Fear is all and she is there inside the palm-wiped smear across the mirror’s
condensation, or behind that maybe, a dissoluble self buried ugly in contusions
swollen up from her face: mouth, nose and eyes fixed in bloated rictus, and
speaking
ache1:
I’m not a pretty crier.
An
involuntary spasm in the hot water, and she’d been shocked by the larval
appearance of a thick bloodclot discharged from high in her nose, and the thing
landing, wriggling between her feet for the drain central to the shower’s
gently-bevelled floor.
The
steam is drawn up into the extractor overhead, the mirror clearing. Closer, her
movements this afternoon limited by a pain the profundity of which seems to
defy the actual physical measure of her body, and again
ache1:
I am not a pretty crier.
the
effort of words now bursting the skin of her lips so that three or four lines
of blood run and spread onto her chin, itself bulbous, empurpled. She feels her
whole face alive with expression, yet the reflected texture of queerly-coloured
flesh remains still.
The
area above her breasts feels raw, hurts with breath, and the eye with which she
sees is punched near full of bright red blur, its tiny capillaries broken and
flooded each into the other.
ache1
(suddenly surprised): God I can’t remember the colour of my mother’s
eyes. I can’t have forgotten that already. Can I have forgotten that already?
and
E.T. lost.
