WARNING: This a work of fiction. This story depicts sexual situations that include fictional minors. It may be illegal for you to read this.
DISCLAIMER: This is written in British English. This is a work of original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
NARCISSA IN THE GLASS By Mister Fish
Momma always said the Tsar gave Gramma the mirror, which Gramma brought it back with her from the Old Country disguised as one wall of her caravan. I never believed the part about the Tsar, but I could believe the bit about the wall. The mirror was, is, huge, no matter how I grow, wider than my bed, frame grazing the ceiling and floor. It's edges are black and silver, old metal, twisting and curling in long sprawling patterns so entwined every path I trace along them is eventually lost. The glass is a little hazy, a little scratched in places, but mostly as clear as it ever was, clean and cold and deep.
I admire myself in it now, the woman I have become. Gramma was Roma, and Momma too, but my father was an island boy, turned black by the South Pacific sun, and the hand I press to the glass is dark olive and light caramel in perfect blend. I did this so often as a child, knowing that if I could just reach out a little further my reflection would be able to pull me in to the magical world beyond, that I can see myself as I was, breast high, hip high, knee high, all my past selves pressing back. Like my father, I grew tall and strong; like my mother, I grew lithe and graceful. Like both, my hair is dark and curly, falling now in masses over my shoulders, though my younger selves in the mirror wear it all in sorts of fashions, put up and pulled down, swept forward and back, grown almost to my waist and cut above my ears.
The mirror has seen my whole life. It will see my future too, though not see my death, as it did not see my mother's, or my grandmother's; the mirror was covered by a big dustsheet on those days.
"It should see only joy," Gramma told me, between her naps which grew ever longer from day to day. "Mirrors remember, little light of mine. They keep every image, locked safely inside, so you should make sure they only see good things. If you look long enough and deep enough, you can see them in there."
I was maybe four at the time, with my page-boy cut and my little pink sundress, sat on Gramma's lap on the foot of the bed, her hand on my leg, just above the knee. (I remember this as if it is happening now, the smell of face powder around me, but Gramma's face is a blur I fear I have constructed more from old photographs than actual recollection.) Her thumb rubbed, softly, back and forth, back and forth, and lulled, almost hypnotised, I stared for a while into the shiny depths, and the little mirror girl stared right back, and perhaps we would still be there now if a bird hadn't gone squawking by the window, bringing us back to ourselves.
"I can only see me, Gramma," I complained.
She laughed a little and said, "you're a good thing," and tickled me until I was giggling and squealing.
Afterwards, we slept, curled up together under the mirrors solemn gaze. The next day, Poppa John and Momma covered it. Gramma left us soon after, and I made Momma leave the sheet up until I could bear to look at the mirror again without crying.
"The tears in the mirror are tears of joy," Momma tells me.
I am sixteen and in my first proper dance dress, examining myself first this way and that in the glass. It is the same pink as my sundress, not brash, but deep and rich. My hair is pulled up into a coiled braid, pinned through with slim ivory needles. I have curves now, and my hands find them, smooth down them, feeling the dress out. Momma is in the mirror, smiling at me through her tears.
"All grown up," she says.
My bra squeezes my breasts together, pushes them up. My dress accentuates my hips. I feel like a child playing dress up and think, for a moment, that I can see myself in the glass, ten years old and tottering in my mother's high heels.
"Never all grown up, Momma," I tell her. "I'll always be your little baby."
She laughs at that. "Always is a very long time; I shall settle for today. And maybe tomorrow."
She laughed at that, I remind myself. Tenses have become confused. Momma is gone, now. I am alone, in this room that was hers, that was Gramma's, that was mine as often as it was not. In the mirror, I am wearing my pink sundress, my pink dance dress, my pink camisole and blue jeans, my blue blazer and charcoal grey school skirt, my charcoal pants suit and trying to decide on these black sandals or those black heels. I am wearing white chiffon. I am wearing red lace panties and a strapless bra. I am wearing water and a pink fluffy towel, and Gramma is rubbing my hair, or Momma is rubbing my back, or I am drying my breasts, feeling the soft, rough towel run against my nipples. I am older, taller, shorter, younger. I totter past in diapers, knee high to a grasshopper, and then in nothing, Momma following in laughter.
