Mirror Mommy

I didn’t like the new house Daddy made us move into. It wasn’t even a house, really- it was more like a dark, cramped, apartment that always smelled like piss and sweat. I had tried asking Daddy many times why we had to move over from our spacious bungalow into this dark and creepy place, but that seemed to make him really mad.

He would start saying something about me being a ‘picky, little princess bitch’. And then he beat me with his long cane stick until I started to cry ‘I am sorry, Daddy’. At times, he wasn’t even aware that I was crying, and kept hitting me until his hands started to pain. Other times, he just stopped after one or two whacks- not because he wanted to, but because he was too tired from the effort.

Once he was done, I would quietly walk back to my tiny room to clean my wounds. I would stand in front of the mirror, rubbing at my injuries till I could feel the bleeding stop. I wanted to cry loudly like all eleven-year-old girls my age are supposed to. But my wailing voice only made Daddy angrier, so he stopped giving me food every time I cried.

That’s how I learned to cry my tears silently.

It was during one of these silent-crying routines when I first noticed the woman inside the mirror.

I remember that day; I hadn’t said anything to Daddy, but he was still angry. He whacked me with his cane for almost half an hour until he became tired and passed out on the couch. I had a real hard time walking back to my room- I think he had broken a few bones in my body. When I looked up at my battered reflection in the mirror, I almost wanted to cry- but by then, I had mastered control over my emotions.

And then just like that, my mirror image started to melt. Initially, I thought that the multiple thrashings from Daddy’s cane were causing my bones to dissolve. But then the glass cleared- and I saw her for the first time. The woman inside the mirror- a thin, frail woman with jet black hair that reached the knees of her tattered white gown dress. She had seen me too- and I could sense as much surprise in her eyes as mine.

An eternity passed away while the two of us kept staring at one another. I couldn't scream, even if I wanted to because of Daddy’s no-dinner threats - but I didn’t want to scream. Something about her appearance- her worn down clothes, the nicks and bruises on her pale-white skin, her puckered face- I felt like we had a connection. It was me who finally made the first move, waving my right hand at her in a silent salutation.

She kept looking at my waving palm for some time. And just when I thought my greeting would go unanswered, she pulled her left hand up, waving excitedly in my direction. I smiled at her. And then she did, too.

From then on, each time I looked in the mirror, I could see her. That’s how our friendship started. We couldn’t speak, hear or touch each other, but that didn’t come in the way of our amity. I grabbed the crayons and drawing sheets I had brought over from our old house, wrote what I wanted to say, and flipped them over to mirror. The mirror woman did the same too- although she didn’t have crayons. Only a red ball-point pen and some notebook paper.

We talked about so many things- she asked me about my hobbies, my favorite food, if I had a pet animal- so much fun stuff. When I mentioned Daddy and his long cane stick, I could tell that she was upset. I asked her about her family too. She replied, ‘I have you’. Then she smiled. I smiled too. I think that’s when I started calling her ‘Mirror Mommy’.

Mirror Mommy and I made drawings, sang soundless rhymes, shared fun girly stuff. It was all so much fun that I had stopped pestering Daddy with my long list of curious questions. He still beat me though- although not as frequently, but every now and then, he would come home from work, and shout my name in his drunken voice- and I would become aware of the painful fate that awaited me in his room.

Of course, I didn’t tell him about Mirror Mommy- the last thing I wanted was for him to snatch away my privileged time with her. But Mirror Mommy did know about Daddy. Every time she saw my wounds, she would write, ‘Daddy?’. I shyly nodded my head. She wouldn’t say anything, she just kept pointing at the body parts that needed to be cleaned. But I could sense that she was angry.

I would often point out how thin Mirror Mommy seemed to be getting with each of our meets. She just smiled sadly, and wrote ‘You are one to talk’. As time went by, though, I could tell that her health was getting serious.

