There she was

There she was again, sitting in that horrid mirror place, looking back and smirking over the top of a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses. She didn't say a word, she never did. Apparently her style today was like some bubbly oyster coloured flapper of a lost thing, the dress was almost inappropriate with it's details and flounces, the cardigan shapeless and loose, the tights were dark and glossy and the shoes were...all wrong really. She'd been left behind after the party, shoulders exposed to a spotlight and fingers still tapping to an internal jazz heartbeat. There was this mish mash of jewellery, picked out in the dark and applied like blind make up, by necessity without design but it created some chunky special stay away effect. Maybe that buried smirk was really some kind of a knowing smile, disguised, either way it was hard to hold the ambiguous gaze for too long. Like putting your finger into a candle flame or touching your forearm against the edge of a hot oven, that inevitable sharp pain would come and then the scarring. It could last for weeks. That was the effect she had; if you were weak enough to acknowledge the coming of the pain. A lazy blond Medusa machine.

She was sitting back in the chair now, maybe ready to suck a pen, touch a typewriter key or light some illicit cigarette, perhaps she'd swig English gin and shake the noisy ice cubes in your face, you never knew. Was that not the kind of thing that modern writers did these days? Somehow her elbows seemed extra important, as if grappling as alien metaphors for harvesting machines or just pointing things that signed and threatened the casual observer to stay out of the way. Some respectful space was needed here or you'll get yourself poked. Her eyes still followed and there was no easy escape. The drama stained and sticky pupils were dark and beady with a muted centre, in behind those glasses, unflattering but practical. At some point everything gets distilled down to the unflattering and practical, it you let yourself go or get that far down the road. Her hair was piled up and held against it's will by two dark clips, like some forgotten hedge that had been teased and tousled into temporary submission, she'd get round to taming it some time, in some chrome and plastic parlour, maybe best done with somebody else's hands. She was that ex-Southern Belle type, spoiled, whatever that had come to mean. Her heart was anchored down home on the dreary plantation, perhaps just down in the plantation but if she was sweating for it in there you couldn't tell. She knew how to hold in her own heat.

An informed observer might have said that inside her, there was something stirring, a hungry itch, a big dirty sensation, a struggling, writhing thing that wanted and waited for the release factor of a public exposition. For a moment it wanted to live and catapult a strange alter-author out across this dumb universe into a sky full of fizzy fireworks and sparklers and squeezed up and compressed feeling. Then when those feelings grew too hot and out of control they could be pissed out back into a bucket of ice cold water. That guilty freeze and the vivid torture held up in a submissive cocktail of remorse and displayed in a polite state of less than fully conscious and less than stone dead. That was the ultimate goal, to meet up with those informed eyes, see through them into a golden and unattainable life beyond, hold it all in the mouth, swirl and then spit it all back out in a mess across the world. Not pleasant or civilised really but then we are such complex, depraved and forever suckling animals...and it just may be that she is the queen.