“Wait-don’t!”
But I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to. I smiled as my fingers pressed against the surface, feeling the jagered edges against my fingertips. Too much pressure and my blood would flow over my nails. Drip down to the floor beneath me like a forgotten tap.
What would it look like? Would it splash and land where gravity threw it? There are gods of seas and skies and war… what of blood? I would argue that it should have its own reverence. A child’s blood had been spilt here, she had watched as the monster smashed the mirror and gripped a piece in his hands. The child had watched. And then watched no more.
Crimson light still gleamed on the insides of my eyelids, forever a red landscape within the burning of my soul. The mirror was not a place for reflection, as ironic as that seemed. I could wait for water to still for all time, wait for the trees to reflect on it like imprints in the sand.
But I would never see it. I would never know what it is to doubt my appearance – and then have the ability to fix it. I will never know how to pick without instruction, to love without touch.
Women cluck at each other like territorial chickens, unaware that all their ruffling feathers make them no different to the fox outside the henhouse. If anything, it amuses him, it gives him a foothold.
My tears had amused the monster; I don’t remember feathers helping me either. We all taste the same.
“Come away.” The woman begged me, curling a hand around my wrist. But I didn’t want to. I pressed my forehead against the broken mirror, and whispered a prayer for the dark angel that had taken my eyes. For the flash of heat as he ran a warm finger down my bloody face.
I laughed. I mad sound that pressed wet clouds against the mirror. Then I reached up to the top of my forehead and did what I hadn’t done for years. I traced along the scar, down to my left eye, across the top of my nose to the other eye, under my nose across my dry, cracked lips, down my chin. How they had stitched it all was a miracle, how it had healed was another. I could move my lips, I could talk and sing and smell. I was an extra from a slasher movie, a nightmare and fear.
“Mirrors,” I mumbled, and laughed again. “Mirrors are an imitation to see what other’s see. They are to burn little holes into your face until all you have left are scars stitched on the inside of your skin. And yet…” I brushed my fingers along the top of the frame and hissed when it pricked me.683Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4qGWkwkqdA
“Yet we look to the mirror for security, for practise, for reality.”
I turned away to stare sightlessly ahead, “I never had to ask the mirror for permission. To be pretty, to be funny, to be me.
Neither should you.
We are the same you and I.”
I turned to my friend, the woman who’s hand still gripped my wrist protectively, “you see the scars, and yet they are just another part of me. They will heal, but they will still linger there. I am not afraid of my scars; I am not afraid to be ugly. It has within it a kind of freedom we forget to seek. To be us without fear. When choice is taken from the equation, sometimes – just sometimes. It forces us to try and be just us.”
Just me.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
