Guest Author Paul DeThroe
Mirrors lie; to some more than others. Perhaps everyone who ever gazed into a mirror has asked the same question: is this a perfect reflection, a distorted perception or a doorway to another dimension? If beauty truly lies in the eye of the beholder, then that question can only be answered from within. However, the fabled looking glass of old fairy tales may not be that far off from reality. Maybe some sentient spirits do reside inside our opposite world, telling us we are the fairest of them all or that someone else is. Regardless of whether that voice comes from the mirror or from our own minds, its haunting nature is inescapable.
Such was the case for a young girl in a small town named Anna. Everyone she knew thought she was the beautiful. In fact, the eighteen year old was voted the most beautiful girl for the senior yearbook. She was the homecoming queen, the girl that all the boys wanted and all the girls envied; some more than others. But Anna never bought any of it. Mirrors told her otherwise. To her, people that told her she was beautiful were trying to play with her mind in order to gain something. So she resented those that complimented her and strangely, felt compelled to be close to those that insulted her. However, of all the haters she had accumulated thanks to her good looks, the only one whose opinion really mattered was her mother. And they despised each other.
Besides her mother, Anna was her own worst critic. Because her mother always had something negative to say about her looks or the way she dressed or the way she carried herself or the friends she chose, she had inherited that negative way of looking at herself from a very early age. Anna was a firm believer that mirrors never lie. Every mirror she looked in told her she was fat, ugly, hideous and unworthy of being loved. Just like her mother did.
That was her truth, not the falsehoods the horny high school boys and male teachers liked to greet her with. “Anna, your dress is spectacular!” a student would say. “Wow, you look great today, Anna!” a teacher would say. The other girls would seethe when they overheard the fawning guys gushing over Anna. She couldn’t understand why the really pretty girls didn’t see right through what the boys were doing. They just wanted to get in her pants! Didn’t the boys tell the same rash lies to them?
Anna noticed a pattern from every guy that chose to talk to her. It was always sugar coated compliments pouring from the lips of a guy staring at her overly-endowed chest. Once the compliment was sputtered or spat out by the overly-eager guy, his eyes would finally move from her boobs up to her face, to read her reaction to their game.
Anna was a professional at returning praises with cold glares that turned the guy’s passionate faces red with the embarrassment of dejection. If she didn’t receive the desired reaction from her icy scowl then her sharp tongue would finish the job and send the unlucky guy fleeing to find another girl that may be more receptive to his advances or a group of guy friends that had experienced similar tongue lashings from Anna and could placate him.
“Jeez, what a stuck up bitch!” she would hear the whispers of the huddling rejected group of boys as she walked by. The girls that hung in cliques were even less pleasant, often of accusing her of being a slutty whore that would have sex with anyone on a whim. Of course, not one bit of that was true but it still bothered her that people thought that of her. She rued every morning that she would have to face the cruelly one tracked minds of horny boys and rude girls in the hallway.
Even though her graduation day inched closer and closer, she considered dropping out of school every single day. “Why can’t just one guy understand me for who I am?” she often asked herself. “Why doesn’t anyone just recognize me as being a not so beautiful but still highly desirable modern woman? If I ever find that guy, I will never let him go!”
Of course, she would never find that guy, because she truly was beautiful beyond compare, at least to everyone that was attracted to her; boys, guy teachers, and lesbians alike. But it seemed like the only people that saw her for who she really was her mother and the mirror. The enemy girls and the female teachers both felt threatened by her beauty and her sexuality and hated her guts for it. They never missed an opportunity to belittle her. The tears she shed on a daily basis because of the verbal abuse prompted her to quit wearing makeup. It would only run, forcing her to share her shame with those who couldn’t care less.
If she was seen crying, her haters would undoubtedly call her a drama queen and her unwanted suitors would try to flatter her even more in thinly veiled attempts to entice her into their arms so they could pretend to comfort her. Of course, all the boys really wanted were to feel her large breasts pressed firmly against their puffed-out jock chests. She wasn’t that dumb.
Her home life wasn’t much better. Her overbearing mother would start ranting the moment she came home from school. Anna couldn’t understand why her mother was such a bitch after sleeping her day away but she knew that was just her nature. “Why do you have to wear such revealing clothes?” mother would inevitably ask. “You dress like a whore! All you want is for guys to look at your boobs. Go put a t-shirt and sweat pants on and start doing laundry. When you’re done you can cook dinner, wash the dishes and do your homework. That’s why you go to school, did you know that? Your homework must be done, so spend less time texting boys and more time studying and you just might make something out of yourself other than being a trophy wife.”