I look away, look up, blink my eyes. I know if I cry I will have to leave the room. The mirror does not get to keep my tears of sorrow, no more than it already has. I lean forward, press my forehead to the cool glass that steams and clears between my breaths. Blindly, I touch the nearest edge, fingers searching, following coils of metal until they dip away. It is old, familiar. I breathe slowly, close my eyes and turn my head, pressing my ear to the glass.
There is a cry, running backwards into silence. It's me. My first. The mirror has seen my life. It has seen my birth.
It was storm season when I was born. Da had gone to help mend fences levelled by one, only to get trapped by the next, leaving ripe Momma and old Gramma home alone with no phones.
"So of course," Momma tells me and Poppa John -- I am twelve and we are all curled up together in my bed and I have a hot water bottle pressed between my legs as I am, apparently, a woman now, blood and all. "Of course," Momma says, smiling, "that's when my water breaks."
I can hear my heart beating in the ear I have pressed to the glass. Perhaps it is hers, beating around me in the womb. With my eyes open or closed, I can see her, though I know this is impossible, that I can have no real memory of this. Still, I see her, naked on the bed, belly round and trembling and shiny with sweat. I can hear her gasp and pant as her body contracts and expands, as her cervix dilates and I am inexorably pushed down into her vagina--
--for a moment, I am ten, and Lucy is explaining this to me, the two of us side-by-side in front of the mirror--
--pushed down, and out. She forces her legs wider. The mirror sees her lips, her labia spread, crowning me (I am born face down and hair first). Momma grits and cries and pushes. I turn, corkscrew in her, Gramma's hands on me. Another push and my shoulders breach the birth canal. In a rush of blood and mucus I slide fully out into the world. I am small and red and tiny in Gramma's hands. Momma pants, laughs, cries. Gramma smacks me, and I take a startled breath and cry too.
This cry, the mirror keeps, returns to me. But my baby outrage is nothing to mother's joy, so I do not begrudge it.
"Magic is made more glorious by the sorrow it encompasses," I hear Kelsi say, sixteen, seventeen years after this. She has a pentagram tattooed on her hip, just under my fingers. Hers trail against my stomach and she says, "tell me."
I tell that my mother held me, still naked on the bed. That there was blood on the sheets (I am twelve and I wake, crying, and my fingers come away from between my legs wet and coppery) and Momma pressed me to her breast until I learned to tease milk from the nipple, while Gramma washed between her thighs.
(A year after this, she has the date of my birth tattooed where Gramma's fingers rub now; Da is dead, and Momma has not yet met Poppa John, and we are alone in the world, us three women, and the mirror; of course the mirror.)
Sated, I sleep against Momma's breast, calmed by the beating of her heart and by Gramma softly singing a song whose tune I feel now reverberating in the glass. Forgetting the words, I hum, and Momma joins in, and later, Lucy, and Kelsi, and Sarah laughs and sings it when we are both thirty and drunk and I tell her she is beautiful and she just laughs some more and sways, beer bottle in hand, beads jangling, breasts marking out the time.
It's now, though, and I push myself away from the mirror once more. It's afternoon. Warm sun slips through the net curtains. Dust motes dance over the bed. I sit on it, then fall back, stretching out. The ceiling could do with a coat of paint, I think, and laugh. It's warm and cosy. The house makes soft noises around me, empty noises. I am all alone. Just me and my forty years of mirror, Momma's sixty five, Gramma's ninety (it belongs to them even when they are gone, as it will belong to me when I am). The bed (queen sized of course, ha ha) is, I think, as old as the mirror; the frame at least, the mattress replaced once a decade, the blankets once a month, the sheets once a week or as needed. Everything else has changed.
