I am looking at myself in the mirror.

I am looking at myself in the mirror, and I think: I hate this bitch.

I am blurry in this silver surface. I don't know if it's that someone hasn't cleaned the mirror recently or that I can't see properly because I'm crying, but I am crying—I know I am, because I see that she's crying. This other Miriam. The one I hate to pieces. 

Her cheeks are streaked with dark tears. Her eyelashes have clumped together. Her hair is a mess, the curls wild and totally broken, half-heartedly braided in some places, matted in others. This is not what a princess looks like, I think to myself. This is a living disaster. And I am not sad. I am angry—bitter—I am infuriated that she has not kept it together.

"Do you know what this makes us look like?" I ask her. My throat burns. When the words come out, they're broken, from a place so deep in my chest it sounds less like a voice and more like a snarl; they snag in every possible place on the way out, like I am trying to throw up pieces of glass.

She looks back at me. Her eyes are tortured and pleading. Her lip trembles as she tries to hold in her tears (and fails; they spill over her cheeks pathetically, and I can hear them hit the floor all the way in the opposite universe). I realize, looking at her, that her face is not marked by any kind of a jewelry, and that she must be my child-self. 

Someone else might think this is an excuse. All children cry, they might say. Even royalty. 

But I look at her and I see weakness. I see the girl I was all those years ago. I see how good I had it and how terribly sad I still was and I want to kill her, or myself, or both of us, and end it all before I'm forced to wake up and see the sun.

"Say something." I want it to be a snarl, but it comes out a whine, the pathetic yelp of a puppy whose tail was stepped on. She stares back at me in silence. My anger is growing insurmountable. I feel it in my mouth like a sting of acid. I feel it curdling my muscles like venom, sitting in my stomach like a rock; I feel it rising and rising and rising, a wave of heat and bright-white pain, pain, pain, pain from my legs to my chest to my throat, until I can't hold it in anymore, and I hack out a cough.

When I open my mouth, bones come out.

Bones. A few of them get lodged in my mouth sideways as they tumble out, and I have to crack them in half and spit them out so I won't choke. 

I cough out bone after bone after bone. They pile up on the floor at my feet. They clatter against each other, making so much noise I think I must be waking up the whole house up. They fall out of me until it's literally impossible, until my throat is raw and broken, until I simply can't cough anymore, and I gasp for breath. 

Most of them are small. They are bright-white; they are old, sun-bleached, and have been picked clean. 

I cough once more.

Miriam the Younger's hairpin clatters to the floor.

It sits there, in the horde of her bones, as still and dead as she is. Blood dribbles out of my mouth. It drips down onto this little pile of what is left of her, and I am too horrified to even feel sick: I can only feel the numbness of my body, and how the terror crawls over every inch of me with spider legs upon spider legs. 

This is a nightmare, I think to myself, finally.

Behind me the door opens.

I feel the air between us sour as soon as I frown. The immediacy of it—the sudden sharpness in my chest, the gust of cold that blows in through an imaginary window—startles me. 

I realize it is because I am not used to people seeing me. Really seeing me, the way this boy does with his buckeye-brown gaze. Perhaps it is because there’s nothing left to distract; it’s just us in this dream, shut off from the rest of the world. Curtains drawn and dark. The room still. Certainly, I am not used to anyone acknowledging my pain; when he sees me jerk in fear, his ears flick back, and there is a terrible part of me secretly delighted by this acknowledgement. 

(Terrible because it is insecure and so deeply pleased. It makes me feel real in a way I haven’t felt at all recently—real enough to be paid attention to, real enough to take up space. Heat rises to my cheeks, and I pull my head to my chest for a brief moment, looking away.)

But then he laughs at me. For the second time. His voice is low and rough, supremely self-assured; I see his gaze fall into a derisive slant. When he speaks, there is a lazy, acrid sneer in his voice: I’m so sorry, miss.

The sound of it scrapes my ears sends me jolting through a cycle of emotions. First, anger: how dare he speak to me like that? (I tell myself this is less about my birthright and more about basic manners, and I think I even believe it.) Then, when it fades, my chest seizes with slow, heavy guilt. I feel bad that I’ve snapped at him at all, rude as he is. How many times have I let my siblings get away with far worse offenses? 

And after that I don’t feel anything at all. At least not over the bright shock and awe that slams through me. 

The bones make a musical rattling. I look down, and at my feet I see them fall apart into sand; the next moment they come together again, but this time they are fireflies with yellow halos, and butterflies with a pearl-white wings. They rise up around me in a divine cloud. One even comes to land on the tip of my nose, where despite myself I cross my eyes to look at it and gasp. “Oh.” But there is the sound of a laugh in it: it is a noise of pure pleasure and surprise. I think I’m even smiling. It feels awkward and unlike me, but I can’t help it.

Then the room grows dark. I’m so distracted by the insects that I almost don’t notice it at first; all the dream-light bleeds out, the way it does in real life when I draw my velvet curtains. But the darkness brings a strange feeling to the surface. My vision goes blurry; it looks as though the walls are melting. That can’t be true, I think. 

But it is. I see the cobblestones bleeding into one another. I see their grays and browns go dripping, dripping down the side of a wall that isn’t there anymore. And behind what once was my room there is—nothing. Just a thick, dark velvet that seems to shift colors so quickly it’s dizzying, and I want to panic at the sight of it—the infinite beyond, a darkness with no end, its many facets flashing from gray to black to blue to something I don’t even have a name for—but my body is so heavy. So, so heavy.

I’m staring at him, but my eyes are soft and dark now. The scowl has fallen away; I’m not quite smiling, but my expression feels unusually… well, dreamy.

“I apologize,” comes my voice. “For my rudeness.” I hear myself speak, but it’s not quite my the usual tone—it’s lower, and softer, and edged roughly by something almost like desire. “Thank you for the butterflies. I’m Miriam. By the way.”