Ghost in the Glass

body of horror

Content warning: This story contains intense depictions of body dysmorphia, disordered eating, self harm, and gore. Please take care.

Photo by Ivan Vranić on Unsplash

TheREALdealNicola: Two months #mirrorfree and I celebrated with a selfie. LOL I think I earned it. So nice to see my face again after all this time— I hope it is for you too! Fr though, I am so free since I gave up MIRRORS. Let’s go girls! You exist whether you’re looking at yourself or not. #healthyandhappy #thirtysomething #mirrorfast

Nicola posted the selfie and let her phone drop onto the bed. She stood at the window and watched the woods. Her head felt fogged.

Her fingers found their way to her face, as they often did, spider walking her features, tracing the crevices around her mouth— she was sure they had deepened— pressing the hard angles of her cheekbones, then brushing the corners of her eyes with her fingertips— would she be able to feel the crows’ feet when they came?

She allowed her eyes to unfocus, and in an instant it was there. A pale ghost in the window, its blue eyes glistening. She turned away.

no mirrors, no mirrors, no mirrors

healthy and happy

Nicola dressed herself with jerky precision, stretching out tops and bottoms on her bed in various combinations, each showing her a melted silhouette. Clothes idealized, without the lumps of a body to interfere.

Once she selected, she slid her palms along her waistband, checking for bulges. She tugged her breasts towards the middle of her sports bra, patted them into passable mounds. She passed a hand between her legs and tugged on the leggings’ crotch seam— she hated the name they gave that particular fold of fabric. The Braille of her body told a story of obedience.

Nicola walked room to room in her empty house, feeling the air swirl around her, feeling her body disturb the space, always averting her eyes from the temptation of windows. Ed was on business and wouldn’t be back for a while. His return dates were becoming blurrier, and this was the longest she’d been alone since they moved in together. She shook her shoulders, flinging the thought away like a dog shaking dry.

Room after room of white surfaces turned her away, never worth touching or sitting on. The trash cans were empty, as usual. She wondered if there were any chores— anything at all she could do until Ed came back. But even a single used tissue would disappear in a matter of hours, whisked away by an army of housekeepers in their busy efficiency.

She found herself back in the bedroom, phone in her hand. She unlocked it with a click, the sound of an unsealing vault.

1 like

One like and it was probably a bot.

She threw the phone down on the bed, paced the bedroom. Ten steps, twenty. Maybe she could get in a hundred.

i should have told them it was my birthday, that always gets likes

no one knows when my birthday is anyway

This is me at thirty-three! Thirty-one? This is me at thirty-one. Mirror free at thirty-one!

i’m not like you

i don’t even look at myself

She was hungry and felt her stomach curling in on itself. She imagined it flattening like one of those vacuum sealer things on TV. She manifested her stomach turning into an empty bag, a wrinkled useless organ with no needs, no purpose. Then she would be free.

She stopped at the window and watched the woods—maybe an owl or a fox, any other living being, would creep onto her property and she could be a person who watched wildlife for a while.

She wished Ed were here so she could see herself through his eyes, in the way he took in all her details. When he was around she didn’t need mirrors. He gave affirmation without precision, confirmation without honesty. He was old, and that meant she was a marvel, by default.

She let her eyes unfocus. The ghost appeared in the glass. She met its gaze and smiled. She moved her chin, checking that part of her neck that had started to feel loose. The ghost did the same and its neck was smooth and graceful as a swan’s. She sucked in to concavity and rolled her shoulders forward to pop collarbones out of their skin and the ghost did the same and it looked amazing.

***** 

After a long run through the neighborhood, Nicola stepped out of the shower to a blank white wall. The mirror fasting bloggers instructed her to cover her mirrors with bed sheets, lest she be tempted, and it had definitely worked. She was so much happier since she stopped seeing herself. So much happier.

Drying off, she patted and prodded her body, feeling every inch for the flaws she no longer obsessed over. She leaned over her legs, squeezed her thigh meat. When she stood up, her head was light. She reached for the counter. Cold sweat misted the back of her neck.

i need to drink more water

As she leaned against the counter, her eyes were pulled to a molten shine on the wall. A slice of the forbidden bathroom mirror had come uncovered. She looked at it and her breath hurried. She rolled her hands into hard fists.

don’t.

mirror free

i’m not like them

But even as she thought the words her hand slid away to touch the glass. She watched herself peel the sheet back. She watched herself fail.

In the mirror the hand reaching toward her was not her own, scattered with freckles and marbled with veins. It was a perfect, elegant hand, pale and smooth as a Disney princess, with a wrist so delicate it seemed only bones. Where her own nail beds were red and runny, the nails in the glass were buffed, feminine, bloodless.

She let her vision go blurry, and the hand came out of the mirror and overlaid hers, a perfect glove. Her heart beat once, hard like a knock, and she dropped the sheet.