The room is an odd shape, a rectangle with its top two corners cut off, windows set in these new walls and between them. Window seats run all along beneath them, running from bed around to mirror. Bed and mirror face each other, of course, and facing the mirror I can see my desk to its left and my right, nestled in the corner, and the bookcase next it, following the wall until it is terminated by the necessity of the door. Everything is done out in reds and browns and natural woods, save the mirror. It should look out of place--
("Good lord," Sarah says on first seeing it, "it's monstrous" and then, before I can leap to the defence, breathes out, "I love it. It's perfect. My god, have you ever seen anything so perfect?" and I, looking at her, say nothing.)
--but fits, somehow. Perhaps only because it is there in all my yesterdays, and today, and maybe tomorrow.
I wriggle back until I am fully on the bed, head nestled against the huge pile of pillows and cushions. I never cared for stuffed animals as a child, or now, but I like the pillows, big ones and small, plump ones and heavy ones, to rest on, or snuggle with, to make a fort or fight, to press against my mouth to smother giggles and gasps, to support my back and raise my hips so I can see the mirror and the mirror can see me.
The mirror sees me, and I see myself.
I am ten and wearing a white floral print dress and Lucy is wearing dungarees and a pink top (it may not be pink; memory and the mirror distort colours) and we are bare foot and hand in hand and bouncing on the bed, giggling as girls do (as boys do, perhaps, though I had no interest then, nor much after, save for some little curiosity).
"Boys have a penis," Lucy says, and I repeat the word. "It sticks out," she explains.
(I am maybe two and Momma is showing me how to clean myself after I pee, wiping always front to back and I giggle and squirm.)
Lucy is my best-friend-forever. Her mother is a nurse. Her hair is blonde and falls in waves to the middle of her back. Mine, at ten, bushes around my shoulders and I think it looks good (it doesn't) and complain every time Momma tries to cut it. Lucy made herself a name in architecture and then gave it up to be a very happy housewife with two ridiculously adorable children. No, I remind myself. She is ten. We are both ten. She is huffing and saying, "I'll show you."
She undoes the buttons on her dungarees and works them off, still wearing her baby T and her white panties and then, while I watch, oddly dry mouthed, something moving in my belly (or perhaps I am only, later, imagining this response, a reflection of future - past - present - something) and Lucy's white panties are over her knees and being kicked off her feet.
"This is my pubis," she said, she says, and I, now, shuffle back against the pillows, lift my head to watch us, then, in the mirror as the mirror, then, watches us.
Lucy's legs are spread. There's the barest down between them. I can feel it when she brings my hand to her, to make me touch.
"These are my labia," she explains, matter-of-fact, as her mother must have told her. I touch them, puffy and warm and spreading under my fingers, parting to let me inside.
I learn the words, with my mouth and with my fingers. Vulva. Labia. Clitoris. Vagina. Hymen. Repeated until I have them down, and then Lucy laughs and pushes me down on the bed, pushes up my pretty floral dress, wriggles her fingers under my panties (yellow, I remember, I see).
"When we're all grown up," Lucy says, and I look over her shoulder and see my skin flush in the mirror (or is it Kelsi? Sarah? Momma, even, or Gramma?) as Lucy explores, "when we have a husband, he'll put a seed in here, and it'll grow into a baby."
"How?" I ask, amazed at this, probably, or at her fingers, touching where only I have (and Momma, and Gramma, because baby needs to be clean -- "oh, soap stings momma!" -- "there you go, little light").
"Boy's stick out, girls go in," says Lucy. "I guess we go together."
I pull a face. After a while we get bored of this game, and go outside for skipping ropes and ice-cream and, later, after Momma has tucked me in and kissed me goodnight, I think about all of this and push my pyjama bottoms down and do the lessons all over again, whispering them to the mirror and the moonlight. Vulva. Labia (majora and minora). Clitoris (and hood). A nice little warmth in my belly, and I rub a little harder, and it's nice, it's good, then itching in a way that's new and weird and -- something. Like maybe it's something I shouldn't be doing ("when we're all grown up," mirror-Lucy says) so I stop and sleep and pretend I've forgotten all about until I almost do.
