My wordbound week 23 entry! A scene that prominently features a mirror
She
did not know how long she’d stood in the bathroom, staring at her reflection
above the sink. For a while she had held it in a death grip, mind a whirl of
emotions and doubts and furies, but her grip had lessened as the inner monsoon
dulled to the barest breeze. Hands hung at her sides, loose and weak, all the
energy having drained from her body.
The
face that stared back at her was familiar, but grew more alien with every
passing second. She knew every line, she knew the story to every scar, but with
the faintest flickering of panic she began to question whether she did or not.
Memory was a fleeting thing, and though she was not inclined to the
philosophical – or, in all honesty, many esoteric and not concrete pursuits –
she pondered this idea. How perhaps memories could be shuttled from one brain
to another, with the right synapse stimulus or the right brain rearranging. Not
for the first time that evening, a chill ran up her spine, and though a small
part of her wished to wrap her arms around herself in a reassuring embrace, she
could not gather up the will to do it.
She
looked at the dark hazel of her irises, calling up a memory of how a boy in
high school had complimented the streaks of green one could see if they got
close enough. Her vision drifted to a scar that cut through her eyebrow,
leaving an awkward part, one she had gained in a fight defending a fellow
classmate; a class ring right to the face. She’d been proud of it. Next, her
hair. Long and flowing, she could hear the distant imprint of her mother’s
voice, cooing over how beautiful it was. How it would be a shame for it to be
cut; a tragedy of a beautiful thing lost to the world.
Wrong.
All wrong. It wasn’t hers, it had never been hers. Someone else’s memories,
someone who bore her face and her name but had died long, long before. She was
impersonating a corpse, a zombie infiltrating the living and she hadn’t even
known it. No one seemed to realize it. Not this body’s family, nor her friends.
She slipped into the role effortlessly, as if nothing had changed, even if
everything had.
Her
fingers flexed at her sides, suddenly restless and desiring to move. She knew
that she – no, this woman – kept a pair of scissors in the medicine cabinet
behind the mirror, to cut away uneven strands that didn’t require a full trip
to a hairdresser. Shaking herself out of her daze, forcing herself into the
present, she opened the cabinet, and pushed aside bandages and pain killers
(ones she never needed, but kept around just in case) to find the scissors. The
dull panic that had controlled her the past few hours was ebbing away, giving
to a sort of confused fury that burned through her like a virus.
She
shut the cabinet to be confronted with her reflection once more. Her chest
heaved and her face distorted into a snarl, as she reached up to wind her
fingers through her thick brown hair. In the back of her mind she could hear a
voice, her – no, not hers, this body’s – mother’s, complementing the pale shade
of brown that pushed it towards blond. How her hair was her greatest asset, a
nice accent to her muscular body. She sneered further, nose crinkling and eyebrows
furrowing and her teeth baring to rip out the throat of an unseen enemy.
Without
hesitation she raised the scissors to her hair, pulling it taunt enough to
strain at her skull. She took a deep breath, one that hissed between her
clenched teeth, and snipped. She sawed through the thick bundle, feeling the
weight fall away and strands falling to tickle the back of her neck. The cuts
were amateur, ragged and everything was at an angle but she didn’t care; she
just needed to do something for herself. To set herself apart. To distance
herself from her reflection, from a dead woman whose name and face and memories
she bore.
She
slowed, took a few deep breaths that shook in her chest to calm herself, and
proceeded to even the cut as best she could. Then, she stared at her reflection.
The face was still the same, bore the same lines and scars and stories, but her
hair was different. It sat at an awkward bob that reached just past her chin,
halfway too her shoulders, with the foot of now lost hair sitting in a sad pile
at her feet. She wanted – no, needed – it shorter, but supposed that could
wait. She would redefine herself, form a new identity from the one handed to
her, and try to do her reflection proud.
But
at that time, she supposed all that was left to be done was to clean up the
mess she’d made.
