There was a mirror in the room. It was right across from the door, cracked like a break in the world. The border around the glass was a rusting yellow, careful swirls and soft circles slowly fading away.
It was a constant reminder to her.
Everytime she resided to the table, every time she glanced up or around. The first thing she saw when she stepped into the dusty quarters, unused, the breath of some forgotten chime.
She would shy away from it.
Quickly peek down, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair that was never long enough. Press her forearms into her eyes until it hurt and she saw red.
She didn’t want to remember.
The mirrors were always there, a malicious glint that flashed in light. Clear and smooth, a glimpse into the subterfuge.
It had smirked at her behind her parents’ backs, when their fists had been raised toward the other, and their screams had rang through her ears like permanent spikes.
It had winked at her when she was trapped, pushed against the shards with a blur of watercolor that painted, swallowed, her vision. She had not wanted to see it, the weakness, the sneer, but it had shown it to her anyways.
It had blinked at her when she struck her sister with a whip of words, fury burning like a ball of fire, concentrated and coiled, scorching her emotions like a sickness. A disease that drove everything away, an invisible hurricane resulting in wasteland.
And it was always there. Presenting her with reflections of patheticness and innocent ignorance, uncovering moments of submission, exposing the raw madness that reigned and basked in the thunder.
She had once thrown her mother’s necklace at the mirror across the door in a fit of uncontrollable desperation. The diamonds had glittered at her menacingly before slipping down towards oblivion.
Her mother had screamed herself hoarse. Her father was never there.
She wished she had disappeared with him. (Perhaps his new home was better. Perhaps it didn’t have so many mirrors. Or, at least, not the mirrors she knew. Not the ones that bulged with scatters of memories.)
Her sister’s room was across from it. The mirror would always beckon her forward, an illusion of forgiveness. She would look away from the faux and the real, snatch up the stock of writhing shadows that crept around her, bring it close to her chest, and walk out.
The mirrors displayed everything she did not wish to acknowledge.
Her reflection--what would she see? Her inner most yearnings, her true acts, the thoughts that pulsed behind flesh and bone. Would it mar her appearance? Creep inside her veins and shriek outward?
Or would the shallow of a shell balance like a mindless puppet? Walk with chapped and dry lips, do with no presence. Colorless in a box of crayons.
And so she would turn away from the mirror, too afraid to face the truth.
Too pusillanimous to jump on the moving train.
Too foolish to accept the things that revealed.