—
a carving knife
, said her reflection.
Well, that might come in handy.
It just might,
she thought. She saw her hand slowly reach out toward it, her fingers closing around it. It felt good, had a good heft to it—why hadn’t she noticed that about it before? She turned it slowly in her hand and watched the reflection of the overhead light enter the flat of its blade and then slide off and then slide back on when she turned it
back. It was like the knife was winking at her, like there was a secret between her and the knife. She glanced up at her reflection and saw that it was winking at her as well, the sly smile having been transformed into a leer. A part of her was a little horrified by what she saw, but a larger part of her was delighted. Yes, Keith had spent so many years stamping her down, controlling her. How wonderful it was to finally be able to stretch out a little bit and show her inner self.
“We’re in charge now,” she whispered to the knife. She turned it just right and lo and behold she saw her reflection in it, stretched a little, cut off at the top of the head, but still there. She was seeing herself in the knife now. She was the knife.
Now what are you going to do with me?
her reflection asked, the knife asked.
Use me?
She gave a low laugh. It came out sounding a little funny, like something was wrong with her vocal cords. A part of her registered that and filed it away, but most of the rest of her didn’t care. It felt so good to be free.
She let her gaze drift away from the knife and back to the window. Her reflection was there, too. She watched the reflection slowly lift the carving knife and begin hacking off her hair. Strands of it drifted down into the sink and onto the counter. A new Virginia began to come out, a woman with short hair, thatched in places and in other places cut close to the scalp. She looked tough. And more than that, she looked dangerous.
She reached up to feel her new head, was shocked when she felt the hair still there. The actual knife hadn’t moved—her reflection was somehow not following her, was instead showing her what to do. Now it was gesturing to her, telling her it was her turn.
She brought the knife up and grabbed a fistful of hair. In the window, her reflection was behaving. It had gone back to being her reflection, was showing her what she was doing again. She watched as the hair began to fall, felt the tug of the knife as she sawed the blade through her hair, trying to crop it as close to the skull as possible.
Her hand slipped and she jabbed her head, making a gash near her temple. It began to throb and bled feebly for a moment. In the window she saw her reflection reach up and touch the cut, then bring a blood-covered finger to its mouth. It licked the finger clean, its eyes crinkling with pleasure.
A few moments later she had finished. The water in the sink had gone cloudy with blood. She looked at her reflection. She looked beautiful, her head shorn nearly bare, little lines of blood dripping down here and there where her hand had slipped or she had cut too close. Yes, she was gorgeous.
In the window, her reflection smiled. Then it carefully shucked its shirt and dropped it out of sight. It took off its bra, its breasts now dangling loose, sagging. It took the carving knife and very deftly began to cut into its own chest. It traced out a circle on its chest, then drew a cross within it, then an upward facing semicircle at the head of the cross, a downward facing one through its base.
Wow, she could become even more beautiful.
It gestured to her. Was it her turn now? It was!
She lifted her shirt off and dropped it onto the floor. She unhooked her bra and let that go, too. It fell into the water and floated for a moment before slowly becoming sodden and beginning to sink. She brought the knife to her skin and pressed it against herself until it broke through. It hurt a little, but it was a pain she enjoyed. It was the pain of letting go, of becoming something new, something that could be controlled. Panting, she brought the knife around to form a ragged, bloody circle. The upright of the cross was hard since at times it almost scraped bone, but soon she’d finished it.
It hurt. God, it hurt a lot, more than anything she’d ever felt. Even more than that time when Keith had gotten drunk and hit her until she had to go to the hospital. But when she was done carving, she looked amazing. Like some sort of demonic goddess standing there with a shaved and bloody head and her chest radiating fire from the symbol she had made.
She started to put the knife down on the counter, but then she caught sight of her reflection in its blade.
Not yet, Virginia
, it said.
“Not yet what?” she asked the reflection.
I don’t think you’re done with that yet,
it said.
Do you?
Not done with it? What else could she do with it? Maybe carve another symbol? She pulled the knife back closer to herself until all she was seeing was the image of her own eye, flattened and wavering on the blade. Then the eye, slowly, winked.
Watch me
, she heard the reflection in the window say. She looked up and saw her slightly askew image, watched it put its fingers to its lips and then turn and walk away from the sink, walking step by step out of the kitchen. It was gone a long time. She just stayed there, staring at the window, waiting for it to come back. When it finally did, the knife and the hand that held it looked as if they had been soaked in blood and there was blood spattered over its body, too.
Now your turn
, it said, and gave a twisted smile.
Yes
, she thought, smiling back.
Now it’s my turn.
Whitey had left the Lords playing on the in-studio speakers instead of shutting it off. Heidi felt like she wasn’t just hearing it; she was feeling it, as if it had become part of her body. Her skin buzzed and her stomach twisted. She broke out in a cold sweat.
Jesus, I must be sick
, she thought. But it felt like it was the music doing it to her, like the music was making her ill.
She tried to take a few deep breaths but it wasn’t helping. Her head was pounding now, too. She tried to get out of her chair, nearly knocked it over. She stumbled toward the door.
“Excuse me a second,” she said.
“Just where the hell do you think you’re going?” asked Herman.
But Heidi didn’t answer, just careened out of the room.
Herman shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “It’s on. This is getting fucking ridiculous.”
“Maybe she just has to pee,” said Whitey.
Herman gave him a look.
“Really? Maybe she just has to pee? Come on, she’s practically nodding out right in front of you. You can’t ever find fault with her, can you?”
