REFLECTION
By dream_fever
"A girl had disappeared into the heart of the woods only for her carcass to be discovered, hanging from strings, soul spilling from an open mouth. Her ribs poked through her shirt, cheekbones through her skin. The flies feasted on the rotten corruption of beauty gone bad." It was the mirrors. And the flies.But mostly the mirrors.This is not my story to tell, but I'm telling it anyway. Not for me. For them."
This is not my story to tell.
I don't hold the full picture; only shards are left, and I'm left piecing together slips of memory that leak from madness-filled minds.
And I'm not sure I'm taping this the right way, but I've done my best. I came up with a story I'm not sure I want to say.
This is for them, those people who fell from victim to villain as the cycle repeated. That fall from grace was not at all graceful.
A girl disappeared in the night, swallowed by darkness, and she didn't come back out.
It was the mirrors. Well, the mirrors and the flies.
The mirrors and the flies and the pretty people picking at their calorie-stripped food, trying to lose a few pounds that they didn't really have.
They lost their sanity with it.
Maria saw this with an open mind, letting doubt bounce into her head and right back out. She didn't connect the dots. Maybe because she couldn't see them, maybe because she didn't want to.
Maybe because if she did, she'd find herself trapped by the invisible lines she hadn't drawn soon enough, conclusions she hadn't jumped to when she had the chance.
So she continued to live there in ignorance, raising her children in that city of starved souls, and the toxic environment of reflected personalities and doubting thoughts infected their bloodstreams.
Monochromatic days faded into shadow-laced nights, and the witching hour began.
* * *
The night was not young. It had passed its youth hours ago and now limped along in middle-aged fatigue, waiting to reach old age and pass away with the rising of the sun.
It was twelve a.m. and Maria had locked herself in a barricade against the world, trapped within the confines of her closed eyelids. She was safe there, drowning in sleep, letting the tides of weariness drag her farther from consciousness. Her heartbeat tethered her to life; her mind would wash up on the sandy shores of a dawn-kissed world in the morning.
Outside the enclosure of her sleeping mind, three things were happening.
One memory, buried under five years of passing time, resurfaced. A girl had disappeared into the heart of the woods only for her carcass to be discovered, hanging from strings, soul spilling from an open mouth. Her ribs poked through her shirt, cheekbones through her skin. The flies feasted on the rotten corruption of beauty gone bad.
Two sets of doors opened and closed from within Maria's home. Phantom shadows shifted in the reflection of a mirror behind a door. A bathroom filled with the stench of vomit.
Maria's infant son took three steps back, stumbling in his crib as he stared at the bedroom mirror and screamed.
Because he looked into the reflection and saw the truth that people explained away after years of staring into mirrors. They'd come to accept the false validity of the reflection.
The person looking back at him wasn't himself.
From the master bedroom, Maria stayed safely hidden behind her closed eyelids and slept on.
Her reflection in the mirror reached out, then fell back, blocked by the barricade of sleep.
I just want to be alive and beautiful. Look at me. Open the windows to your soul and let me in.
Wasted words floated through the air, and her eyes stayed shut.
* * *
Let us examine the contents of that night, spill its guts onto the table to see what was eaten and what was left when the witching hour spat up the rest.
It's a collection of memories, of testimonies and murmured recollections from mangled souls and broken minds. They masqueraded as humans within their armours of flesh and blood.
With those words and those memories, I can give you a snapshot of a scene away from Maria's sleeping body. Just a video-clip of a moment.
The night began with an ending.
And with the flies.
The old owner of Maria's apartment is not here anymore, but it is with her that I must begin.
I dug through history and found her, focused my lens on her story before turning back to the sleeping Maria.
Five years ago, she'd disappeared in the night. Her apartment was empty. So was her bed. So was her body.
From the branch of a tree in the nearby woods, a girl wore darkness as a cloak as she spun in endless circles. Her neck was decorated with a rope-thick necklace of death, her body hung up to rest like a pair of old ballet flats.
The wind blew at her lifeless legs, and it seemed almost as if she moved. As if she lived, like she could lift the shackle of death from her body and dance again.
The flies swarmed over her skin in a paparazzi-thick craze, gorging on the leftover remnants of her ruined beauty. They feasted on the evil, tasting the tainted soul that leaked from her fingertips, seeping from her body.
Her phone read 1:13 am.
It would be hours before anyone noticed she was missing, perhaps days before they found her. Her boyfriend would cry over the ivory bone, swatting at the buzzing flies that held what was left of her flesh.
He would sob over his lost beauty, the lovely pair of ballet flats that were forever hung up to rest.
