Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:12:06 +0000
From: Mister Fish <fishnifty@googlemail.com>
Subject: Narcissa In The Glass

WARNING:
This a work of fiction.  This story depicts sexual
situations that include fictional minors.  It may be illegal
for you to read this.


DISCLAIMER:
This is written in British English.  This is a work of
original fiction.  Any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is coincidental.


###

NARCISSA IN THE GLASS
By Mister Fish

###

Momma always said the Tsar gave Gramma the mirror, which
Gramma brought it back with her from the Old Country
disguised as one wall of her caravan.  I never believed the
part about the Tsar, but I could believe the bit about the
wall.  The mirror was, is, huge, no matter how I grow, wider
than my bed, frame grazing the ceiling and floor.  It's
edges are black and silver, old metal, twisting and curling
in long sprawling patterns so entwined every path I trace
along them is eventually lost.  The glass is a little hazy,
a little scratched in places, but mostly as clear as it ever
was, clean and cold and deep.

I admire myself in it now, the woman I have become.  Gramma
was Roma, and Momma too, but my father was an island boy,
turned black by the South Pacific sun, and the hand I press
to the glass is dark olive and light caramel in perfect
blend.  I did this so often as a child, knowing that if I
could just reach out a little further my reflection would be
able to pull me in to the magical world beyond, that I can
see myself as I was, breast high, hip high, knee high, all
my past selves pressing back.  Like my father, I grew tall
and strong; like my mother, I grew lithe and graceful.  Like
both, my hair is dark and curly, falling now in masses over
my shoulders, though my younger selves in the mirror wear it
all in sorts of fashions, put up and pulled down, swept
forward and back, grown almost to my waist and cut above my
ears.

The mirror has seen my whole life.  It will see my future
too, though not see my death, as it did not see my mother's,
or my grandmother's; the mirror was covered by a big
dustsheet on those days.

"It should see only joy," Gramma told me, between her naps
which grew ever longer from day to day.  "Mirrors remember,
little light of mine.  They keep every image, locked safely
inside, so you should make sure they only see good things.
If you look long enough and deep enough, you can see them in
there."

I was maybe four at the time, with my page-boy cut and my
little pink sundress, sat on Gramma's lap on the foot of the
bed, her hand on my leg, just above the knee. (I remember
this as if it is happening now, the smell of face powder
around me, but Gramma's face is a blur I fear I have
constructed more from old photographs than actual
recollection.)  Her thumb rubbed, softly, back and forth,
back and forth, and lulled, almost hypnotised, I stared for
a while into the shiny depths, and the little mirror girl
stared right back, and perhaps we would still be there now
if a bird hadn't gone squawking by the window, bringing us
back to ourselves.

"I can only see me, Gramma," I complained.

She laughed a little and said, "you're a good thing," and
tickled me until I was giggling and squealing.

Afterwards, we slept, curled up together under the mirrors
solemn gaze.  The next day, Poppa John and Momma covered it.
Gramma left us soon after, and I made Momma leave the sheet
up until I could bear to look at the mirror again without
crying.

"The tears in the mirror are tears of joy," Momma tells me.

I am sixteen and in my first proper dance dress, examining
myself first this way and that in the glass.  It is the same
pink as my sundress, not brash, but deep and rich.  My hair
is pulled up into a coiled braid, pinned through with slim
ivory needles.  I have curves now, and my hands find them,
smooth down them, feeling the dress out.  Momma is in the
mirror, smiling at me through her tears.

"All grown up," she says.

My bra squeezes my breasts together, pushes them up.  My
dress accentuates my hips.  I feel like a child playing
dress up and think, for a moment, that I can see myself in
the glass, ten years old and tottering in my mother's high
heels.

"Never all grown up, Momma," I tell her.  "I'll always be
your little baby."

She laughs at that.  "Always is a very long time; I shall
settle for today.  And maybe tomorrow."

She laughed at that, I remind myself.  Tenses have become
confused.  Momma is gone, now.  I am alone, in this room
that was hers, that was Gramma's, that was mine as often as
it was not.  In the mirror, I am wearing my pink sundress,
my pink dance dress, my pink camisole and blue jeans, my
blue blazer and charcoal grey school skirt, my charcoal
pants suit and trying to decide on these black sandals or
those black heels.  I am wearing white chiffon.  I am
wearing red lace panties and a strapless bra.  I am wearing
water and a pink fluffy towel, and Gramma is rubbing my
hair, or Momma is rubbing my back, or I am drying my
breasts, feeling the soft, rough towel run against my
nipples.  I am older, taller, shorter, younger.  I totter
past in diapers, knee high to a grasshopper, and then in
nothing, Momma following in laughter.

