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.