I saw her collapsed on the brown dusty floor of her dingy room one-night. Her eyes weren’t moving. I frantically pounded on the glass, even though I knew it wouldn’t work.

Thankfully, she did open her eyes.

‘You really need to eat something’ I scribbled across my sheet.

She smiled, as faintly as she could. She tried to reach for the pen that lay next to her feet. I had to do something; I knew that the effort would be enough to kill her.

‘Stop writing, I know what you need. I’ll be back in a minute’ I eagerly flashed, hoping that she would stop. She did. Good.

I rushed out of my room into Daddy’s den. I needed something that Mirror Mommy could eat. There it was- crumpled, in one corner of Daddy’s table- a half-eaten Pizza slice. I maneuvered over Daddy’s sleeping body to grab the food, aware that the most minute of the sounds could stir him. Once I had it, I quietly tiptoed back to my room.

I wouldn’t describe Mirror Mommy’s movement on the floor as ‘moving’- it was more like twitching. I could tell that she was in the final rounds of her impending battle with death. I wildly banged on the glass, trying to tell her that I’ll find some way to give her the food.

But we both knew that wasn’t happening. We had tried exchanging physical things countless times before- hugs, kisses, drawing sheets, crayons. None of it had worked. I had once suggested to try and break the glass, but Mommy was strictly against the idea. ‘What if that breaks our connection?’, she had warned me.

But now, as I watched my Mommy draw her dying breaths, I knew that I had to chance it. I started banging on the glass with my hands. The glass was hard and really hurting my bony wrists- but I couldn’t allow the pain to stop me! I kept slamming on the surface; one-time, two-time, three-times.

Crack!

Voila! A glassy mess on the top side of the glass. I had an opening.

‘What did ya break, bitch?’

I could hear Daddy’s voice from the other room. Shoot, I had to hurry. I grabbed the Pizza and rushed over to the cracked surface, smearing it with ketchup and pepperoni.

Please work, please work!

Nothing happened. The messy bread harmlessly slid off the smooth glass, as I helplessly watched Mommy’s body trembling on the other side of the sauce marred broken-surface.

Slam!

‘Alright, I told you not to mess around with any of the stuff here, it’s all on rent, but you- what the fuck did you do to my dinner?’

He wasn’t sleeping, after all. He was passed out.

‘Who told you to lay your filthy hands on my dinner, bitch? I gave you that half-stick of Toblerone for dinner, didn’t I? You dare steal from me?’

‘Please, Daddy, you don’t understand, I-’

‘What did I tell you, girl? No talkback to Daddy! Damn, you haven’t had a lesson in a long time, have you? Stealing from your old man, this ought to teach you some manners.’. His hands moved to the buckle of his belt.

‘Daddy, I didn’t want to steal for me, it’s just that-’

‘Shut your dirty piehole, bitch!’

Whack!

The belt’s leathery sting on my face made me topple over on the floor. I curled up in a ball as Daddy walked closer to me.

‘A no-good hell-spawn, that’s what you are. Stealing food now, Lord knows what’ll become of you. Take that, you thief!’

He kept whipping me with his belt even after I had started screaming. But, like I said earlier, that just riled him more. Halfway into his routine, he paused.

‘Pl-please, Dad-dy,’ I stuttered. ‘I am sor-sorry.’

‘Silence!’

Whack!

Pain seared through my arm as his ice-cold metal buckle lashed at my elbow. Between the sickening metallic klinks, I could hear my blood splatter. Every part of my body was craving to roar from the pain, like a hurt lion cub. But I knew better than to agitate Daddy twice in a row.

His thrashings were starting to lose their rhythmic pattern, I could sense that they were about to end. As was I. I could feel the pain coursing through my bloodied bones. My heart was beating at a bullet train pace, and I could tell that I was breathing about twice as fast as I normally did. This was it- my end at the hands of my own Daddy.

