Shattered Essay -- Poetry

The mirror is cracked but not shattered. Fragments of glass reflect pieces of her. Lily-white skin. Primped, hanging curls the color of corn. A button nose. Cherry ribbon lips. Opaque forget-me-not blue eyes. The dark pupils dilate and swivel, dilate and swivel, but her eyes are sightless. She sees, but she does not. The mirror is cracked but not shattered. She sees her face separately in each shard of glass. Some small, some large. A multitude of reflections, each one a clone of the other, each one a doppelganger, a twin. Never alone. Each reflection with an identical companion. Symmetry is beautiful. She aches. The mirror is cracked but not shattered. Her fingers graze the mirror. The pads of her fingertips tingle at the touch of each crack’s raised edge. A mirror; a symbol of frailty and a symbol of immense power. Reflective ice. What lurks beneath the translucent, razor-thin surface of a mirror? Her fingers reach for the reflections before her. The mirror is cracked but not shattered. The curtains unveiled her. Pretty as a doll. Silent as a mannequin. Lifeless as a marionette with no one pulling her strings. Beneath the spotlight’s glare, a reflection clearer than in a cracked-but-not-shattered mirror. The lipstick glued to her lips, the blush caked on her face, the bright red circles painted upon her cheeks. A freakish sight fit for the gypsies’ circus. Silence. Or laughter. Silent laughter. The fat tears roll down, leaving clean tracks in the thick makeup. The mirror is cracked but not shattered. Prone to melancholy, she muses. To be cracked like the mirror but not shattered. All the pieces together, but not completely complete. Complete completeness terrified her. Her own eyes see clearly, t... ... So much frightens her. Irresistible completeness strikes both awe and terror in her. Her tiny hands ball into fists, the fingers like claws, like stilettos. Her porcelain whets into a blade. An inexorable desire rising, groaning like a glutton within her disgustingly perfect shell. The mirror is cracked but not shattered. With her white flawless claw, she smashes the cracked mirror. It shrieks one final time as its fragile fragments shatter and cascade to the barren floor. Fluorescent lights glare callously at her triumph below. A moment’s pause, as the silence embraces the passing of the mirror’s long life. The deadened air suckles eagerly from the mirror’s relinquished memory of reflections. Beneath her lie the pieces, abandoned and unwanted like broken teeth, no longer part of an incompletely complete work of wonderment. The mirror is shattered.