(The mirror remembers. The mirror remembers everything.)
"I used to sit under the taps when I was running myself a bath," Kelsi says, six months after the dance, and my ten year old mirror self looks intrigued, curls into me at seventeen -- I have a mad month and go uber-butch and Kelsi laughs and puts bright gold streaks in my far, far too short hair. "All those years you missed!"
Not entirely, I think, remembering sneaking touches, remembering a little too long with the wash cloth, a different kind of wetness.
In the mirror, I am twelve and wake from rabid dreams to low belly cramps and sticky slickness on my thighs, spots on the sheets, and cry, loud enough to bring Momma running. Poppa John yawns and slow blinks in the doorway, rubs at his beard--
--I'm eight and he's just John, not yet Poppa, teasing, rubbing me with it so I'll shriek and giggle--
--and goes and gets a hot water bottle and brings it to me ("my sister always said it helped") and we, all three, crowd into the bed together, me between them, until I sleep, and a few months after this, it's Lucy in the bed with me, and she's saying,
"I find frigging myself makes the cramps hurt less,"
and we're playing Doctor again, though this time we only touch ourselves, lying side-by-side in the bed, watching each other in the mirror, all contrasts, her light, me dark, her assured, me fumbling, watching her skin flush, listening to her breath catch, strain. I trace my labia ("cunt lips", Kelsi insists, she likes the word, informs me she has appropriated it from a misogynistic patriarchy for her own varied use -- "plus it's just fun to say, come on: cunt! Cunt! Cunt!"), circle my clitoris, slide fingers inside, just a little ("your hymen is for your husband," ten year old Lucy tells me seriously, and twelve year old Lucy has already broken hers, though I won't learn this until we're both proper teenagers).
Remembering this, watching it in memory, in mirror, I start to unbutton my top with lazy, almost unintentional fingers. My nails are cut, short as they'll go, and Sarah is saying "that's what made me think" and I'm shaking my head, heat in my cheeks, and saying, "its just to stop me biting them", a habit I picked up in school, somehow, which makes me think about my school uniform again, and Lucy in it, and out of it.
We're twelve and, in the mirror, I see her lips form the words "Did you?" and I have no idea what she means, but I nod my head anyway, not trusting my voice, and she sighs happily and says, "Isn't that the best?" so I just nod again. When her fingers stop, mine do too. She has much more hair than me, spreading out in a golden v, where mine just bush a little, only a touch darker than my skin. I feel guilty, and I don't know why. Eventually we sleep, and wake, and play, in our clothes and outside where Momma watches and hangs out the laundry.
It's now and I unbutton my jeans.
It's then and my breasts are budding (and full and pert, beginning to hang, I'm still flat, all at once) and I examine them in the mirror, these little chest bumps, pushing them flat, squeezing them out, rubbing them in circles. I like the way my nipples feel against the heat of my palms, the way they thicken and rise. I like the way they feel against the cool of the glass, when I press against the mirror, making pouting, kissing faces at my reflection, which puckers right back so we both leave wet lip smears. Momma has nice breasts, I think, and Gramma did, once, and I want mine to fill my palms too, and rubbing encourages growth, maybe. I grind against the mirror, but it's not enough, so I go back to hands, and that's much better, but it's still not enough.
I follow the heat down from my breasts, over the curve of my belly, fingers dipping between my legs, rising again, finding the right place to grip. Eyes fluttering open and closed like shutters, and I'm watching myself in the mirror, one hand all over my vulva ("cunt"), one hand working my almost-breasts ("nips and tits," Kelsi again) and it starts to feel good, then real good, and I stumble forward again, to lean my forehead against the cool of the mirror, forcing myself to breathe, deep, squeezing and rubbing, warm-wet between my legs, liquid heat in my belly and breasts and legs and head and everywhere, rising in pulsing waves, I'm panting and rubbing and something breaks, I think something breaks, releases, everything is rushing, heat and light and my legs go and I slide, panting, gasping, down the mirror to puddle on the floor.
