Then somebody bends
The mirror stage without stage
She talked to the pet in pet-voice, smushing its cheeks and speaking close enough that her tea-stained breath made its nose twitch. The high-pitched ’Ello!, the very rhetorical questions asked in a voice made monstrous by coming from a kiss-shaped mouth, the affirming reflexive declarations, “Yes you are!” and so on. In a round handheld mirror she showed the pet images it couldn’t understand, first among them itself. Then she showed it one of the younger women who’d approached their castle. In continuing pet-voice, she acted out what the mirror images meant.
Since a dog chased her away, all the young woman first caught of the castle was a cliff-face of a wall, and a garden with its Pompeii forms of snowed-under shurbs and cherubs beneath a cold and clear sky, so quiet a space it was like a huge indoors rather than outdoors. She ran laughing from the dog (a silky King Charles spaniel, smaller than a cat) not seeing the windows which something had put out, but neatly so, or the fountains and birdbaths tumbled to empty on one side. She backed through the gap in the castle-hedge, to humour the spaniel, to no longer enrage it by ignoring its guard-dog duties. It kept yelping to the point it yelled.
Watching out for the dog, she managed next to make it across the gardens, to the front hall, whose heart-shaped mirror was whitewashed over, then the kitchen, where the silver and crystal were whitewashed too. Thinking it was the shadow of her cloak along a colonnade, she turned to see lurking in strobes through columns what looked like a chestnut horse. It had a horn: not pointing out like a narwhal’s but back like a crest. The horse rounded the last column then charged her. A step away it reared on its hind legs, a ruby-gashed hoof close enough to nip her cold ear. A piano-toothed mouth foaming in anger? terror?
When it rained the castle stirred least, no animals about till the last puddle had lifted; then she made it to the second floor. She was arrested at the top of the stairs by the nasal breathing of someone asleep. A snowy lynx opened its lime-green eyes; through paper-cut apertures it glowered at her. The eyes darted all over her, as if parts of her were in motion she herself couldn’t detect. She kept the now hissing, now yowling lynx in sight as she backed off down the landing. It limped as it followed, first on three legs, then two, then it dragged itself to the left down another corridor. At its far end, where the walls became balconies, a huge bird strutted out.
The eagle dove off then crashed around the courtyard. It looked hurt; she tried to keep it in sight. Shoulders hunched, it’d sheltered in an alcove with a slit window which streamed cold over its purple feathers and down her neck. It put a crab-sized, heavy claw on her. She fell against a palette on the wall. Like undoing entrails in reverse, it tied her to the palette which it screeched out of the alcove. Hauling the palette with her on it, the eagle burst up and diminished in one swoop the castle into a grey spot in a vast whiteness. They’d flown a while when the eagle dropped suddenly. A feathery eyebrow squeezed then relaxed, and it flew higher. Dropped suddenly then flew higher. It flew the rest of the way with either eye closed to her.
After they landed, a savage flash of beak—she threw her arms to her face. The eagle was tearing the rope. When it left her, both its eyes were open, and still the purple dot crashed down as soon as it’d gotten above the branches. She marvelled at the torn, expert knots then followed the faint squawking sound.
The older woman had been pleased with the younger for showing due diligence, - unlike her three sisters before her - and coming to see her for tea and a chat about her plans to solve the castle. Throughout, she referred to her as ‘beautiful’ or ‘you beauty’—“Hope you don’t mind. A class thing. But the name that anyone deserves who loves themselves, true loves themselves.” The rest of their chat was less gracious. “For you and your sisters to think my work needs a solution says to me you think it’s incomplete. Yes I said the curse was not concluded but that’s not the same as saying it’s waiting for you. Not every curse is made to be lifted, every spell to be broken. Beauty, what else can I warn?… Witches aren’t justice!” She sloshed upwards with her cup. “Don’t you know that lizard above your head is silently screaming? Poised for hours, till it comes flailing at you, all the while screaming. It can’t hear us, but we’ve seen it. It wasn’t coming at you. But now it must head back to the castle.”
What do you see in the mirror next? On a forest road the eagle’s feathers thickening like they’re freezing or turning to ceramic petals. More terrible than its squawking is its silence now, apart from the odd crack. The wings split at the longest pinion, into a crescent-shaped forefeather and a straight but spiked second feather. With the sound of butchered meat being torn, the rest of each wing splits four ways, each split twirling into a segmented twig. Air bakes upwards like an oven. The beak collapses as if being pulled inwards by a string, at the end of which crackling retreat the eyes from the pressure pop out on wet red stalks.
The polka-dot crab scuttles the forest as fast as a rat. Though moving side-on, its dash to escape her means its own gaze is focussed on the rising carpet of the road, a complex nook-and-crannyscape which, with the speed and precision of a knitting machine, its eight legs traverse and fly across.