Not wanting to feel the back of her mother’s hand across her face, Anna would smile humbly and start her chores. But that didn’t stop her from texting the very boys that she spent the entire day pushing away. The boys didn’t mind. They just thought she was protecting her image at school but at night the true Anna would come out, through explicit texts. Her part of the conversations were often engaging but theirs was mostly just strung together pickup lines. Teenaged boys were never clever enough to unlock the keys to her heart, but as she well knew, they were more interested in unbuttoning her pants.
To Anna it was a tradeoff between the lesser of two evils. She detested talking to the boys about the things they wished to talk about, which was basically using her to get their noodles wet, but she detested listening to her mother even more. So she carried on the silent conversations with the boys even though she knew that none of them were right for her, and that meant that they had little chance of being the first to experience sharing her sexuality.
Sure, she had gone out on movie dates, and shared goodnight kisses, but she guarded her virginity like a dragon guards its golden horde. The closest she’d ever come to even remotely being sexually active was the grind-fests, better known as the high school dances. Boys seemed to take turns being the lucky one behind her, grinding her hips and dry fucking her to the rhythm of blaring rap music. But that was as far as she would go. After the dance, she would return to her normal taciturn self.
After the dance, her mother would make her take off her clothes and would check her panties to see if they were wet from the sweat of dancing or from cum. She would then accuse her daughter of generally being a whore and send her to her room in tears. Anna would then sit naked on the floor in front of the long mirror that was nailed to her door.
That was when the mirror’s voice would begin haunting her. It was the only voice she trusted. Even though the mirror’s voice was just as abusive as her mothers, she knew in her heart of hearts that the mirror had only her best interests in mind. Her mother’s intentions, she thought, were to humiliate her, but the mirror wanted only to make her a better person. The mirror was her friend.
“You’re fat and ugly,” the mirror would tell her.
“No, I’m not!” she would scream back in a whisper so her mom wouldn’t hear and think she was threatening her. That would be cause for an instant beat-down by mother.
“Yes, you are,” the mirror would bluntly mock her. “Look at the zits on your face; ugly, ugly. You can’t hide that, even with pancake makeup. Your only redeeming quality is your boobs, but they’re only big because you’re fat. Look at your stomach! You’re a fat ass!”
“Leave me alone,” Anna would cry. Of course, she believed everything the mirror told her, even though she pretended she didn’t. This ultimately led to eating disorders; bulimia was the first, followed swiftly by anorexia. When the mirror called her fat, she would turn her back on it and sit their sobbing as she waited for her mother to go to sleep.
When the right moment came, she would sneak to the kitchen and guzzle glass after glass of milk while filling her belly up with packaged snack cakes. The next morning she would wake full of guilt. It was time to diet, so she would skip both breakfast and lunch at school. Inevitably, she would come home drained, with a massive migraine. Feeling thirsty, she would binge on milk and snacks before eating supper to please her mom, and then run to the bathroom to purge. The cycle repeated itself daily for many months before things got much worse.
Of course, her looks and behavior would make the rumor mill, and those rumors would eventually make it back to her. Not wanting to be the girl that people talked about negatively, she would forego her diet and eat her meals at school again, just to shut them up. Unfortunately, the voice of the mirror still lingered in her head, and the thought of food sitting in her stomach, preparing to turn to fat, would be too much for her wounded psyche.
Just as the bell signaling the end of lunch would sound, she would rush to the now empty restroom and purge herself of the vile food that wreaked havoc on her life. Her new habit of showing up late to class after lunch got her sent to the office repeatedly, but she would always have a good excuse for the forgiving, young male principal, who couldn’t resist her tragically sad eyes and pouty lips.
Instead of punishing her, he would have her sit in his office to chat until the next bell rang. He enjoyed her company, that much was obvious, but she both loved and loathed the way he looked at her young body. She knew he was no different from the other boys, even though he was careful not to go farther than hints at the pleasure he got from her company.
As the weight began to flee from her bones, the whispers of her peers about her eating disorders turned to shouts and the voice from the mirror turned to a deafening roar. The more weight she shed, the fatter she felt. A terrible cycle in her life had begun and the scars on her young mind continued to accumulate.
Yet, the mirror was merciless. Its voice pointed out her imperfections around the clock, torturing the poor girl to the point that she seemed doomed to everyone, including herself. As her ribs began to protrude from her skin more and more, all she saw in the mirror were rolls of fat. Even her mother became concerned and set up an appointment with a psychological therapist. The appointment was unnecessary and unwanted to Anna, but she had no choice. Still, even though she cooperated with the therapist, she basically told the woman everything she wanted to hear. In the meantime, her condition continued to deteriorate.