***** 

Five almonds nestled together on the kitchen counter, one slightly bigger than the others. That one Nicola pinched between her fingers and dropped back into the jar.

Four almonds. She took a picture of them to post later—you’ll be surprised how full you can feel on a handful of almonds!— then ate them one at a time. Her arms felt heavy and cold. She fished out the big almond and ate it, too.

emotional eating

i should journal

It was getting dark out. The housekeeper must have come and gone while she was out running. The wilted lettuce in the fridge had disappeared, and she fought off the imaginary judgment of the woman who did it.

i would have eaten that

i love greens, i’m obsessed with them

It was still too early to go to bed but she could always hop on the Peloton. She could wash her workout clothes, fold them and put them away and deny the maid this one task.

Her eyes flicked to a spoon left in the dish drying rack. It glinted silver under the kitchen light. In its bowl, the reflection of an eye that wasn’t hers. Crystal blue, like a husky dog’s eye, with thick black eyelashes. She blinked and felt a tear overflow her own eye, which she knew was still only brown. She grabbed the spoon in her fist, shoved it in a drawer, the crashing metal sound from inside echoing through her empty house.

mirror fast mirror free.

Her hand found the loose part of her neck and she tried to press the skin back into herself.

***** 

The next morning Nicola stood in front of the white sheet and her fingers shook. Black confetti rained across her vision.

No one was liking her mirror fast post.

what is the point if no one knows

The text from Ed had pushed his return date “a few more days,” vague and abandoning. She feared there would be another few days and another. She felt like an intruder in his house, a huge filthy dust mote drifting around wherever the air pushed her.

Eventually she would land somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be— staining an armrest, cluttering a countertop— and a housekeeper would come by and sweep her away too.

i don’t need to do a stupid internet trend

mirrors don’t make me unhappy— i’m perfectly happy— i’m fine

maybe i should journal about this

But she didn’t journal; she pulled on the sheet, finding it firmly stuck at the top of the mirror. She remembered directing the maid to tuck it deep behind the frame.

She lifted the loose corner and saw a skeletal arm in the reflection, its skin a translucent ivory glowing from within. Her mouth tasted like battery acid.

She held the corner over her head and ducked underneath before letting go. The sheet draped down over her, its dense thread count dimming the light, falling heavy and silky and reassuring across her shoulders.

In the mirror loomed a spectre with two black holes where eyes should be. Its lips were pillows of injected goo, and they seemed to slide sideways down a shiny face. The bones of its chest bowed out, shoulders angled away from its chin as sharply as a clothes hanger. Thin skin gathered in hollows at the base of its neck.

To the right, where the sheet touched the glass and obscured it, was the radiant Nicola. The mirror ghost that had been trying to get out all these years. She moved the sheet and where it billowed she caught glimpses of her true self— a floating wisp of shining hair, a cold glint of blue eye, a graceful expanse of velvety skin.

The ghost was hard and smooth and flat; idealized, ethereal, sharp in all the right places.

Nicola wrapped both fists in the sheet and pulled. She needed to be with the ghost, to fill her head with its shiny radiance, to disappear into its mirror world and escape the vacuum of her own life.

The sheet made a ragged ripping sound but did not come down. She pulled until her knuckles went white and the huge bathroom mirror cracked across the middle. The bottom half slammed into the counter and shattered with a sound like pouring rain. The top half came down around Nicola, a supernova of light and gravity. She felt something press the top of her head before her vision went black.

****

When she opened her eyes, Nicola was on the floor, surrounded by glass shards like ice crystals. She brought a hand to her head and felt something soft and dense like melted wax.

She no longer recognized where she was, but the sunlight gleaming on the broken things around her was so beautiful she thought she might already be dead.

Glimpses of the ghost flitted across the silver reflections. She ran a palm over them, listening to their tinkling cry, until her fingers found a long piece like a dagger.

She wrapped a fist around the dagger and squeezed, feeling and resisting the gasp that tried to escape when the glass broke through her skin. Swallowing that sound was a victory.

She pressed the point of the dagger into the floor at an angle, straining against it until it snapped. The piece on the tile held a perfect, upturned nose.

Then she did it again and again, snapping off pieces that gave back perfect fragmented body parts, until all that was left in her throbbing hand was a gummy red chunk. And this she raised to her mouth.

Her front teeth closed against the smooth surface of the mirror and slid across it. That wasn’t the way.

She opened her mouth, tasting blood and the flakes of paint from the back of the mirror, and put the chunk against her molars instead.

like a granola bar

When she bit down, an electric buzz burst on her tongue as hundreds of tiny splinters wormed into her soft parts. White hot needles drove into her gums, finding unseen spaces between her teeth. There was a different kind of crack when her enamel finally chipped against the glass. Her mouth filled with liquid that dripped down her chin and snot ran over her lips, gluing the shreds of them back together.

Shard by shard, Nicola swallowed the ghost in the glass, until the warmth in her chest told her she was whole.