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Member
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Oregon
Gender: Female
Posts: 9
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Through the Looking Glass
This was in response to a prompt a friend gave me, "Through the Looking Glass." Please comment! constructive criticism desired.
Tammy loved her mirror. Or rather, she loved it because she could look at herself in it. Every day, before and after school, and before she went to bed, she gazed at her reflection.
Now, Tammy was a very beautiful girl. She took pride in her beauty. Everyone at school thought she was as well. Boys loved her and girls envied her. She could get any boy to help her with any little thing, merely by giving them a glance and a smile.
But Tammy loved her reflection more than any of her admirers. Sometimes she spent hours in front of it, gazing at herself, admiring the perfect shape of her face, her amazing blue eyes (carefully surrounded with make-up, of course) her full lips (accentuated with lipstick) and her high cheekbones (cleverly covered in blush). She loved stroking her long, styled, gelled, highlighted blonde hair. Tammy was in as much love with herself as any boy at school.
Tammy looked down on any girl she thought wasn’t pretty enough to share the world with her. She mostly hung out with the cheerleaders. She wasn’t a cheerleader herself, she might get bruised.
One Monday morning, as Tammy applied her daily make-up, she noticed something odd. At first she thought it was her imagination. But no. Right there, beside her left ear…what was that odd smudge? Tammy frowned. It must be a pimple forming. Irritating. She put on some cover-up. It did nothing. She put on more and it faded the teensiest bit. After several layers of cover-up (she didn’t pay much attention) her face was to her satisfaction. She went to school happily.
At lunch, her friend Patricia frowned. “What next to your ear, Tammy?”
“Agh! Is it showing again?” Tammy cried in dismay.
Patricia looked at her quizzically and closely. “No, but you have a huge glob of cover-up, it looks like. All dried up too.”
The other girls at the table had noticed as well but hadn’t dared say anything. Patricia was the bravest.
Tammy felt the spot and sure enough, a large blob came off in her hand. “M-must not have been paying attention,” she tried to joke, but couldn’t understand it. She hadn’t put that much on.
Right when she got home, Tammy tiptoed up to her mirror, and peeked nervously into it. The spot was still there.
“Darn you!” Tammy yelled at it, and went straight to bed.
The next morning she awoke with a headache. She got up and took an ibuprofen, then headed directly for the bathroom.
Down in the kitchen her mother heard a howl of anger.
“What is it, Tammy?” she called up the stairs.
“Nothing, mom! It’s all under control!” Up in the bathroom, Tammy stared in disbelief at the very obvious crow’s feet around her eyes. 16-year-olds don’t get wrinkles! Do they? She thought.
Not just that, but the smudge from yesterday had developed into an all-out bruise.
Exasperatingly, Tammy put on three layers of foundation, paying extra attention to around her eyes, and tried to cover the bruise with cover-up.
At school, the whole lunch table raised their eyebrows. Tammy’s usual picture-perfect image was marred somewhat by the ghastly amounts of goo she had on her face.
Tammy fought back tears, sure that she looked like an old woman.
“You realize your make-up is as thick as syrup?” Patricia asked.
“I know!” Tammy whispered. “I was trying to cover up a bruise, and-“
“Where?”
“That spot by my ear.”
“There’s…not a bruise there, Tammy.”
Tammy laughed. “Don’t try and make me feel better.”
Patricia just shook her head and exchanged looks with the other cheerleaders at the table.
And so the days went. Each morning when Tammy looked in the mirror her face looked worse and worse. Bruises, wrinkles, and pockmarks increased at an alarming rate. At first she tried to keep disguising it with make-up, but her friends kept giving her weird looks. Even her counselor, Ms. Adams, suggested taking a break from school.
“Sometimes you can get burned out,” she suggested helpfully. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
When the morning came that Tammy looked in the mirror to see her nose horribly misshapen, she refused to go to school. She locked herself in her room and refused to leave, and told her mother she wasn’t feeling well.
All Tammy could do was stare miserably at the mirror, wondering how this could happen to her.
“She’s in bad shape, all right.”
Tammy jumped in the air and looked around frantically. A voice?
“Yeah, I’ve never seen one like this.”
“Oh, I have,” came the first voice. “Vanity is a terrible thing for the soul.”
Tammy stood on her chair. “Who’s there?”
“Whoa! She can hear us!” came the second voice.
“She’s definitely wearing thin. Let’s do this.”
“Wha-what are you talking about?” Tammy cried fearfully.
Two hazy shapes came into being before her. They looked like rowdy teenagers, with bandanas around their heads and torn jeans and t-shirts. But they were the most gorgeous boys Tammy had ever seen. She just stared.
“Thank you for not screaming,” the first voice, a blonde, said. “I’m Van. This is Shelk.”
The other one, a redhead, bobbed his head, staring at her like a zoo animal.
Tammy’s only thought was, “I wish they could see my beautiful self.”
Van cocked his head. “We can,” he said, replying to her unspoken thought. “It’s you who cannot, unfortunately.”
Tammy looked back at her mirror. “No, look, I look like a beaten old woman!”
“That’s not your physical self, it’s what your soul looks like,” Van said matter-of-factly.
“My soul?” she cried.
They both nodded.
“How can that be?”
Shelk finally spoke. “Every time you laugh at an ugly girl, every time you break a boy’s heart, you damage your soul. Years of it has produced this effect.”
“And every time you place more importance on your looks than other things,” Van added. “No one else sees you like this but yourself, and us.”
Tammy stared in horror. “What are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Van said. “All that matters is our purpose. And that is to take your soul.”
“My SOUL?” Tammy screamed.
“It’s for your own good,” Shelk said. “Your soul is in such a bad state that if we don’t remove it, it will disintegrate and you will cease to exist.”
“You’re going to kill me?” Tammy shrieked. She had no remorse over her past deeds: ugly girls deserved to be made fun of, in her experience. It wasn’t her fault these lunatics had made her like this. And now they were going to kill her!
“But…what good will that do me? What will happen to my soul then?”
Van frowned. “We’re not allowed to talk about the afterlife. But don’t worry, we have people to take care of souls. This is our job, though: removing the soul. Plus, you don’t want to walk around as a soulless, do you? I’ve seen those and it ain’t pretty.”
“I’ve heard about them,” Shelk said in awe. “Hitler was one.”
Van nodded. “Zuza was punished for that one. She felt compassion for his sad childhood. His soul was consumed by rage at his past, because she refused to take action.”
The two boys turned their attention back to Tammy.
“We are not going to make the same mistake.”
Downstairs, Tammy’s mother heard a scream. Dropping the dish she was holding she raced upstairs. “Tammy? TAMMY! Open this door!”
The police found Tammy’s body lying on the floor, once they had broken down the door. One told reporters, “she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame.”
The morticians could find no accurate cause of death. A few hypothesized a heart attack, but no credible evidence for that could be found.
The only sign of a struggle was a mirror, shattered beside her on the floor.
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