Mary's Room

A young woman wakes up alone in a room. She sits strapped to a chair. A blue dress covers her body. A felt hat covers her head. There are no windows.
She can’t remember how she got there. She doesn’t know anything about herself.
In front of her, a picture of herself hangs on the red wall.
All day long she stares at the picture.
Nothing ever changes.
She sits still.
She keeps her hands folded on her lap.
***
Once the young woman blinks, and the photo blinks back.
Afraid, the young woman looks away and clenches her jaw.
The young woman steadies her breathing.
Very slowly, she turns her head to look back at the photo. Very slowly, the face in photo turns to look back at her.
She cocks her head slightly, and the photo cocks its head back.
They are connected, the young woman realizes. She and the photo.
They stare at each other for a very long time.
***
One day the face in the photo starts to crack. The young woman notices a tiny crack under the photo’s eyes.
The young woman grips her chair tries to repress an awful thought. Maybe her vision is playing tricks on her.
Maybe the cracks will go away.
But the cracks remain on the photo. The cracks get wider and darker.
Finally, the young woman reaches up to touch her own face. Under her eyes, two deep cracks have formed.
When she starts to cry, she can see through her tears, the face in the photo cries too.
***
The face in the photo is falling apart.
One day, the face’s forehead cracks, then the young woman’s forehead cracks.
One day, cracks split the photo’s cheeks, and they split the young woman’s cheeks too.
One day cracks form over the photo’s lips, and then they form above the young woman’s lips.
The woman doesn’t even need to touch her face to feel the cracks anymore: her spilt face aches.
Soon her hands, folded in her lap, crack too. She tries to push her skin back together, but the cracks just get darker, wider, deeper.
She pushes her hands and her face back together for hours, but nothing she does works.
Inevitably, the young woman is falling apart.
***
One day the young woman falls asleep and doesn’t wake up.
***
The maintenance men go to check on Apartment 434 because the ladies on the fourth floor complain something smells. The ladies say the smell is seeping out from under the door.
Probably nothing is wrong. Probably it’s a dead rat.
No one’s been in Apartment 434 in years.
The maintenance men get the key from the front desk.
They go upstairs.
They open the door.
In the middle of the room, a very old woman, strapped to a chair, is slumped over. There are claw marks on her hands and cheeks, and blood dried on her fingernails. 
She faces a mirror.
The men stand in the doorway for a while.
Finally someone goes inside. He picks up the body and carries her out.
The other maintenance man stares at the barren room, the chair and the mirror. He shivers. He closes the door.
Category:Mirrors