That one you can keep, I tell the mirror. That's a good one. Yeah. That's a real good one.
So I think I know what Lucy meant, and I do, but it turns out she didn't, not really, and we're thirteen and this time I'm the teacher, curling my fingers through her pubes and down and in ("have you had--?" I ask, and she blushes, says, "bike accident") and around, tug at her nipples with my fingers and teeth (no spare hand), and squeeze and massage and rub and coax and entice and bring her up to the edge and push her over it.
Afterwards she looks at me and smiles and says, "do you think we'll get boyfriends soon?" and something breaks again, except this is weird and sharp and slimy and unpleasant and I just shrug and offer to go again.
My mood, my memory, my mirror is all over the place. I pull my top off, push my jeans down and kick them away. Socks, panties and bra, all simple white, though my panties have darkened where they're pulled up against me. They're wet against my fingers. I can feel my pulse through the thin fabric. I try to think of Lucy, or Kelsi, or Sarah, but the mirror sees everything, even the gaps between them. I bump against them as I would the glass. Everything is entwined, curled together like the mirror frames, rising for a moment in patterns and then vanishing under each other until everything seems to begin and end at once.
I find a line, make myself trace it with my eyes. I find a memory. The mirror traces it. My reflection jumps, shifts.
And so I'm fourteen and Russel is at the desk with me, working on some school project, and I turn and he turns and he leans in and I pull back and we both pretend nothing happened. I'm still fourteen and Lucy's laughing about this, and she turns fifteen first and makes us play spin the bottle and it lands on Amanda, so I go to kiss her, but Lucy makes me spin the bottle again ("I don't mind," Amanda says, and Rolf laughs and says "Yeah!" and Lucy just huffs and says, "the rule is boy and girl" and even though I know this, it still hurts to hear, somehow, and somewhere at the back of my head, where I am watching myself as if in a reflection, I am starting to know why) and it lands on Derrick and we kiss. Lips closed. A quick peck.
Derrick is a 'hottie'. Lucy looks at me like I've disappointed her. I sink back, ashamed.
"You're supposed to open your mouth," she says. "Don't you even know how to kiss?"
(Lucy always has to explain things to me, even when I already know; always takes it badly when I explain things to her. By the time I think to wonder if this is because of the colour of my skin, the colour of hers, we've long since grown apart. It's a liberal age. The skinheads grow their hair long on the outside.)
Later, I kiss Rupert Green. It's nice enough, I suppose. It's like -- It's sorta like kissing Gramma, only not really, because he's a boy. I like him because I make him nervous, and he stutters and blushes and keeps his hands to himself, so I offer to go out with him, just so I can have a boyfriend before Lucy does. We go to the movies a few times, and I let him hold my hand, and we even kiss a couple more times, and it's--
"It's nice," I say when he asks if I like kissing him.
"Just nice?" He asks.
I shrug, then and now, shoulders shifting against the pillows.
The next day, I catch him kissing Teresa behind the bike shed. They're really going at it, hot and heavy, his fingers curled in the dark waves of her hair. When they come up for air, pulling back a little, I realise her tongue was in his mouth and fire curls in my belly. Teresa sees me first, arches a perfect eyebrow
(I try this for hours in front of the mirror and never manage it, to my eternal annoyance)
and Rupert looks vaguely guilty. I look at Teresa's lips. They're wet and a little -- I don't know the word. Puffy, perhaps. Kiss-bruised. I'm sure I look like an idiot, but I can't think of anything to say, so I just shrug a little.
"He's all yours," I tell her.
"I wasn't asking permission," Teresa says, but she's like that with everyone so I don't take it personally and I still let her crib off me in Maths (I'm second in the class because of stupid Daniel who has a maths teacher for a mum, which is just cheating) and try not to let on that I went home and touched myself thinking about her sharp pink tongue and trying to pretend I was thinking about Rupert.
