I can see my own lips in the mirror-screen. They stay impeccably still. My chest heaves rhythmically with the weight of my breath. My lungs ache with the toxins I pump them with. My diaphragm is folded over my stomach like a crepe. My eyes feel marble hard, and my brain knocks onto the sides of my skull with a drunken dizziness.
I look at my mirror-screen mouth. At my chin. There’s blood on my teeth from my chewed lip, and freckles hanging around my neck like it’s a crowded party that just got boring.
I look at the mirror-screen me. Mesmerized.
The mirror-screen wavers, fractured, like a glitch. Only mirror-screens cannot glitch. Mirror-screens don’t do anything much but reflect the outside of people.
My mirror-screen, apparently, does glitch. My mirror-screen jolts and cracks. My mirror-screen whines, high pitched and LOUD too LOUD. Oh My Heart Too Loud My Heart My Head My – Spiralling Hurts Too Hurts Loud LOUD –
I can’t slow don’t my breathing or my panic. It swells higher even as the squeal is cut dead as your great uncle Norman. RIP. Even as the mirror-screen stop shacking stops breaking, just Stops. My head feels like a thousand hammers are trying to hatch from it. My hands are still clutched tight to my ears.
Finally, my eyes peel wide.
And I look at me.
My hair is burnt, dull and dry, clinging to me and trailing over my face like the brown fronds of a deceased plant. My eyes are like pools of milk, and my eyebrows are thin and curve all the way around my sickly pale cheeks. My skin looks deathly smooth, like white porcelain, but when I reach up to brush my face, the texture is rough as sandpaper.
And my mouth is dark as a black hole, waxy and dripping, ready to drown, consume, devour.
I look at me. Yeah, that seems about right.
And I take my gaze from that mirror-screen and never look at me again.