I look away, look up, blink my eyes.  I know if I cry I will
have to leave the room.  The mirror does not get to keep my
tears of sorrow, no more than it already has.  I lean
forward, press my forehead to the cool glass that steams and
clears between my breaths.  Blindly, I touch the nearest
edge, fingers searching, following coils of metal until they
dip away.  It is old, familiar.  I breathe slowly, close my
eyes and turn my head, pressing my ear to the glass.

There is a cry, running backwards into silence.  It's me.
My first.  The mirror has seen my life.  It has seen my
birth.

It was storm season when I was born.  Da had gone to help
mend fences levelled by one, only to get trapped by the
next, leaving ripe Momma and old Gramma home alone with no
phones.

"So of course," Momma tells me and Poppa John -- I am twelve
and we are all curled up together in my bed and I have a hot
water bottle pressed between my legs as I am, apparently, a
woman now, blood and all.  "Of course," Momma says, smiling,
"that's when my water breaks."

I can hear my heart beating in the ear I have pressed to the
glass.  Perhaps it is hers, beating around me in the womb.
With my eyes open or closed, I can see her, though I know
this is impossible, that I can have no real memory of this.
Still, I see her, naked on the bed, belly round and
trembling and shiny with sweat.  I can hear her gasp and
pant as her body contracts and expands, as her cervix
dilates and I am inexorably pushed down into her vagina--

--for a moment, I am ten, and Lucy is explaining this to me,
the two of us side-by-side in front of the mirror--

--pushed down, and out.  She forces her legs wider.  The
mirror sees her lips, her labia spread, crowning me (I am
born face down and hair first).  Momma grits and cries and
pushes.  I turn, corkscrew in her, Gramma's hands on me.
Another push and my shoulders breach the birth canal.  In a
rush of blood and mucus I slide fully out into the world.  I
am small and red and tiny in Gramma's hands.  Momma pants,
laughs, cries.  Gramma smacks me, and I take a startled
breath and cry too.

This cry, the mirror keeps, returns to me.  But my baby
outrage is nothing to mother's joy, so I do not begrudge it.

"Magic is made more glorious by the sorrow it encompasses,"
I hear Kelsi say, sixteen, seventeen years after this.  She
has a pentagram tattooed on her hip, just under my fingers.
Hers trail against my stomach and she says, "tell me."

I tell that my mother held me, still naked on the bed.  That
there was blood on the sheets (I am twelve and I wake,
crying, and my fingers come away from between my legs wet
and coppery) and Momma pressed me to her breast until I
learned to tease milk from the nipple, while Gramma washed
between her thighs.

(A year after this, she has the date of my birth tattooed
where Gramma's fingers rub now; Da is dead, and Momma has
not yet met Poppa John, and we are alone in the world, us
three women, and the mirror; of course the mirror.)

Sated, I sleep against Momma's breast, calmed by the beating
of her heart and by Gramma softly singing a song whose tune
I feel now reverberating in the glass.  Forgetting the
words, I hum, and Momma joins in, and later, Lucy, and
Kelsi, and Sarah laughs and sings it when we are both thirty
and drunk and I tell her she is beautiful and she just
laughs some more and sways, beer bottle in hand, beads
jangling, breasts marking out the time.

It's now, though, and I push myself away from the mirror
once more.  It's afternoon.  Warm sun slips through the net
curtains.  Dust motes dance over the bed.  I sit on it, then
fall back, stretching out.  The ceiling could do with a coat
of paint, I think, and laugh.  It's warm and cosy.  The
house makes soft noises around me, empty noises.  I am all
alone.  Just me and my forty years of mirror, Momma's sixty
five, Gramma's ninety (it belongs to them even when they are
gone, as it will belong to me when I am).  The bed (queen
sized of course, ha ha) is, I think, as old as the mirror;
the frame at least, the mattress replaced once a decade, the
blankets once a month, the sheets once a week or as needed.
Everything else has changed.