I'm pretty enough, so I'm popular, of a sort (this holds true at any age, as timeless as Gramma's mirror, as Momma's, as mine) and so I'm sweet sixteen and it's the first proper real school dance (all those imported American TV shows make me want to call it a prom, though it isn't, not really) and Lucy insists we double date, because Lucy is friends with popular girls, so we must still be best-friends-forever, so, really, she has every right to insist
--"sixteen year old girl logic," Kelsi says, "is like nothing else on Earth" and I don't know if she's agreeing with my rant about Lucy or mocking me too--
and Daniel gives me a long, slow look and says, "sure; pick you up at six?"
I watch myself trying on dresses in the mirror like I wanted to do in the store but Momma insisted you could only tell in your own light, and I reach the pink and it's perfect, even when it makes Momma cry. I watch myself in the mirror, sixteen, my hands tracing my body through the sheer drape of fabric. This is a good moment. I try to hold it steady, touching myself now as I touched myself then. But my breasts are fuller, hang lower, my hips wider, my hands creased by age. My present-future smiles wryly at me in the glass. My past smiles shyly. My mother cries.
I try to skip forward, get caught. We're -- there are curtains hanging down, and lights, but it's still dark somehow. Behind the stage. There's music. Daniel's hands are on me. His suit is askew, his tie undone and hanging around his neck. He's smart, not unattractive. A tall, dark stranger. He kisses me. It's too hard, too hot, too heavy. There's something on his breath, a foul taste on his tongue. When I pull away, he follows, pushing me back against the wall. I try to get away -- no, I try to think of Teresa's tongue again. His is too thick, too blunt, too wet.
"Please," I say, then and now, whispering to the mirror, to the audience of memory.
He tugs at my dress. I push at him, and he just laughs. I push harder and he frowns.
"What is with you?" he says.
"I don't--" I start.
He tries to kiss me instead. I kick out, hit nothing. He moves against me and I realise he's hard, that I can feel it pressing against my leg.
"Don't!" I say, louder.
Daniel actually pulls back. His eyes are dark, his cheeks flushed. He still has a hand on one of my breasts, the left, I think (or is it right? mirror-effect confuses) and it feels good and doesn't. None of this feels good.
"Come on," he says. "What the fuck?"
"I think I'm gay," I say. I know it's a mistake before the 'I' is even out, but the rest slips after like the last lunge of a baby being born.
When he smacks me, I cry out, thinking suddenly of Gramma.
Someone says "I'm sorry," repeats it, her then to him, me then, and me now, to her. I'm sorry. So sorry. I hug my arms around me. I'm crying. I make a noise when he grabs me again, pushes me against the wall, grinding that sick hardness against me.
"Who the fuck do you think you are?" He asks, spits in my face. So close he blocks out most the light, everything gone blurry shadow like an unclean mirror. "Who the fuck? You stupid cock-teasing bitch ni--"
Good memories in the mirror only, I remind myself. Good memories only. It didn't see this. You don't have to see this. Skip to the good bits.
Fifteen years after the dance, I'm telling Sarah about it. Here, in this room, the two of us drunk and spilling spirits and secrets all over the bed, each other, the mirror. She recites abuse statistics when I try to tell her about faith. Ten years after that, I recite statistics and she tells me about faith. Everything reflects. Dark moments into light.
"You," Daniel is saying, "stupid, cock-teasing, bitch, ni--"
And then suddenly he isn't there any more, going sideways with a scream and a sudden spray of blood, and there are hands in mine and a shock of impossibly red hair
("So fake it's real," she'll tell me, later, tweaking the new piercing in my nipple.)
and we're going, away from the curtains and the dark and the lights and the music, away, and she's laughing, and suddenly I'm laughing too, and we go around the side of the building and tumble into the wall, and she kisses me, a brush of lips, a quick slide of tongue against my lower lip, and we're somehow still laughing, her skin darker than mine, her hair larger, her body thicker, fuller, her voice deeper, richer, everything just perfectly more than me.
"I'm Kelsi," she says, "and you just came out by proxy to the whole school, unless you want me to go back and beat that kid up until he can't even remember his name, let alone yours."
And I smile at her, and quite ridiculously burst into tears.