Breathless, she heads it off at the gates. The crab dallies, darts, stops, three-point-turns. At rest, it bobs in the frozen mud, bellowing itself, jetting streams of air from hidden tender gills. What doesn’t it want her to see? Or want her to? With a wince of eyestalks, and a sudden cooling turning the air to mist, the faintly screaming as-if-being-boiled crab flips onto its back. Its shell in one throb breaks into an irregular mosaic, between whose cracks, like raw flesh under ageing and eczematous skin, sprout grey and pink shoots, feathers again, a blossom of twitching flesh and feathers, while telescoping high out of the jabbering and squealing crab’s underside come a pair of striated sticks, golden, like a wispy gold rope trick. She keeps gazing, transfixed, as the flamingo rights itself then strains its face at her, and already in a jaggedly forward expansion, mist turning to a miniature snowfall, the face bulks out to that of a Yorkshire pig’s. She looks away and only listens. It snuffles and drag itself into the castle.
She’d always look away. But once, looking for the garderobe, she chanced upon the pig from behind, nosing at frosted compost. She was gazing at it with concern - it farting and nibbling, grunting ho-hum chides to itself - when a grey turnip popped left, the pig in serious pursuit, sidelong to her. It met her gaze, squinted, then greyed over and bubbled like rotting vegetables, all the way down to the cheroot of a slug.
Other times it comes to gaze at her, drawn by an impulse it does not understand nor feel on its hairs, but somewhere over and above, to watch her from the ceiling as she passes far below, or even glances up, near but not quite at it. Then it’ll rappel down, tinily and silently, and stand for hours by her so-warm pulsing fingers as she leans back in front of the fire.
She was self-possessed enough not to startle when she saw the clumped crimson spider right by her hand, withdrawing the hand only because of the usual next step, when it saw that she’d seen.
Just when it’s getting used to its octagonal worldview, to feeling the forever fibre strum of the world, it silently screams. Four legs each side fuse to two pairs, fangs curl into horns. Yet the goat-sense only stays as horror at becoming a worm, the worm-sense at rising as tall as a giraffe. It doesn’t know what it is each time, giraffe or worm, in the same way giraffes and worms won’t.
The Persian cat had been gone for days in the forest. When it came back it had a dead vole for her. While it cleaned the back of an ear with a hand tucked in a brown-red sleeve, she monitored the skies for hawks and vultures. She refilled the castle pond for it to hunt in instead, and these gift fish she sometimes ate. Later, after the cat had erupted into a kingfisher, it’d swoop expertly then dump dragonflies at her feet. It stayed to enjoy her scratch on the egg-light ridge of its electric blue head. She put the insects on the compost as soon as it flew off. Then she invited the old woman to the castle with her discovery about the pace of the transformations.
“No, my Beauty, it’s not that what’s done it. Love is nothing, love is shit. You can love anyone! Why you, you love a beast!” The witch explained to her but facing the beige frog, which somehow managed to hop backwards, a sandbag tumbling down a keeling floor. “For the second time, witches aren’t justice. Didn’t I transform chambermaids and stableboys as much as their little lord? Fixed them in their function. Turned to use-objects.”
Having been half-listening on a chaise longue, Beauty leapt as if bit, then turned and apologised. From then she wouldn’t sit on anything but floor. Which furniture was dumb object and which dumbstruck servant? With a certain Louis XV chair, if she pressed her ear to the tight velvet, which took the print of her palm in a peach-fuzz-white, she’d hear deep, deep down inside: the crying of a wasted life.
Other ways to waste a life: ‘What do they see in me? What am I scared they see? What do I want them to see? What do I want them to want to see?’
She refills the fountains, drenches the mirror and the silverware with turpentine. The kingfisher looks in them, and at her, and she at it, for longer and longer. With a glow, its face grows up and out, eyes unflanking from parallel to widespread like a butterfly opening its wings to dry.
The rest you can see in the pond. How he woke by the pond to rising music. Getting to his bare feet, one bloodied, he kissed his Beauty, then heard with joy his servants. One freed from cogged innards, one from burning hands, one from thickly gushing snout, one shellshocked from the indignities of the toilet, and all, beyond their lessening daze, seeing him and her.
Still kissing, he reopened his eyes, and in the pond saw the servants seeing. With them gazing on astounded, he tried to pull away, to stop kissing the leering monkey, the screaming swan, the hippo, the studded starfish. Through a mouth struggling to press off its inverted stomach he dismissed his servants for good. But he could still picture them seeing her. He shuddered and dropped the giant snail, pushed it away with his foot as it furred into a fruit bat. He never looked away, though, from the pond where he’d seen all this, to her, to check, could not even conceive of it. The air remained still and moderate. By worry, disappointment, then contempt he is transfixed.
He hears voices breaking down into twittering song. It looks far up to see why she didn’t listen. “You Beauty, love yourself less, and give in to the itch you now feel, search that face as it searches yours, see what it sees them see and be the wind forever too.” But the witch and Beauty are looking down at the baffled sparrow, while you are looking into the mirror into the pond.
Cheers Rob
This is an interesting story, Mazin. I like the imagery, the mirror, the morphing. Nice. While reading, I experience it like a fogged memory of a half forgotten dream.