The room is an odd shape, a rectangle with its top two
corners cut off, windows set in these new walls and between
them.  Window seats run all along beneath them, running from
bed around to mirror.  Bed and mirror face each other, of
course, and facing the mirror I can see my desk to its left
and my right, nestled in the corner, and the bookcase next
it, following the wall until it is terminated by the
necessity of the door.  Everything is done out in reds and
browns and natural woods, save the mirror.  It should look
out of place--

("Good lord," Sarah says on first seeing it, "it's
monstrous" and then, before I can leap to the defence,
breathes out, "I love it.  It's perfect.  My god, have you
ever seen anything so perfect?" and I, looking at her, say
nothing.)

--but fits, somehow.  Perhaps only because it is there in
all my yesterdays, and today, and maybe tomorrow.

I wriggle back until I am fully on the bed, head nestled
against the huge pile of pillows and cushions.  I never
cared for stuffed animals as a child, or now, but I like the
pillows, big ones and small, plump ones and heavy ones, to
rest on, or snuggle with, to make a fort or fight, to press
against my mouth to smother giggles and gasps, to support my
back and raise my hips so I can see the mirror and the
mirror can see me.

The mirror sees me, and I see myself.

I am ten and wearing a white floral print dress and Lucy is
wearing dungarees and a pink top (it may not be pink; memory
and the mirror distort colours) and we are bare foot and
hand in hand and bouncing on the bed, giggling as girls do
(as boys do, perhaps, though I had no interest then, nor
much after, save for some little curiosity).

"Boys have a penis," Lucy says, and I repeat the word.  "It
sticks out," she explains.

(I am maybe two and Momma is showing me how to clean myself
after I pee, wiping always front to back and I giggle and
squirm.)

Lucy is my best-friend-forever.  Her mother is a nurse.  Her
hair is blonde and falls in waves to the middle of her back.
Mine, at ten, bushes around my shoulders and I think it
looks good (it doesn't) and complain every time Momma tries
to cut it.  Lucy made herself a name in architecture and
then gave it up to be a very happy housewife with two
ridiculously adorable children.  No, I remind myself.  She
is ten.  We are both ten.  She is huffing and saying, "I'll
show you."

She undoes the buttons on her dungarees and works them off,
still wearing her baby T and her white panties and then,
while I watch, oddly dry mouthed, something moving in my
belly (or perhaps I am only, later, imagining this response,
a reflection of future - past - present - something) and
Lucy's white panties are over her knees and being kicked off
her feet.

"This is my pubis," she said, she says, and I, now, shuffle
back against the pillows, lift my head to watch us, then, in
the mirror as the mirror, then, watches us.

Lucy's legs are spread.  There's the barest down between
them.  I can feel it when she brings my hand to her, to make
me touch.

"These are my labia," she explains, matter-of-fact, as her
mother must have told her.  I touch them, puffy and warm and
spreading under my fingers, parting to let me inside.

I learn the words, with my mouth and with my fingers.
Vulva.  Labia.  Clitoris.  Vagina.  Hymen.  Repeated until I
have them down, and then Lucy laughs and pushes me down on
the bed, pushes up my pretty floral dress, wriggles her
fingers under my panties (yellow, I remember, I see).

"When we're all grown up," Lucy says, and I look over her
shoulder and see my skin flush in the mirror (or is it
Kelsi?  Sarah?  Momma, even, or Gramma?) as Lucy explores,
"when we have a husband, he'll put a seed in here, and it'll
grow into a baby."

"How?" I ask, amazed at this, probably, or at her fingers,
touching where only I have (and Momma, and Gramma, because
baby needs to be clean -- "oh, soap stings momma!" -- "there
you go, little light").

"Boy's stick out, girls go in," says Lucy.  "I guess we go
together."

I pull a face.  After a while we get bored of this game, and
go outside for skipping ropes and ice-cream and, later,
after Momma has tucked me in and kissed me goodnight, I
think about all of this and push my pyjama bottoms down and
do the lessons all over again, whispering them to the mirror
and the moonlight.  Vulva.  Labia (majora and minora).
Clitoris (and hood).  A nice little warmth in my belly, and
I rub a little harder, and it's nice, it's good, then
itching in a way that's new and weird and -- something.
Like maybe it's something I shouldn't be doing ("when we're
all grown up," mirror-Lucy says) so I stop and sleep and
pretend I've forgotten all about until I almost do.