Her mother chided her relentlessly all the while she was suffering. “What a pretentious bitch,” Anna would think, “pretending to be worried, while treating me like shit! How dare she?”
When she ate, she called her a fat bitch and dared her to throw up. When she didn’t eat, she harassed her about starving herself. Between the mirror and her mother, Anna’s torture became too much to bear. She passed out from malnutrition and a nervous breakdown and was rushed to the local hospital. There, she was hooked up to intravenous nutrients and was monitored around the clock; because they said she was suicidal. She received good care from the medical professionals and before long, she started coming around. For the first time she started seeing the damage she was doing to herself. She participated fully in her rehabilitation and finally started getting better.
When Anna returned to school, cold stares greeted her from most of the students, but mercifully the whispers about her insanity stayed well away from her ears. Her few friends were sympathetic and helped bring her back along to normalcy. Then a funny thing happened. She found a boy that she connected with. The boy was new to the school and seemed perfect. Instead of telling her all the things he wanted to do with her, he asked her questions about her and how she felt. It seemed so different to Anna, and she quickly fell madly in love with the boy.
The two of them started regularly hanging out together and built a bond that Anna thought would last forever. Once the boy had gained her trust, his game intensified and he seduced her until her sexuality awakened. Ever the opportunist, he had found a way to become more than friends with Anna. The other boys jealously took note.
Not ready to give up her virginity, oral sex became her passion and she pleased her boyfriend every day in his car. He rode her everywhere, and who could blame him. He was the first boy to play his cards right; he was the front runner to take Anna’s virginity and he knew it.
Then two things happened that would change the way she felt about that boy, and all boys for that matter, forever. The first incident happened on their usual Friday night date. He took her bowling with his friends. They had a magnificent time, even though she had no particular love for bowling. When the games were over, he kissed her passionately and told her to go wait in his car while he said farewell to his friends. She naively obeyed.
She waited in the car for fifteen minutes or so and became quite bored. She fumbled through his glove compartment, hoping not to find any other girls phone numbers, and was not disappointed. Finally, the boredom became too much and she went back into the bowling alley to see what was taking him so long. That is when she saw him fondly hugging and kissing another girl, one of her school enemies to make matters worse.
Devastated, she walked back to his car in tears. When he finally joined her, she had wiped away the tears and pretended nothing had happened. He never even noticed, partially because his mind was on the other girl and also because he was intent on getting his nightly fix. After she satisfied his urge while he drove her home, they kissed and she went inside her house. She bypassed her mother, who was nagging about the late hours she kept, and went straight to her room to cry in front of her mirror.
Her mirror had stopped talking to her since she started receiving therapy and tonight would be no different. Though she cursed herself for being foolish, she utterly convinced herself that she loved the boy so much that she would ignore his transgressions. Forgiving him was easy, but forgiving herself proved very, very difficult. She blamed herself for not being woman enough to keep her man happy, and vowed to do whatever she could to make sure his wandering eyes stayed focused solely on her. She started her diet once more.
The next incident was more profound. She went with the boy to his home to have dinner with his parents. They had welcomed her into his life without judging her and didn’t expect her to follow the rules that her mother had placed upon her. After dinner, her parents turned a blind eye to the couple and they snuck upstairs to his bedroom. Gentle cuddling quickly gave way to heavy petting and before long arousal had sprung the boy into passionate aggression. He was determined that blowjobs weren’t going to be enough to satisfy him in his bed, on this night. He hurriedly her undressed her and himself. “If you really love me, you will do this,” he told her emphatically. Her body shook nervously, as she reluctantly agreed to his demand and spread her legs.
Though she had talked to her older cousins about what to expect, the pain she experienced was more than she expected. “No, no,” she cried, “I’m not ready.” He continued. Tears fell from her eyes like rivers of confusion as the boy that had promised her he would wait and would never do anything to hurt her, did not wait and did not stop. She pushed him away, but he was more determined than she, and he took what he wanted. When he was done, he attempted to comfort her, but the damage had been done. Her most precious possession was forever gone, even though it had not happened the way that she had hoped.
The next day at school, all eyes were again upon her and it seemed as if the entire school knew what she had done. She went straight to the usual place her and her boyfriend met every morning and he tried to greet her with smiles, hugs and kisses, but Anna was hurt, and he didn’t even seem to care. He was more interested in bragging to his friends about his conquering exploits. Ignoring his behavior she went about her day, trying to ignore the whispers as boys and girls alike giggled about her losing her innocence.