But I didn’t want to spend the final moments of my life with my eyes closed. I carefully uncurled myself. The pain in my fractured joints made me feel like I was burning. But I couldn’t care- I was dying, and the last thing I wanted to see before my passing was my Mirror Mommy’s face.

I opened my eyes, slowly. The side angle and the big red streaks of blood- my blood! -made it very difficult to clearly see. But I could make out someone standing on the other side of the glass. That must be my Mirror Mommy, waiting on the other side for me to join her. The thought gave me some happiness; I could almost sense the mirror’s glass shining in a bright red glow.

This is it, I thought.

‘Face me, you pathetic child!’ I could hear Daddy’s booming voice roar. Click. The belt’s metallic buckle chimed on the ceiling above as Daddy yanked it over his head. Brace yourself, here comes the final strike. I closed my eyes.

The last thing I saw was a pair of bony hands coming out of the glass’ surface. She was nearly out for an hour before she regaining consciousness.

‘Mommy,’ she weakly croaked as her precious amber eyes blinked open.

‘Yes, darling, Mommy is here for you. Your Mirror Mommy’.

The last six months of hallucinations weren’t fruitless, after all. All this time I had spent questioning my own sanity- I had the answer now. I finally had her. My beautiful, darling, mirror baby.

Click!

Jeremy was here. I couldn’t afford him to hurt my mirror baby. ‘Shh’, I signaled to her as I pushed her under the bed.

‘Hey, gorgeous. How’ve you been holding up?

’I stayed silent. Jeremy only asked rhetorical questions. No matter how I answered, the replies never pleased him.

‘Here, figured this should you get you charged for your next date.’ He tossed a bar of Snickers in my direction. Something about the way he said ‘date’ sounded wrong. Like a sick, dirty joke that I was supposed to enjoy.

‘Can I skip today, please, Jeremy? I’m feeling really tired today. I’ll try for a double night tomorrow, but today’s not good. I- ‘

A quick motion of his hands across my cheeks cut me short. Of course. The date wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command. Everything Jeremy said was a command.

‘There. That ought to get your batteries double charged.’ He knew how much I hated that line; that’s how he had roofied me to spend the night with him. And that’s how I had ended up here.

I tried dragging myself off the ground, while Jeremy casually pulled out a cigarette from his sleeves. A long inhale; then he puffed the fumes right on my face. I coughed. He chuckled.

‘Really, though, I wonder what makes you so tired plain sitting around here. It’s those stupid child rhymes, isn’t it, messing with your dim-witted brain?’

Back when he had first brought me here, I used to protest against his spiteful commentaries. A three-month-long routine of slaps and starvation had taught me an important lesson- silence is the only answer.

‘How’re those drawings coming along, by the way? Flowers, cats, what is that, a strawberry farm? Good Lord, what are you, Strawberry fucking Shortcake? Is that what makes you too tired for the job? What else makes you tired, Jenny? That old mirror I brought you; does staring into that pathetic, disgusting reflection make you tired? You’re lucky you’re even getting someone to sleep with, you know. That’s how pathetic you are. God, where is that mirror, you ought to see for yourself. Ah, there it is. You see that, Jenny, that – ‘he paused.

The mirror! God, how did I miss that?

‘Jenny why is the mirror broken?’ Jeremy’s voice had a bitter coldness to it. I wasn’t sure if this too was one of his rhetorical questions.

‘Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you about the mirror. Well, you see, I got a bit worked up last night, and so…’

‘It’s got blood.’ He stroked the cracked glass surface. ‘You’ve been trying to kill yourself.’

‘Jeremy, I swear to God, it’s nothing like you think- ‘

A sharp jab from his fist blocked out any likely explanation I could come up with.

‘You’re a real piece of work, bitch, you know that? I should’ve known. You’ve been cooking some shit in your head ever since I caught you. Suicide plans, huh? Damn, ain’t I lucky that I dropped by first? You have no fucking idea how badly this could have gone with the clients. Fucking suicide? That’s a cop-y stunt, girl.’