And then he would do his best to forget her, discard the memories that stacked up in the back of his brain. Because she was his girlfriend that died, and that would taint his life forever.
Just like he had tainted hers when he asked her out because he thought she was pretty. Because he thought she was cute. Because he liked the alignment of bones in her face, the arrangement of the flesh in her body, and that's all he cared about.
He'd asked her out because he thought she was "hot".
And she, poor, kind soul that she was, said yes.
That doesn't make the beginning of a love story. It makes the beginning of a tragedy.
She'd tried to fix herself for him, spent hours facing the mirror and changing things so she could sit safely in his pocket. She was his plaything, a graceful soul in ballet shoes and a smile, and she'd give anything to stay that way.
So she looked in the mirror, opening the windows to her soul, and something climbed in and poisoned her thoughts.
You don't deserve this body. Let me have it. I've waited years, and you're almost pretty enough for me. I'll fix this body for you. I'll take it off your hands. I'll make you as beautiful as I used to be.
She didn't say yes. She didn't have to. Her voice was extinguished by the voice in her head, and her boyfriend didn't notice when her body started wasting from the inside out. The flies buzzed close to her skin.
Something in her eyes changed, something in her personality shifted, and her skin lay near her bone without the mattress of flesh to support it.
He didn't notice.
People started telling her she'd changed, and she'd laugh it off with a smile that didn't fit her face.
I've just lost some weight, she said.
Those words still stained her death-ridden lips.
You mean you've lost too much weight, they'd tell her, and she ate that as a compliment. Empty words filled her stomach.
The flies gathered to watch her beauty, flying close to her skin. It was almost as if they could smell the death ready to slip into her emaciated flesh, knew that the soul couldn't kick the body along much longer.
It wasn't even her own body. She was just a pair of borrowed, worn out ballet shoes, and the owner had been tossed away by a reflection in a mirror.
So when her mind stopped wanting to play with Life, with the shoes she'd ruined, she hung the body up to dry and gave it a rest.
The neck was tied in a pretty noose, looped around a tree like a pair of ballet flats that nobody wanted to wear.
Not anymore.
The flies feasted.
And somewhere, back home in the apartment, thin fingers and a desperate face shifted from within a bathroom mirror.
I just wanted to be beautiful.
* * *
I have two more fragments of that night to share; that was only the first. It happened five years before Maria came to be sleeping here. The rest of this story rests upon that foundation.
People would talk about her whereabouts for days, and the one who stumbled upon it-
That's not my story to tell either, and I won't tell it.
I won't speak of her boyfriend. I won't waste words on the police and the tears and screams.
There is a time and place for everything, and the next thing I must speak about came an hour after the ballet-girl spun from beneath a tree.
So let us scrabble among the unraveling memories for another piece of that night and see what we can piece together.
* * *
Maria flipped onto her back, beginning to snore as she hugged her pillow tighter. Her eyes were closed against the darkness, and the gloom sat heavily on her skin.
A room over, her daughter did the same. Her eyes were wide open.
The clock ticked the incessant, monotonous tune of passing time from her bedside table.
When the time read 1:30, the girl slipped from beneath her blankets.
Her door opened, then closed.
She stood in the dormant carcass of her sleeping house, stagnant air moving around her body. The silence glued her mouth shut, kept her padding feet from slamming into the ground with staccato footsteps. She preserved the quiet.
When she reached the bathroom, a searching hand flipped on the light switch and she stepped in.
The mirror there was the breeding place of starved souls, the point of transition from one realm to another.
She didn't know.
So she stood there, staring at her reflection, hearing the words that broadcasted into her mind.
She thought they were her own.
I want to be beautiful. Alive and beautiful and young.
She kept staring at her own face in the mirror as her hands automatically opened the drawer to her mother's makeup.
I want to be pretty. Have a nice body of flesh and blood, maybe a bit thinner. I want to dance again, eyes clear and face bright.
A fly buzzed near her ear, but she ignored it. She stared into the mirror and her reflection stared back, hands ready to experiment on her face.
She'd been doing this for the past year.
It had started when she'd needed to use the restroom during the night and caught sight of her reflection. She began wondering if she was pretty.
She was twelve, and the boys in her class had begun the murmurs and pointing of childhood infatuation.
She looked at herself and after a moment, a desperate, stretched voice whispered, I can fix you.
I can fix your face. Let me in, and I'll make you beautiful. Don't look away. Don't shut me out.
So she kept her eyes wide open, and thoughts of becoming beautiful invaded her head.
She kept coming back, and every time she did, little pieces of her began to change. Her own personality became suppressed by the voice in her head that crawled through the mirror, and it got louder every day.