(The mirror remembers.  The mirror remembers everything.)

"I used to sit under the taps when I was running myself a
bath," Kelsi says, six months after the dance, and my ten
year old mirror self looks intrigued, curls into me at
seventeen -- I have a mad month and go uber-butch and Kelsi
laughs and puts bright gold streaks in my far, far too short
hair.  "All those years you missed!"

Not entirely, I think, remembering sneaking touches,
remembering a little too long with the wash cloth, a
different kind of wetness.

In the mirror, I am twelve and wake from rabid dreams to low
belly cramps and sticky slickness on my thighs, spots on the
sheets, and cry, loud enough to bring Momma running.  Poppa
John yawns and slow blinks in the doorway, rubs at his
beard--

--I'm eight and he's just John, not yet Poppa, teasing,
rubbing me with it so I'll shriek and giggle--

--and goes and gets a hot water bottle and brings it to me
("my sister always said it helped") and we, all three, crowd
into the bed together, me between them, until I sleep, and a
few months after this, it's Lucy in the bed with me, and
she's saying,

"I find frigging myself makes the cramps hurt less,"

and we're playing Doctor again, though this time we only
touch ourselves, lying side-by-side in the bed, watching
each other in the mirror, all contrasts, her light, me dark,
her assured, me fumbling, watching her skin flush, listening
to her breath catch, strain.  I trace my labia ("cunt lips",
Kelsi insists, she likes the word, informs me she has
appropriated it from a misogynistic patriarchy for her own
varied use -- "plus it's just fun to say, come on: cunt!
Cunt! Cunt!"), circle my clitoris, slide fingers inside,
just a little ("your hymen is for your husband," ten year
old Lucy tells me seriously, and twelve year old Lucy has
already broken hers, though I won't learn this until we're
both proper teenagers).

Remembering this, watching it in memory, in mirror, I start
to unbutton my top with lazy, almost unintentional fingers.
My nails are cut, short as they'll go, and Sarah is saying
"that's what made me think" and I'm shaking my head, heat in
my cheeks, and saying, "its just to stop me biting them", a
habit I picked up in school, somehow, which makes me think
about my school uniform again, and Lucy in it, and out of
it.

We're twelve and, in the mirror, I see her lips form the
words "Did you?" and I have no idea what she means, but I
nod my head anyway, not trusting my voice, and she sighs
happily and says, "Isn't that the best?" so I just nod
again.  When her fingers stop, mine do too.  She has much
more hair than me, spreading out in a golden v, where mine
just bush a little, only a touch darker than my skin.  I
feel guilty, and I don't know why.  Eventually we sleep, and
wake, and play, in our clothes and outside where Momma
watches and hangs out the laundry.

It's now and I unbutton my jeans.

It's then and my breasts are budding (and full and pert,
beginning to hang, I'm still flat, all at once) and I
examine them in the mirror, these little chest bumps,
pushing them flat, squeezing them out, rubbing them in
circles.  I like the way my nipples feel against the heat of
my palms, the way they thicken and rise.  I like the way
they feel against the cool of the glass, when I press
against the mirror, making pouting, kissing faces at my
reflection, which puckers right back so we both leave wet
lip smears.  Momma has nice breasts, I think, and Gramma
did, once, and I want mine to fill my palms too, and rubbing
encourages growth, maybe.  I grind against the mirror, but
it's not enough, so I go back to hands, and that's much
better, but it's still not enough.

I follow the heat down from my breasts, over the curve of my
belly, fingers dipping between my legs, rising again,
finding the right place to grip.  Eyes fluttering open and
closed like shutters, and I'm watching myself in the mirror,
one hand all over my vulva ("cunt"), one hand working my
almost-breasts ("nips and tits," Kelsi again) and it starts
to feel good, then real good, and I stumble forward again,
to lean my forehead against the cool of the mirror, forcing
myself to breathe, deep, squeezing and rubbing, warm-wet
between my legs, liquid heat in my belly and breasts and
legs and head and everywhere, rising in pulsing waves, I'm
panting and rubbing and something breaks, I think something
breaks, releases, everything is rushing, heat and light and
my legs go and I slide, panting, gasping, down the mirror to
puddle on the floor.

