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Always on those rainy nights when she decided to drive into the city to play the game, she would first revisit the mirror maze… All that afternoon, warm rain danced against the tin roof of the loft, and the faint howling of a dog, somewhere on the fringes of the park, made her think of pain. With darkness, light from the sulfurous street lamp across the road, cut by the blinds, cast soft stripes across the walls and floor. She sat on her hard wooden stool listening to the patter on the roof and the squeak of the ceiling fan as it thrashed the humid air.

When, finally, she made her decision, she moved with swift resolve. She rolled up the little blue rug beside her bed, opened the trapdoor beneath, then made her way by memory and touch down the wooden ladder to the catwalks.

These she crossed with the grace of an aerialist. When she reached the switchboard, she turned on the lights below. Then she lowered herself deftly to the floor down a soft, thick white gym rope. Finally she stripped off all her clothes and walked out to face the mirrors.

The ones in the sharply angled Corridor met her like angry sentinels-fattening, elongating, disproportioning her body. She strode rapidly past them, wound her way through the labyrinthine Chamber, exited via the sinuous Fragment on Serpent, then entered the Great Hall of Infinite Deceptions. Here, in the middle of the vast room, she stopped, then slowly turned like a skater cutting a figure on a patch of virgin ice.

Her glossy tresses of dark brown hair, so dark they looked almost black in the mirrors, cascaded down her neck, broke upon her shoulders and edged her pale back. Pausing to regard her high cheekbones and sculpted lips, she smiled gently at her likeness.

She basked before the multiple images. The reflections ravished her eyes. Then she began to look beyond herself, searching out corners and crevices in the silvered glass. There was secrecy in mirror space, places to hide and to conceal, corridors of sparkling light, endless shimmering passages and tunnels.

She positioned her image into one of these, stared hard at her eyes, willed herself entry. Then, in an instant that no matter how often she experienced it would always seem magical, she passed through to become her dream-sister the one she'd known since girlhood, the one who lived in mirror world.

She felt safe then, in a place where so many things were possible, where the rules and laws that governed the world outside were null and void.

Here, in the land of mirrors, normally forbidden acts could be performed without fear or guilt and to degrees of intensity undreamed of even in deepest sleep.

Later, wigged blond, dressed smart, artfully made up, she drove into Manhattan through the tunnel beneath the river, then onto the city's rain-slick streets. She kept all her car windows shut. Only music from the tape deck, dizzying arias sung by great divas, reached her ears.