"You don't get that," I tell the mirror.
It stares placidly back. It has all this. In the mirror, Sarah sits beside me, toying with my hair and a skip across the decades earlier Kelsi is rehashing it, and it passes through me, and the mirror, from one to the other, framing moments in entwining, vanishing curls. I swipe at my face, but my cheeks are dry. Kelsi (Sarah) already took care of that.
She takes care of a lot of things, tastes like oranges and cinnamon when she kisses me, tells me not to fall in love with her, though I already have, and I think she knows. We never talk of it. It's okay. I like having love inside me, like a light. She doesn't love me back the same way, of course, but it's okay. School jeers and jabs no longer touch me. She does. I do. She guides my hands and I guide hers, exploring, coaxing, invigorating. College and careers will take her away from me (even as they bring me Sarah), but never from the mirror, where she smirks still and draws lazy spirals around her nipples with her fingertips.
"Take them off," she tells me, then, and now, now, passed that darkness and grown into myself, matured (as Lucy never did, as Kelsi always assured me I would, as Sarah has always seen), I take off my bra.
I do it slow, because they like it like that. The mirror likes it like that. It slow smiles, all secret, growing warmth. My panties darken between my thighs as I rub them over the crisp rustle of pubic hair, the wet slick of flesh.
"You're so pretty," Lucy says.
"The devil's own tongue," Kelsi moans.
"Beautiful baby," Sarah insists. "So fucking beautiful."
So beautiful fucking. They say men are more visually orientated than women, but this, oh, this, this mirror I can watch forever (as it watches me, as it always has, shades of Momma and Gramma and all who have passed its gaze, passed her glass). I let the confusion and the terror of my teens get lost under a curl and follow a new thread that leads from hand to hand, fingers to fingers, lips to lips to vulva -- to cunt, god damn it, perfect, glorious cunt -- and I push my panties down and trace a finger between my lips and, god, Eve's sin was worth it for knowledge of this.
--let's do it," Sarah says, and since we're both naked and flushed and glowing, I say, "we already did", and she touches my belly and says, "no, let's do this" and, later, not even the cold of the doctor's instrument can take away from this--
In the mirror, I am born; I am thirty and Sarah's breasts are warm and delightfully squidgy in my hands; I am five, naked as, hands pressed to the glass; I am ten in high-heels and Lucy; I am twenty-three and my own is plundering unexpected Teresa; I am twelve and slipping blooded, fingering away the cramps; I am sixteen and made beautiful on Kelsi's artful tongue; I am all ages, all at once, all touching, all kissing, all loving, all fucking; I am nothing but the wet slick heat around my fingers, the tautness of a nipple against my palm, the spread of fleshy lips, the aching nub, the rising, pulsing waves of heat and pressure
--my hands trail over the small bump of my belly, feeling the life within, and soon I will be Momma, and the mirror will see this birth too, sees it already, and my daughter, it sees her, as it sees me, as she sees me, as I see Momma and Gramma and they see me and her, everybody sees, everybody sees everything, their eyes on me and my eyes on the glass and--
spreading my legs, pinching my nipple, fucking my fingers right up me, humping my clit against my palm, rubbing and humping and twisting and pinching and touching and fucking, panting big deep breaths, filled with air and life and love and lust and fire and LucyKelsiTeresaSarah are all there in the mirror cheering me on and I rise and rise, tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter, faster and faster, everything burning away white until there is only this, only me and the mirror, locked together, soaring together, higher and higher and I can't hold it and everything explodes, screaming joy and gushing and squeezing and pulsing and shaking and coming, coming, coming!
In the mirror, the woman falls back, flushed, sweat sheen glowing, panting, cat-canary smiling. She sprawls out, letting the afternoon cool her, dry her. Naked, breasts slowly rising and falling. Her hands find the curve of her belly, cradling her science-miracle baby-to-be. Eventually she sleeps.
The mirror, softly smiling, keeps watch.
###########################-30-###########################
23rd Jan 2009 5,914 words Constructive criticism welcome.