That one you can keep, I tell the mirror.  That's a good
one.  Yeah.  That's a real good one.

So I think I know what Lucy meant, and I do, but it turns
out she didn't, not really, and we're thirteen and this time
I'm the teacher, curling my fingers through her pubes and
down and in ("have you had--?" I ask, and she blushes, says,
"bike accident") and around, tug at her nipples with my
fingers and teeth (no spare hand), and squeeze and massage
and rub and coax and entice and bring her up to the edge and
push her over it.

Afterwards she looks at me and smiles and says, "do you
think we'll get boyfriends soon?" and something breaks
again, except this is weird and sharp and slimy and
unpleasant and I just shrug and offer to go again.

My mood, my memory, my mirror is all over the place.  I pull
my top off, push my jeans down and kick them away.  Socks,
panties and bra, all simple white, though my panties have
darkened where they're pulled up against me.  They're wet
against my fingers.  I can feel my pulse through the thin
fabric.  I try to think of Lucy, or Kelsi, or Sarah, but the
mirror sees everything, even the gaps between them.  I bump
against them as I would the glass.  Everything is entwined,
curled together like the mirror frames, rising for a moment
in patterns and then vanishing under each other until
everything seems to begin and end at once.

I find a line, make myself trace it with my eyes.  I find a
memory.  The mirror traces it.  My reflection jumps, shifts.

And so I'm fourteen and Russel is at the desk with me,
working on some school project, and I turn and he turns and
he leans in and I pull back and we both pretend nothing
happened.  I'm still fourteen and Lucy's laughing about
this, and she turns fifteen first and makes us play spin the
bottle and it lands on Amanda, so I go to kiss her, but Lucy
makes me spin the bottle again ("I don't mind," Amanda says,
and Rolf laughs and says "Yeah!" and Lucy just huffs and
says, "the rule is boy and girl" and even though I know
this, it still hurts to hear, somehow, and somewhere at the
back of my head, where I am watching myself as if in a
reflection, I am starting to know why) and it lands on
Derrick and we kiss.  Lips closed.  A quick peck.

Derrick is a 'hottie'.  Lucy looks at me like I've
disappointed her.  I sink back, ashamed.

"You're supposed to open your mouth," she says.  "Don't you
even know how to kiss?"

(Lucy always has to explain things to me, even when I
already know; always takes it badly when I explain things to
her.  By the time I think to wonder if this is because of
the colour of my skin, the colour of hers, we've long since
grown apart.  It's a liberal age.  The skinheads grow their
hair long on the outside.)

Later, I kiss Rupert Green.  It's nice enough, I suppose.
It's like -- It's sorta like kissing Gramma, only not
really, because he's a boy.  I like him because I make him
nervous, and he stutters and blushes and keeps his hands to
himself, so I offer to go out with him, just so I can have a
boyfriend before Lucy does.  We go to the movies a few
times, and I let him hold my hand, and we even kiss a couple
more times, and it's--

"It's nice," I say when he asks if I like kissing him.

"Just nice?" He asks.

I shrug, then and now, shoulders shifting against the
pillows.

The next day, I catch him kissing Teresa behind the bike
shed.  They're really going at it, hot and heavy, his
fingers curled in the dark waves of her hair. When they come
up for air, pulling back a little, I realise her tongue was
in his mouth and fire curls in my belly.  Teresa sees me
first, arches a perfect eyebrow

(I try this for hours in front of the mirror and never
manage it, to my eternal annoyance)

and Rupert looks vaguely guilty.  I look at Teresa's lips.
They're wet and a little -- I don't know the word.  Puffy,
perhaps.  Kiss-bruised.  I'm sure I look like an idiot, but
I can't think of anything to say, so I just shrug a little.

"He's all yours," I tell her.

"I wasn't asking permission," Teresa says, but she's like
that with everyone so I don't take it personally and I still
let her crib off me in Maths (I'm second in the class
because of stupid Daniel who has a maths teacher for a mum,
which is just cheating) and try not to let on that I went
home and touched myself thinking about her sharp pink tongue
and trying to pretend I was thinking about Rupert.