Near lunch time, she sweet talked her teacher into excusing her from class early. As she walked down the hallway to the girls’ room, she saw the last thing she needed to see. Her boyfriend was once more in the arms of the girl he was kissing at the bowling alley. It turned out that this boy, who seemed so perfect to her, was nothing more than a player, and she was nothing more to him than a game.
That was the last straw. She went up to him, slapped him in the face and never talked to him again. This, of course, only made the girls at school hate her even more. How could she treat the most charming boy in school so terribly? He had no problems at all finding sympathy in the arms of the many girls that hated Anna. She had a much tougher time finding solace. It seemed that all they boys that came to comfort her had a not so hidden agenda. They wanted the same thing that her ex-boyfriend had gotten. They wanted to heal her pain with sex, and nothing more.
Feeling ostracized, Anna withdrew even more. Even her closest friends seemed to find fault with her because she dumped her charming boyfriend. Anna thought it was ironic she such ridicule while the cheating boy seemed to be admired. To her, it was all the more reason to find fault with herself.
Now that her first true love had ended in disaster, she spent most of her time hiding away in her room. She sat in front of the mirror nearly all the time she was home, begging the mirror to talk to her again, to punish her, to tell her how she went wrong. The mirror ignored her. She was so frustrated that she wanted to hurt herself, but she somehow found the courage not to. It wasn’t easy. She had seen other girls at school walking around with slashes all over their forearms. These were the sad, lonely, depressed girls that like to listen to ego music. Even though she was not like them, she could relate to them, because they obviously had deep emotional problems too, but unlike her they found a way to deal with them.
Anna figured that they must be onto something, so she started wearing darker makeup, black clothes and listening to the same sad, Goth-like music they listened to. The Goth girls at school took quite an exception to her, and starting bullying tactics to push her away. They adamantly refused to allow the infamous school bimbo into their clique and would say or do anything to make sure she knew this.
Anna was completely lost in life. No one liked her and she fit in with no one. She was becoming a loner, but that was not by her choice. She would have preferred to be popular, but she was anything but. She quickly lost interest in the Goth scene and dyed her hair bleach blond and started wearing the most revealing clothes she could get away with at school. If sex was all it took to become popular with the boys, then sex it would be. Everyone considered her a whore anyways, so she decided she would be the biggest whore the school had ever seen. She never considered how bad of a mistake she was making.
After a few months of sleeping with whatever random guy she could entice, she found that not only was she unable to replicate the feeling she found with her first love. In fact, she was unable to find any type of love at all. Her self-esteem was taking a huge hit and she considered her new tactic to be nothing more than an epic failure. The girls at her school hated her more than ever and the boys made quite a sport of bedding her and bragging to whoever would listen about the juicy details. She decided enough was enough and vowed she would never sleep with anyone else again, unless they truly loved her. The only problem was she had no way of knowing what true love really was.
Despondent, she sat in front of her mirror one night and cried her eyes out while begging the mirror to talk to her once more to give her advice. Again, the mirror was quiet. She fell asleep in front of it and soon found herself in a strange new world where she felt beautiful, wanted and above all, loved. It was possibly the best dream she’d ever had. But it was short lived.
She woke from the dream when her mother banged on her bedroom door, yelling at her to get started on her chores. She lifted her dizzy head from the floor, told her mom she would get right on it and then looked in the mirror. Her hair was messed up, her makeup smeared from her tears and she felt horrified at what she had become. She thought she was the ugliest girl alive, triggering tears to run down her face once again. She cursed at the mirror for abandoning her but received no satisfaction from her outburst. She had to find an outlet for her frustrations so she balled up her fist as tight as she could and punched the mirror, shattering it.
Still sullen, she slammed her fist into the pieces of broken mirror that still hung from its frame over and over again until the flesh of her knuckles was shredded. By that time, most of the mirror lay on the floor in dozens of shards. As the pain from her wounds finally broke through her intense anger and registered in her brain, she grabbed her hand and started sobbing. Blood poured from the multitude of cuts and dripped down her arms on the shattered pieces of mirror, empowering them with the unsought magic of her rage.
Slowly the shards of mirror came to life. As she moaned in pain, they screamed at her in thousands of contradicting voices of terror and then gathered to speak in one voice, loud and clear. “Rise and kill, Anna,” the shattered mirror hypnotically ordered her. “Rise and kill! Rise and kill!”
“I cannot kill,” she sobbed, disbelieving what she was hearing.
“Kill your oppressors and you shall be free from pain forever!” the broken mirror wailed to her. “Rise and kill! Kill and be free! Rise and kill! Kill and be free!”
