Pieces

There were a thousand things Kate could blame for being there. The bus happened to stop in Carlington, her tailbone hurt from sitting for so long, Vanessa’s bathroom mirror had shattered and they needed a new one to replace it.

Later, when she recalled the memory of standing in front of The Little Shop of Mirrors, she would wonder why the bus stopped in Carlington at all. Why it left the freeway for a gas station town where no one seemed to live except truck drivers staying overnight and a few lizards beside the road. Why she, Kate, had wound up outside this blip of a store, this dead-end void that somehow earned enough revenue to support itself.

But in the end there was no one to blame but herself. She had been tired, so tired of feeling like she was leaving something behind. She got off the bus because, for just a while, she wanted to stand in one unmoving place.

A week after she bought the mirror on the bus ride back from home, Kate stood in front of her bathroom sink and gazed at her reflection. She brought her fingers up to brush the warm skin under her eye. Pressed it down. She watched the already loose flesh sink under the imprint of her fingers and then detach from her skull, like slow-cooked pork falling off ribs. The bone underneath was clean and white.

She looked down at her empty palm, her real one, then back up at the mirror. There, the rotting skin congealed in her hand. 

Her face was the face of a corpse several days dead. A piece of skeleton gleamed beneath her eye, winking at her as if to say Yes, dear. I’ve been here the whole time.

There was a bell on the door and it jingled when she entered the shop.

“Welcome in,” said a voice. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

The voice came from the mouth of a woman standing behind a table displaying ornate hand mirrors. She could have been anyone’s grandmother with her gray hair in its crisp bun and her floral clothes, sweater and slacks, bright red flats peeking out from beneath the table. But there was something inhuman about her that couldn’t be ignored. The way she held her body, still as stone, breathless without breathing, patient in a predatory way. 

Kate looked at the hand mirrors, then at the walls of mirrors around her. She was trying to wrap her head around where she was and what she was doing.

“What are you looking for?” the woman asked.

Kate stopped herself from saying, “a mirror,” and said, “A mirror to put above my sink,” instead.

“We have those,” the woman nodded. The motion was stiff like she wasn’t accustomed to moving her neck. “Would you like to look at our selection?”

She led Kate further into the shop. She showed her what they had, normal-looking mirrors, some with intricate frames and others without a frame at all. Kate tried to ignore her reflection but it was difficult because it kept jumping out at her. She was everywhere—up by the ceiling, on the floor next to her feet, at her elbow, behind her back, staring at her, staring into her, eyes boring through her skin. She had never noticed before how much she looked like her mother.

“It’s a little disconcerting, isn’t it?” the woman asked.

“What?” 

Kate looked away from one of her reflections, an unhappy one lingering in a long hallway mirror, and flinched at the proximity of the woman. She had moved to stand right beside Kate. Not uncomfortably close, but closer than strangers were supposed to stand.

“The mirrors can weigh on you, sometimes.” Her eyes were wide enough to reflect the room, a mirror of mirrors, and Kate’s pale face framed against them. “The more you look, the more you see. Your reflection has a life of its own, you know. But you have to look at it for it to be anything at all.”

Kate stared at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The woman blinked—slow like an owl, her eyes an orangish-brown similar to what Kate imagined an owl’s eyes looked like—and turned away.

She gestured at a benign mirror that Kate thought would look ordinary above her sink.

“I think this is what you’re looking for. How do you like it?”

Kate leaned over the sink, gripping both sides of the porcelain bowl. She had been tempering a feeling of intense nausea for the last few minutes, but now it was boiling over and the things inside her were roiling, churning, ready to spill out of her mouth.

“Hey,” Vanessa’s voice came through the doorway. “You almost done in there?”

Kate couldn’t stop herself. She looked up at her reflection.

The flesh sagged off of the sharp lines of her skull. Her eyes were gone, they’d been gone for days now. What was left were the hollow spaces where they used to be, and the darkness that seemed to fill her whole body, all the open parts of her that her organs were supposed to fill.