I'm pretty enough, so I'm popular, of a sort (this holds
true at any age, as timeless as Gramma's mirror, as Momma's,
as mine) and so I'm sweet sixteen and it's the first proper
real school dance (all those imported American TV shows make
me want to call it a prom, though it isn't, not really) and
Lucy insists we double date, because Lucy is friends with
popular girls, so we must still be best-friends-forever, so,
really, she has every right to insist

--"sixteen year old girl logic," Kelsi says, "is like
nothing else on Earth" and I don't know if she's agreeing
with my rant about Lucy or mocking me too--

and Daniel gives me a long, slow look and says, "sure; pick
you up at six?"

I watch myself trying on dresses in the mirror like I wanted
to do in the store but Momma insisted you could only tell in
your own light, and I reach the pink and it's perfect, even
when it makes Momma cry.  I watch myself in the mirror,
sixteen, my hands tracing my body through the sheer drape of
fabric.  This is a good moment.  I try to hold it steady,
touching myself now as I touched myself then.  But my
breasts are fuller, hang lower, my hips wider, my hands
creased by age.  My present-future smiles wryly at me in the
glass.  My past smiles shyly.  My mother cries.

I try to skip forward, get caught.  We're -- there are
curtains hanging down, and lights, but it's still dark
somehow.  Behind the stage.  There's music.  Daniel's hands
are on me.  His suit is askew, his tie undone and hanging
around his neck.  He's smart, not unattractive.  A tall,
dark stranger.  He kisses me.  It's too hard, too hot, too
heavy.  There's something on his breath, a foul taste on his
tongue.  When I pull away, he follows, pushing me back
against the wall.  I try to get away -- no, I try to think
of Teresa's tongue again.  His is too thick, too blunt, too
wet.

"Please," I say, then and now, whispering to the mirror, to
the audience of memory.

He tugs at my dress.  I push at him, and he just laughs.  I
push harder and he frowns.

"What is with you?" he says.

"I don't--" I start.

He tries to kiss me instead.  I kick out, hit nothing.  He
moves against me and I realise he's hard, that I can feel it
pressing against my leg.

"Don't!" I say, louder.

Daniel actually pulls back.  His eyes are dark, his cheeks
flushed.  He still has a hand on one of my breasts, the
left, I think (or is it right? mirror-effect confuses) and
it feels good and doesn't.  None of this feels good.

"Come on," he says.  "What the fuck?"

"I think I'm gay," I say.  I know it's a mistake before the
'I' is even out, but the rest slips after like the last
lunge of a baby being born.

When he smacks me, I cry out, thinking suddenly of Gramma.

Someone says "I'm sorry," repeats it, her then to him, me
then, and me now, to her.  I'm sorry.  So sorry.  I hug my
arms around me.  I'm crying.  I make a noise when he grabs
me again, pushes me against the wall, grinding that sick
hardness against me.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?" He asks, spits in my
face.  So close he blocks out most the light, everything
gone blurry shadow like an unclean mirror.  "Who the fuck?
You stupid cock-teasing bitch ni--"

Good memories in the mirror only, I remind myself.  Good
memories only.  It didn't see this.  You don't have to see
this.  Skip to the good bits.

Fifteen years after the dance, I'm telling Sarah about it.
Here, in this room, the two of us drunk and spilling spirits
and secrets all over the bed, each other, the mirror.  She
recites abuse statistics when I try to tell her about faith.
Ten years after that, I recite statistics and she tells me
about faith.  Everything reflects.  Dark moments into light.

"You," Daniel is saying, "stupid, cock-teasing, bitch, ni--"

And then suddenly he isn't there any more, going sideways
with a scream and a sudden spray of blood, and there are
hands in mine and a shock of impossibly red hair

("So fake it's real," she'll tell me, later, tweaking the
new piercing in my nipple.)

and we're going, away from the curtains and the dark and the
lights and the music, away, and she's laughing, and suddenly
I'm laughing too, and we go around the side of the building
and tumble into the wall, and she kisses me, a brush of
lips, a quick slide of tongue against my lower lip, and
we're somehow still laughing, her skin darker than mine, her
hair larger, her body thicker, fuller, her voice deeper,
richer, everything just perfectly more than me.

"I'm Kelsi," she says, "and you just came out by proxy to
the whole school, unless you want me to go back and beat
that kid up until he can't even remember his name, let alone
yours."

And I smile at her, and quite ridiculously burst into tears.