That night, it was deafening.
Open yourself up to me. I can make you beautiful. Give me your body, and I'll make you pretty. Let me in. I didn't get to live out the rest of my life in mine, so I'll use yours.
She couldn't look away as she painted the makeup on.
The more she opened herself up, the more the thing in the mirror climbed into her head from the windows of her soul.
It was beginning to feel as though she was the one in the mirror and not the one standing in her body-
And for a startling, shocking moment, she saw herself standing in front of herself, like she was the reflection and the girl in front of her was flesh and blood, and she saw-
They didn't look alike.
In that moment, she realized that she'd never seen herself with her own eyes, looked at her face with her own view. It'd always been a reflection.
And that reflection had lied.
It was the little things. It was the eyes, the windows to the soul, because she stared at her body of flesh and blood and everything was the same. Except for the eyes, because she looked through those windows and saw a mournful dancer who'd been granted a second chance in a new home.
That person was not herself.
That night, the last remnants of the ballet-dancer's soul leaped through the mirror and into her body, and the pieces of her personality were shoved into the reflection to make room.
A body could only hold one soul, and her body didn't even hold her own.
That reflection stood in front of her, wearing her makeup-laden face, and it ran a hand over her cheek and said, "I wish I got a better body."
No, she thought, but she couldn't get out.
"I wish I had a better face."
That's mine, she screamed, but she had no words.
"Will he still love me like this?"
That's not you; that's me, she whimpered, but her voice didn't carry.
"I think I need to lose more weight."
You can't-
The reflection turned away, walking to the toilet, and stuck her fingers down her throat like she'd done it a million times before.
Bile poured from her lips.
The flies buzzing around her got louder, attracted to the stench of corrupted beauty.
The reflection-girl wiped her mouth on her sleeve, then glanced into the mirror and smiled. "Thanks for giving me another chance," she whispered, and she left.
In the dark bathroom, a shadow writhed within the mirror.
* * *
If we were to follow that girl just a little further, trace her life for the next few years, we'd see a child gone mad.
She got into the car and drove herself to insanity, purging the food from her stomach, the self-confidence from her mind, until the borrowed body couldn't take it anymore.
A vial of sleeping pills tucked her into bed six feet under.
But that, too, is not a story I will tell. I only have one more snapshot relevant to that night, showing another scene of those three cursed hours.
There is one more memory to share.
The boy would suppress it for eighteen years, lock it into a little black box in his head that turned into a ticking time bomb. A psychiatrist had to crawl through the tunnels of his mind to defuse it before it blew.
It was 1:46 am, and the baby had been asleep. His crib was cloaked in darkness next to Maria's bed, and the room was filled with gloom.
He woke at the sound of retching down the hall.
Or maybe it wasn't the sound of retching.
Maybe it was the feeling of being watched that came ten minutes later.
So he sat up in his crib and glanced at his mother sleeping next to him.
The windows to her soul were closed.
He turned back to the pillow, but a shifting in the glass reflection of the mirror caught his eye.
He froze.
Took one step back, then another, then another, until he hit the back of his crib.
Because eyes that looked suspiciously like his sister's stared back at him, and her words begged him to keep his eyes open, to lend her his body, to let her live and grow and be beautiful again.
He looked into the mirror and screamed.
From behind him, a fly buzzed through the air, then settled on his skin.
* * *
These are the only pictures I have, the only moments I could unearth that pertained to this cursed night.
So, I repeat: It was the mirrors.
The mirrors and the flies and the pretty people picking at their calorie-stripped food. Maria had seen it all and dismissed it, moved into this apartment and this city of starving souls, and they bit at her children until they went mad.
She didn't believe it. She didn't see the shifting shadows in the glass, didn't recognize the never-ending cycle of people who stared into reflections until their bodies were stolen from their souls.
A girl from the mirror had stolen the ballet-girl's body, and that girl took the flesh of Maria's daughter as her own to compensate.
That daughter tried to worm her way into the mind of her own little brother.
The psychiatrist weeded out the problems that the boy had buried in his mind, and his soul remained in his body.
I only have one more thing to say.
Sometimes, Maria lies awake at night. Her son is at college now, her daughter sleeping in the grave.
Her house is empty.
Or that's what she thinks.
But sometimes, she gets up to use the restroom. Sometimes she sits up in her bed and looks into the mirror.
Sometimes, it almost seems as if she can see her daughter's eyes reflected back at her.
And one night, when it all seemed too much, she stood in front of the bathroom counter and just stared.
Let me in, a voice said. I want to be alive again.
So Maria opened the windows of her soul.
A fly crawled over her shoulder.