It's not her.
She touches the smooth oval piece, light contact with her index finger. She jerks back. It's not cold but it's not hot either. It's warm. A nice, comforting sort of warmth...like snuggling up under blankets when the night is chilly...like a hug when your heart feels cold...
It creeps her out.
She stares at it again and the girl on the other side looks back at her with a sincere smile. She moves from left to right, right to left, back and front, jerky quick movements meant to test this weird object. The image moves along with her but her actions are smooth, graceful and you can tell
She wants to be that girl.
She stretches her fingers out towards the image again, making swirling patterns on the smooth surface but making sure her long nails don't leave a scratch. She wants to be that girl. She wants it so much.
But it's a hopeless dream.
The girl's trapped, trapped within that other world, the world so far away from her reach. She can see her, she can see her smiling, she can see her whole...but she can't pull her back. That young, happy, little girl...Innocent, grinning, full of life....She's not gone. No. But she's never going to return either. The glass isn't a cage - oh how she wished the child was trapped within such a fragile thing - the glass is just to remind her of what had been and how all that had been lost. It was to remind her, it was to hurt her, it was to make her long for the impossible just to realise that it was never going to happen, that it was just that, absolutely impossible.
She lifts the mirror off the grass.
And as much as it looked so close...her bony fingers stroke the silvery glass once again....she'll never reach it. Because the girl's trapped and even if she tries, they'll grab her and wrench her back. Jagged cuts on her forehead and purple bruises splattered over her thin legs...They'll pull her back. She knows that. She knows she'll never reach it.
Crack.
Blood stains don't matter when your shirt's already crimson and when your heart had long been punctured, blood trickling out like a stream in hell. She looks at her hands and wipes the liquid off by rubbing her palms against her tattered jeans. The glass is in pieces and she bends forward, looking for her reflection. It's a distorted image, broken and messed up, spots of blood decorating the edges.
Now that, that's her.
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Writing prompts for above given by AJ, Cheeze, Pigeon & Storm. Much thanks :D (Innocence, reflection, disintegrated and mirror)
Meant to review this a few days ago but some stuff came up. Sorry 'bout the delay.
ReplyDelete'Tis pretty good. It seems like she has a love/hate relationship with the mirror/girl in the mirror, because she wants to be her, but at the same time, as you find out later, she can't, and that means that she has a certain hatred, and perhaps jealousy and these emotions are really felt by the descriptions, plus the fact that you gain more information as the
so you get a better picture of what's going on. And the last bit's pretty cool too, about how she sees herself as broken, and that's her true reflection, because that's how she sees herself. And that brokeness means that physical pain doesn't mean anything to her.
...I would go on about how using mirrors is a really good technique because it's about perception and stuff because then I'll start rambling about Mirror by Sylvia Plath (thanks to my English Lit education) and you don't really want to hear about that and oh look I've started ramling aready. Ahem.
Eh. The only phrase I didn't really like was the part about "like a stream in Hell". I assume you mean that streams in Hell flow with blood. I don't really know why, but it sounded kinda contrived and I couldn't really picture it. That's probably only me though.
Oh, one slightly random question: Why is there a mirror on the grass? That was just a little random. Unless it's a metaphor for something that I haven't figured out. Or something like that.
Anyways, I liked this piece. I think it's one of my favourite ones of your pieces. Because you do write a lot of angsty romance - they're not bad, but those sorts of pieces aren't really my favourite stuff to read about.Plus I like the overall tone of hopelessness and despair and the fact that I am mentioned. Awesome. :)
You're so good at keeping this up! Unlike me, who can't make a writing blog (I failed.) ...
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