"You don't get that," I tell the mirror.

It stares placidly back.  It has all this.  In the mirror,
Sarah sits beside me, toying with my hair and a skip across
the decades earlier Kelsi is rehashing it, and it passes
through me, and the mirror, from one to the other, framing
moments in entwining, vanishing curls.  I swipe at my face,
but my cheeks are dry.  Kelsi (Sarah) already took care of
that.

She takes care of a lot of things, tastes like oranges and
cinnamon when she kisses me, tells me not to fall in love
with her, though I already have, and I think she knows.  We
never talk of it.  It's okay.  I like having love inside me,
like a light.  She doesn't love me back the same way, of
course, but it's okay.  School jeers and jabs no longer
touch me.  She does.  I do.  She guides my hands and I guide
hers, exploring, coaxing, invigorating.  College and careers
will take her away from me (even as they bring me Sarah),
but never from the mirror, where she smirks still and draws
lazy spirals around her nipples with her fingertips.

"Take them off," she tells me, then, and now, now, passed
that darkness and grown into myself, matured (as Lucy never
did, as Kelsi always assured me I would, as Sarah has always
seen), I take off my bra.

I do it slow, because they like it like that.  The mirror
likes it like that.  It slow smiles, all secret, growing
warmth.  My panties darken between my thighs as I rub them
over the crisp rustle of pubic hair, the wet slick of flesh.

"You're so pretty," Lucy says.

"The devil's own tongue," Kelsi moans.

"Beautiful baby," Sarah insists.  "So fucking beautiful."

So beautiful fucking.  They say men are more visually
orientated than women, but this, oh, this, this mirror I can
watch forever (as it watches me, as it always has, shades of
Momma and Gramma and all who have passed its gaze, passed
her glass).  I let the confusion and the terror of my teens
get lost under a curl and follow a new thread that leads
from hand to hand, fingers to fingers, lips to lips to vulva
-- to cunt, god damn it, perfect, glorious cunt -- and I
push my panties down and trace a finger between my lips and,
god, Eve's sin was worth it for knowledge of this.

--let's do it," Sarah says, and since we're both naked and
flushed and glowing, I say, "we already did", and she
touches my belly and says, "no, let's do this" and, later,
not even the cold of the doctor's instrument can take away
from this--

In the mirror, I am born; I am thirty and Sarah's breasts
are warm and delightfully squidgy in my hands;  I am five,
naked as, hands pressed to the glass; I am ten in high-heels
and Lucy;  I am twenty-three and my own is plundering
unexpected Teresa;  I am twelve and slipping blooded,
fingering away the cramps; I am sixteen and made beautiful
on Kelsi's artful tongue; I am all ages, all at once, all
touching, all kissing, all loving, all fucking; I am nothing
but the wet slick heat around my fingers, the tautness of a
nipple against my palm, the spread of fleshy lips, the
aching nub, the rising, pulsing waves of heat and pressure

--my hands trail over the small bump of my belly, feeling
the life within, and soon I will be Momma, and the mirror
will see this birth too, sees it already, and my daughter,
it sees her, as it sees me, as she sees me, as I see Momma
and Gramma and they see me and her, everybody sees,
everybody sees everything, their eyes on me and my eyes on
the glass and--

spreading my legs, pinching my nipple, fucking my fingers
right up me, humping my clit against my palm, rubbing and
humping and twisting and pinching and touching and fucking,
panting big deep breaths, filled with air and life and love
and lust and fire and LucyKelsiTeresaSarah are all there in
the mirror cheering me on and I rise and rise, tighter and
tighter, hotter and hotter, faster and faster, everything
burning away white until there is only this, only me and the
mirror, locked together, soaring together, higher and higher
and I can't hold it and everything explodes, screaming joy
and gushing and squeezing and pulsing and shaking and
coming, coming, coming!

In the mirror, the woman falls back, flushed, sweat sheen
glowing, panting, cat-canary smiling.  She sprawls out,
letting the afternoon cool her, dry her.  Naked, breasts
slowly rising and falling.  Her hands find the curve of her
belly, cradling her science-miracle baby-to-be.  Eventually
she sleeps.

The mirror, softly smiling, keeps watch.


###########################-30-###########################



23rd Jan 2009
5,914 words
Constructive criticism welcome.