Fairy Tales 🧚 Alberta
Mirror, Mirror
Vulcan
Beatrice stood over the sink, rubbing her hands and letting her fingers slide up and down her perfect arms. In the background she heard the guffaws of her parents, who were savouring the pranks Ralph Kramden played on his wife Alice. The Jacky Gleason Show, that pretty much summed it up. Her parents found nothing more witty or humorous on this earth than the shenanigans of Ralph and Alice Kramden.
While the black and white television cranked out its eternal nonsense, Beatrice stared out the kitchen window and watched the violet sun fall into the dark fields. She asked herself, What did God make this skin for, without birthmark or freckle? Are angels banned — even dark angels — from this godforsaken place?
From the dry, thin air she heard a voice: What God? He left us on this burning plain to fend for ourselves. Forget all this nonsense about climbing back into His starry realm. That won’t last long. Why grovel and surrender? Why beg to be forgiven? What have you done? Take control of your life!
She looked down into the sea of golden bubbles, and heard herself repeating, but as if for the first time, Climb by your free will, your own sacred free will, and take by guile what was lost by force! Climb, climb that tower of your self, that beautiful body soft and white ...
Beatrice dropped her dishcloth into the water, dried her hands absent-mindedly, and walked out of the kitchen. As if bewitched, she mumbled, Goodnight fair ladies, goodnight, and started up the stairs. Her father nodded distractedly as Ralph stuffed a pie into the face of Alice and then threatened to smash a cheap figurine against her skull.
Beatrice climbed the stairs silently, just as Rapunzel, Ophelia, the Lady of Shallott, and all the other sorrowful virgins before her had climbed into the lonely towers of their forbidden selves.
Once in their towers, the sorrowful virgins spent their days wondering if their hair would ever be long enough to fashion an escape into the world of their hidden desires. This was what her grandmother, Güsfreude, had told her one night when she was eleven years old, just before her first period. Did Güsfreude know that she was going to have her period and therefore decided to tell her just as she was on the brink of womanhood? Or did Güsfreude's talk of womanhood induce within her the bodily transformation? Beatrice never figured this out.
Güsfreude also told her that she knew a great deal about Rapunzel, Ophelia, and the Lady of Shallott. All three were invented by men who didn’t fully understand exactly what they were dealing with. Güsfreude had it on reliable information that Beatrice could slide down her silken hair into a world no one could see. It would be her own private world. And since no one else could see into this world, no one could tell her what to do in it. She would be like Alice on the other side of the mirror. She would be in a world of her own, far from the books without pictures. She would be blissfully detached from the crude, everyday world where true love was only a fairy tale and where a princess could languish for decades without finding her prince.
Beatrice entered her bedroom and turned on the radio. It was playing a song that implored her to Go ask Alice. Surely not Alice Kramden, she thought. The music was strange and delirious, martial and surreal. It made her want to undress long before bedtime, and look at herself in the mirror. Strange, this.
Güsfreude was right about the hair and the escape. She was even right about the endless expanse of imagination and desire that lay within the heart of her grand-daughter.
Yet she was wrong that no one else could see into her private world. She was not, as the aliens say, alone.
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Beatrice ran a brush through the silken waves of her hair exactly 1001 times, just as Güsfreude had instructed. She stared all the while into an old mirror someone had left at the end of their driveway a year or two earlier. She hadn’t really taken a good look at this mirror before, but she was somehow intrigued by it now.
The mirror had a simple frame, yet then she saw light traces of animal figures capering around the edges. When she looked into its centre she saw a crystal vortex. It resembled a swirling tornado, with a yellow cat’s eye at its centre. The yellow slit got wider and brighter as the sun’s light went out and the moon resembled a sickle’s edge across the throat of the prairie sky.
The straps of her white muslin outer garment slipped from her shoulders. Beneath it, her silk crimson gown followed the muslin to the checkered floor, her white skin exposed and glowing in the beige and rosy light of the room. The room seemed larger than before, as if it had expanded to take on the dimensions of her imagination.
She stared at her full breasts and her smooth skin, white as ivory. Her breath fogged up the mirror, but she could still make out a shape in the distant gloom: a cowboy in dark boots and ten-gallon hat, chanting sonnets to the moon.
She saw her body glowing in the mirror, her golden nipples sitting on her breasts like sovereigns on two alabaster orbs. She looked at her pelvis in the mirror: her pubic hair was rich and blond, with fine curls that became finer and softer as they disappeared into the fault line of her sex.
Who was this new woman she was becoming? And why was it at once frightening and exalting?
Again she thought she heard a voice, humming with a faint rumble in the twilight air: Climb, climb the invisible stairway. Enter the mirror. Seize the only thing that exists: your self. Seize the day. Welcome to the jungle.
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In the kangaroo court of the Writer, the Writer has arranged the circumstances of the crime, committed the crime, hunted down the culprit, put him on trial, read the verdict, and thrown away the key. At the end of it all, the protagonist stands accused, now and forever, or at least as long as the verdict still penetrates paper or floats in tangled webs of ether. The protagonist, however innocent he or she really was, stands accused and convicted of whatever crimes the writer finds reprehensible: showing his fangs while he eats, hissing noisily into his phone while the Writer is sitting at a table in a cafe trying to come up with the exact phrasing that would elicit an olfactory response similar to that which a sweet sixteen year-old girl would get when she looks at herself in the mirror and smells the scent of roses through her open window.
A snake has clamboured up the drainpipe and is peeking into her room, the light current of roses in the air merely an irritant in his sensitive nostrils, which prefer the pungent flood of Drakkar Noir or Paco Rabanne’s Invictus. The snake has seduced the young girl with images in mirrors of Italian towers and Venetian canals, the Eiffel Tower throbbing in the dusk. Just as in Sumer in 2000 BC and in Qumran 2000 years later, the Writer pronounces the age-old verdict: the Snake did it.
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Her lips pressed up against the surface of the mirror, pressing further than she thought possible. She wasn’t just kissing a mirror; she was kissing a second self deep in the recesses of her invisible body. She put one foot on the oak beam supporting the mirror, her knee flush against the edge of the round pool, the placid water in which she would be reborn. The other foot joined the first, and she let herself fall into this brave new world.
She did a swan-dive from a great height, plunging deep into the clean water and then resurfacing with her mind refreshed. She had cleansed the doors of her perception, and saw everything as it is, infinite.
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Next: 🎲 Between the Gandleflower Sheets
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