His hands darted around his pockets. A green-hilted razor blade.

Even before I could realize what he was up to and avail the chance to make a dash, he had his arms around my nape. The silver blade of his razor mere inches away from my throat.

‘You ain’t the first one who’s tried to pull this stunt, you know. But I sure did let my guard down. God, have I been popping too many pills or what? Glass mirror? Really? I’m pathetic. Ah, well, no harm’s done. But I can’t afford to keep up with this homicidal stuff, alright. First anorexia. Screaming second. Now broken mirrors. No. I’m gonna put you out of your misery. Right here, right now.’

His grasp tightened. I could feel the blade graze my skin.

‘Well then. Any last words?’

I did have a few. ‘Leave the girl alone.’

He chuckled. ‘Girl? What is that, a code for a drawing or something? Honest to god, bitch, you’re just- ‘

His grip loosened. His taught hands went slack as the blade fell on the ground with a sharp klink. As did his body, a few moments later. His mouth agape in a silent scream. Eyes still unable to register the surprise of the mirror shard that was coming out through his bloodied guts.

And a few feet behind him, stood my darling little baby. Eyes burning pitch black with love. A tapestry of red, mommy-baby love etched across her bony frail arms- arms that still had gashes from the whipping. Auburn bangs that went down to her feet covering near about all of her face except those dark eyes. My baby. My dear, beautiful mirror baby. Had saved my life.

‘Let’s go home, Mommy’. One call to the cops from Jeremy’s phone. That’s all the price we had to pay for our new home. Of course, the cops and the media didn’t see find any ‘we’- all they found was a sensational story of a woman being held hostage by some shady trafficker. No mention whatsoever, about an eleven-year-old girl who had suffered abuse at the hands of her own father.

Although, to be fair, I did some research; turns out, they did cover something similar in a nearby town about twenty years ago. Never found the father’s body, though. Whatever, it’s not like Millie wants too much media coverage or anything like that. In fact, none of the media images couldn’t capture her- even though she kept sitting right beside me! We didn’t care much for the attention anyways- it’s not like we expected them to understand our relationship.

I mean, we couldn’t stop laughing when we read how some of the media houses had interpreted the strawberry farm pictures I had drawn. ‘A tormented victim's disturbed appeal for aide; a beckoning to her lost-innocence’. Really? No, that’s not what it’s supposed to be- it’s supposed to be Strawberry fucking Shortcake. Something innocent a mother drew for her child!

No, what we cared about, was the ample amount of money that the lawsuits and media campaigns fetched us. On Millie’s insistence, we now live in a big, oakwood bungalow in the countryside, just about secluded from any unnecessary human contact. I teach painting and music at a school nearby, while Millie tries her hand at writing stuff. It’s a real shame that she won’t get the recognition that she deserves. Not directly, at least- my pseudonym author avatar Millie Troy is doing a nice job with her children stories. Millie likes that.

There is one thing, though, that we keep having second thoughts about. We have only one mirror in our house- but it’s not some fancy full-length mirror that has bright light-bulbs on the edges. No, it’s the cracked glass mirror that Jeremy had installed back in my refuge; the same mirror eleven-year-old Millie had in her room back in her father’s dingy apartment. We don’t even use the mirror that much- it’s not like either of us is too image-conscious anyways.

But occasionally, Millie tells me that she can see her Daddy in the glass- his eyes wide open as his neck gets strangled by my bony hands from the other side. I see things, too- sometimes, I see Jeremy’s corpse pressing face up against the glass, mouth agape right after Millie had shafted that shard through his guts. We know that they are trapped inside the glass, awaiting their window of escape- something me and Millie had been lucky enough to find for her. The thought both comforts and scares us.

More importantly, though, we keep it; because it reminds us of how we found the most beautiful things in our messed-up lives. I had found Millie- my darling, dear, Mirror Baby.

And Millie had found me- her warm and bright, Mirror Mommy.