Anna put her hands over her ears to block the unholy voice that was encoding her with wickedly violent commands that were more powerful than any she felt before. A pacifist at heart, violence was against the very grain of her soul, but the vulgar voice and its diabolical demands bled through her soul, as if replenishing the blood that poured from her hands with a new, hateful indulgence.
The mirror’s homicidal demands soon sounded like music to her ears. She swayed to the chants of the mirror and within moments was totally mesmerized. Completely under its power, she reached down with her bloody hand and grabbed the biggest, sharpest shard of mirror left. She mindlessly walked out her door, down the steps and into the kitchen, where her mother sat at the table with her back turned to her, drinking an after dinner cocktail. Her mother howled in pain as the mirror stabbed deep into her neck. She instinctively grabbed for the wound, jumped up, turned around to face her attacker and saw her bloody daughter raise her arm once more. Anna’s mother’s eyes opened as wide as silver dollars, her face turned blood red then pale white and she yelped her dying screams.
Anna felt unremorseful as she stood over her mother’s twitching corpse on the blood covered kitchen floor. She simply dragged her dead mother’s body to the bathroom and left her lying there. Ignoring the blood on the floor, she went upstairs, showered, bandaged her wounded hand and went to bed. She woke the next morning, got dressed and went to school as if nothing had happened. The blood stained bandage made everyone gasp in horror but she ignored them and their whispers and their finger pointing and went straight to the cafeteria where she knew her ex-boyfriend would be, talking to the next victim of his unfaithful libido.
“Rick, we need to talk,” she frantically tapped his shoulder to snatch his attention from the lips of the girl he was lost in. The girl looked at her with vile hatred but rather than wilt as she would have before, she returned the hateful glare with her own death stare. The girl got up and walked away and Rick said, “I don’t want to talk to you, Anna. If you continue harassing me I will have my mother call the police.”
“You do want to talk to me,” she said bluntly as Rick looked curiously into her previously unseen penetrating glare.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked shocked and then at her bloody hand at what he saw. “Not that I care; if you didn’t come to apologize with a blowjob, you can just go away and bleed on someone else.”
“I did come to apologize,” Anna cooed sensuously as she grabbed and squeezed the crotch of his jeans. “If you want a blowjob, just follow me to the girls’ room and I will give you the best blowjob you ever had. You can squirt it all over me.”
“I want you to swallow it, baby,” he smiled, “just like you used to.”
“I promise,” she winked and smiled, grabbed his sweaty hand with her good hand and led him to the restroom. They shooed all the wide eyed girls from the restroom and locked the door from the inside. She playfully shoved him against the door, started kissing his neck and unzipped his pants. He shut his eyes in anticipation as she took him into her hand. Without warning, she reached into her coat and pulled out the same shard of mirror that she had killed her mother with. It subconsciously screamed at her to be driven deep into his neck, at the jugular, but she could not resist maiming him first. She knelt before him, looked up at him, licked her lips and opened them slightly. She leaned in slowly and stabbed his penis with the shard. She put her lips over the wound to let the blood squirt into her mouth, twistedly fulfilling her promise.
Rick’s chilling screams filled the cafeteria and the kids listening outside started banging against the door to save him, but it did not budge. He shoved her head away, repulsed that his penis’ blood smeared her lips. He grabbed his injured member, refused to look at and started punching Anna’s face and head repeatedly with his other hand. She finally fell away. He succumbed to the pain, bent over and fell to one knee, sobbing.
With Rick defenseless now, she finally obeyed the voice of the mirror shard and impaled his neck, severing his jugular. His blood squirted all over her and she thirstily drank it until his heart no longer beat and his life was no more. The school authorities finally showed up with a key and opened the door and everyone around gasped and screamed in horror at the bloody scene. Anna was sitting on the floor passionately performing oral on Rick’s mutilated penis.
Anna was carted away when the police arrived. The authorities found her mother’s corpse when they went to her house to inform her of what her daughter had done. The local prosecutor ambitiously sought the death penalty, but the shock factor of her story garnered both local and nationwide media attention and a famous publicity seeking attorney took her case. Because of the media circus and her cunning attorney, Anna was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Incarcerated in an asylum instead of prison, Anna still never found the help she needed. She was simply too far gone. No amount of therapy or psychiatric medicine ever helped her. Her only friend was mirrors, but her doctors knew this and they also knew what she claimed mirrors had caused her to do. They kept her locked away in a room without mirrors for the rest of her life. She was never to see her own face again and died many decades later, an insane, lonely woman.
© Paul DeThroe 2011
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