Flash Fiction: Mirrorless

By: Ceri Savage

CW: This fictional story depicts extreme food restriction and weight loss.

I told you I wanted to live mirrorlessly.

It began with the gold-leaf one, leaning against the bedroom wall, smug, arms crossed, asking why I had raccoon eyes in the morning when all I did was sleep. Telling me my face was fuller than yesterday, that I’d inherited Mum’s nasolabial folds without earning them.

The morning you left, I smashed it. Jabbed my desk chair into the top-right. Its glass splintered, then cracked with each blow, then shattered. I had to prise up shards between the floorboards with bleeding fingers.

The bathroom mirror left a space on the wall, a smooth, white surface where I hung a copy of that Van Gogh, the skeleton smoking a cigarette.

I accepted my seven—no, fourteen—years of bad luck graciously. I’d made my choice.

It was no fun in the city: shop windows, train poles, car bonnets, security-camera screens. There was the navy-blue stained glass of the front door distorting me like a kaleidoscope. The tinted windows of the magistrates court made me look slim side-on but that wasn’t the point. And the coffee machine at work—stainless steel, framing my face neatly enough but highlighting the eczema scar on my nose. I snapped the water dispenser early one morning. It took three gleeful weeks for them to order another, out of service over its gloss. And, wouldn’t you know, some hooligan threw a brick through our front door. Even local government buildings were being vandalised.

I stopped seeing friends. They kept capturing memories I refused to look at. You know, a camera is just light refracted, a mirror flipping. And sometimes I saw my reflection in their eyes, our pupils creating an endless corridor like facing mirrors in a dressing room.

I spent my savings on a house—well, cabin, more of a shed really—in the middle of the woods where nobody wanted to live. I removed the windows and nailed up wooden slats. The whole place was a brilliant, un-shiny brown.

But escape wasn’t the only answer. Even the monster saw himself in Lake Geneva. I started avoiding water. On my walks I walked away from the gushing of the nearby river. I still drank water, of course, though I closed my eyes when I did, just in case. I hired a man with a van to bring me supplies once a week. He’d knock once, dump the bag, I’d wait an hour or so, then go and collect it. I couldn’t take the risk.

Obviously I didn’t own spoons or knives or forks (just chopsticks) or porcelain, but I did keep some black matte pots and pans, metal handles snapped off. Sometimes I fried meat from a deer that I’d shot with a bow and arrow—a knife has a blade and a gun has a barrel. Most I killed while they ran. But one stilled in the forest, long grass hanging from its lips, watching me, deciding whether to be scared. Argh, that fear freezing you to your bones.

I stopped eating meat.

One day, opening a cardboard packet of rice, the bag splintered and I recognised—I’m not sure, exactly, but something about the chaos as it scattered, followed by the helpless way it lay strewn on the kitchen floor. Something about its reach—I’d find a lost grain in the corner of some cupboard months later. I stopped eating rice. I stopped eating altogether, the day I absentmindedly buffed an apple on my jumper and its surface gleamed.

Soon I felt my ribs protruding, hip bones, clavicle sharpening. I could see them from above, jutting; who knew how they looked from the side, the back. I craved a mirror then—I’ll be honest—to admire my own wilting. But I resisted, focused instead on tearing up worn sections of floorboard that had become a bit too polished for my liking,

When the sound of a storm startled my eyes open one night as I drank, I saw some swirly, ugly thing that was always moving yet confined to the bottle, jaw slack like it was screaming. I stopped drinking water.

With slow, aching movements, I patched up every breach in the walls, each tiny hole in the roof. Until the cabin was pitch-black. There was something too familiar in the light splintering through the gaps, its prismatic state.

But my eyes adjusted to the dark. Shapes still formed. The hatstand might’ve looked like me in another life, one in which I wasn’t hunched in hunger.

I lay down and closed my eyes, lips splitting, swollen belly rising and falling too fast. I felt myself sink into the mattress, until the lines between skin and cotton met and continued down the bedpost, joined with furniture outlines, door frames, to less-straight lines outside, wobbly trunks and chewed petals and changing waves in the river.

I closed my eyes for so long there was nothing to keep them closed or open except for a faint fluttering. Even that ended, once my eyes stayed open.

I’ve done it, I rejoiced. I told you I’d live mirrorlessly! I waited for you to return, now that there was nothing left not to love.

But then again,

there was something so familiar in that darkness.

***

Ceri Savage (she/her) is a Berlin-based British writer with a BA in English Literature from the University of Exeter. Her writing is published in The FU Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and ASP Literary Journal. She is the founder of Savage Edits, an editing business that provides self-publishing services to indie authors. Follow her @cerisavagewrite and check out her website.