She felt infected. Disgusted.

She looked at her hands against the sink. They were smooth, tan. They looked like they were probably warm. Wasn’t that how the rest of her body felt when she pressed on it? Her neck with the pulse beating, her cheeks, her lips?

But when she looked at herself in the mirror she saw the truth. There was no going back from dead, she realized. No warmth for cold bones, no life for the decomposed.

The ride from Carlington took another hour. Kate spent the majority of it with her face pressed against the cool glass of the window. Ignoring the line of her nose reflecting at her, the outline of her tangled hair. She held the mirror in her arms, close to her chest.

She convinced herself that it was like this every time she left home. That she always felt like this, felt the torment of being caught in-between. 

She imagined herself getting off the bus, walking the sidewalks to the apartment and unlocking the door. Changing into her favorite pajamas and curling up in her bed, sipping a cup of tea. Everything would be in order again, she told herself, while in the same moment she tried to suppress images that kept intruding her thoughts, images of cold tile floors, wooden paneling, flowers in vases—roses and tulips and carnations with their perfumes thinly veiling a smell lurking beneath. Their bright colors a stark contrast to gray skin nestled in silk.

She would get off the bus and do all these things, these familiar things, and she would feel like most of the pieces of herself. 

Most of them but not all of them, never all of them in the same place. Never again. 

Vanessa was standing there when she opened the door.

“Took you long enough,” she said. Her irritation faded as she looked at Kate. “Are you okay?”

Kate wiped one hand on her jeans and used the other to brush her hair over the sweat on her forehead. Her legs felt weak, like they might crumple beneath her. She leaned against the doorway to stop her knees from shaking.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine.”

They glared at each other. Vanessa shook her head. 

“I’m going to take a shower. Yell if you need something.”

Vanessa closed the bathroom door and Kate stumbled over to her bed. She settled herself on the blue comforter, straightened so that each corner lined up with the mattress.

Everything on her side of the apartment had been put there for a purpose. She had two white pillows. A desk lamp and a stack of books. A pencil sharpener. Her only indulgences were a pile of wildlife brochures on her desk, the topmost reading Backyard Birds of the West Coast, and a mango-scented candle her mom had given her. It was purely decorative as they weren’t allowed to have open flames. Sometimes she picked it up just to smell it, to hold it in her hands.

She lowered herself onto her back. Breathed in and out. She brought her fingers up to feel her body, trying to remind herself of the beating heart in her chest, the lungs that kept her breathing—but as soon as she touched her ribs, the nausea returned in full force.

So she placed her hands at her sides and stared at the ceiling until the spinning stopped, until the revulsion slid away into dull horror. And if she wasn’t feeling one hundred percent when she walked out the door, she was at least feeling ready to stand on her feet, which was sometimes the best she could do.

Before she left the shop, the woman put a hand over hers.

“It’s a delicate thing, dear. Be precious with it.”

Kate nodded like she understood. All she wanted to do was leave, escape the pieces of herself in every part of this room.

The woman seemed to notice where her eyes were going. 

“Eventually you’ll get used to them,” she said. “It’s alright if they change, dear, don’t be afraid.”

Fear wasn’t what was bothering her, she wanted to say. She could handle fear, she could handle pain and blood. It was these faces staring at her that made her heart beat faster, pound in her ears. Made the goosebumps rise on her arms and on the back of her neck.

“Thank you,” she managed to choke. Then it was too much. She ran out of the shop and burst out into the muggy Carlington air. She breathed it in like life itself.

The bus pulled to a stop in front of her. Kate shifted the bubble-wrapped mirror in her arms and grabbed her wallet. She paid at the front and fell into the first seat she came to. Curved into the cushioned plastic, felt her body relax.

If she was crying, there was no one to notice, not even her reflection. The mirror was wrapped up tight where it couldn’t see her. She had made sure of that.