are backward tribes who distrust mirrors and images because, they say, they steal a bit of a person's soul and there's only so much of a person to go around. And the people who wear more clothes say this is just superstition, despite the fact that other people who spend their lives appearing in images of one sort or another seem to develop a thin quality. It's put down to over-work and, tellingly, over-exposure instead.