Fifteen feet up.
One second down.
Five severed blocks of bone all the way across.
—-
Where to begin with the image in the mirror?
One thing I can tell you for sure – it did not seem real, that thing looking back at me.
It was a shocking mess of swollen, bulbous, bruised flesh – as though my face had been stung by a thousand bees and then trampled on.
How could skin stretch that much without splitting?
It did not end there.
Gruesome caterpillars of thick, black, spikey sutures crawling across my lip and chin.
A bright, cherry-red eye staring back at me like some sort of grisly sci-fi automaton.
This was all horrific, but the worst part was hidden behind my lips:
Shiney, braided steel cords winding in and around and behind every single tooth an impossible number of times, holding my jaws together in a death grip – a twisted cage of horror in the middle of my broken head.
I looked away, but it didnt matter. Because it wasn’t inside the mirror. It was inside me.
Or rather, I was inside it.
I was trapped.
I had a brief urge to vomit but quickly squelched it, because obviously that would not have been ideal.
Me and mirrors. It would be a long time before we finally made a truce.
2 responses to “Chapter 12”
The narrative is very tight. I read all chapters in one go.
Thank you Ankur 🙏