Whitey just shrugged. “So what are you going to do?”
“Do? What am I going to do? I’m going after her.”
“Dude, she’s probably in the ladies’ room.”
“Well, she don’t belong there,” said Herman, standing up. “Because she ain’t no lady.”
By now she had used the knife to cut the rest of her clothes off her body, jabbing herself a few times in the process. Damn, that song was great. It was making her feel really alive. How had she been able to survive this long without it? She reached out and turned the music up, loud this time, her wet hand getting shocked again. Weirdly, it felt good. She turned it up as loud as it could go.
From the living room she heard Keith shouting at her. “Will you please turn that fucking radio down?” he called.
No
, her reflection said.
I won’t.
She smiled at herself and then turned and moved stealthily toward the living room. Behind her, she imagined her reflection doing the same thing, going into the living room that lay within the reflection, killing its mirror husband. Or wait, no, it had already done that and had come back bloody, so maybe now it was just waiting there, staring at her, watching her. She turned around to have a look and sure enough there it was, watching her go, bright now against the black glass, and with eyes that glowed red.
Go on
, it motioned to her with the reflection of the knife.
Go on.
She went on. She came to the doorway and slowly peered around it. There was Keith in his shitty La-Z-Boy, sprawled out, reading the sports page, beer on the table next to him. He hadn’t even bothered to put the beer on the coaster.
She could see the back of his head and the bald spot on top of it.
Jesus
, she heard him say, and then he half turned and she ducked back behind the doorway.
“Christ!” he said. “Turn it the hell down! I can’t hear myself think. If I have to get out of this chair and do it myself there’ll be hell to pay!”
She stayed there against the wall until she heard the rustle of the papers again, just audible over the radio. She peered out around the edge of the doorway. He was reading again. Slowly she shuffled forward and around the doorjamb. Keith, fool that he was, didn’t notice.
She made her way around the back of the room, clinging to the wall, until she was directly behind him and then fell to her knees and crawled across the shag rug. There she was, gently touching the back of the armchair, listening to him rustle his papers and grunt and burp just on the other side.
She felt her way along the fabric, locating where the wooden supports were hidden beneath. Carefully, she considered where he was on the other side and chose a spot.
In one fast motion she drove the knife through the back of the chair as hard as she could, letting out a shriek as she did so. Her husband gave a cry of surprise and pain and stumbled out of the chair to crash into the TV. He had one hand pressed to his back, blood already seeping out, and seemed unable to catch his breath. She gave a crooked smile. Maybe she’d punctured a lung.
She stood and came out from behind the chair, moved toward him.
“Virginia?” he gasped. “What the hell?”
There was fear in his eyes. He reached his hand out toward her and she flashed the knife forward, taking off two of his fingers at the knuckle. He cried out again and turned and clawed at the wall, tried to escape her by going through it and she brought the knife down again and took off one of his ears, opening a gash in his shoulder.
“Bit by bit,” she said, in a strangled voice she could hardly recognize as her own—it was almost like someone else was speaking
through her. “Just like what you did to my life!” And when he turned and looked at her in surprise, she struck out and cut open his cheek and took off most of his nose.
The knife was sharp and so the small bits were easy. After a while he was on his knees screaming for mercy. She smiled and tried to cut off Keith’s hand, but it wouldn’t come and he kept grabbing at the knife so finally she just stuck it hard and deep into her husband’s neck. He burbled for a moment, even managed to get to his feet and reel through the doorway into the kitchen. He stood there swaying for a moment, then fell facedown and got blood all over the linoleum.
Once again
, she thought,
there he goes making a mess that he expects me to clean up
.
Once he’d been down a few seconds, he stopped moving. Now it was much easier to cut the hand off.
She sat on his legs and pulled his feet up and then unlaced his shoes and pulled them off. Hell, he was a mess. His socks didn’t even match. She stripped the socks off, too, and then got to work removing the toes, going smallest to largest. She collected them in a little pile that she made just beside his mouth.
In the end she looked exactly as she had looked in the mirror, as if the knife and the hand that held it had been dipped in blood, with the rest of her body spattered in it. She returned to the sink and stood before it and looked at her reflection again. She waited for it to speak but it did not speak. Now they were the same.
She smiled. She’d never felt better in her life.
The only thing missing was that song by the Lords. She got up again and wandered around the kitchen until she found her cell phone. What was the station’s number again? She would call them and beg them to play the song again. And if they didn’t, well, they’d find she was a woman to be reckoned with. By hell, she’d go down there with her big knife and
make
them play it.
She was lying on the floor when Herman pushed his way in, the smell of vomit in the air. She’d made it into the stall but hadn’t made it as far as the toilet, had vomited all down the tile splash behind it. Damn, she was bad off. He hated to mess with her, but well, somebody had to.
But he let her be for a moment. She just lay there with her head against the cold tile. And then as the Lords song finally wound down over the bathroom sound system she began to groan. A moment later, holding her head with one hand, she pulled herself up, stumbled to the sink, turned on the water, and splashed her face.
It was only then that she noticed Herman.
He expected some wisecrack from her, some sort of quip to laugh things off or try to make him feel that she was better off than she looked. But apparently she was beyond that now, through with joking around. Which made him think that maybe it was even worse than he had thought.
“What?” she said, her eyes dead, her voice flat, like she didn’t give a shit.
It pissed him off. “What?” he said. “You want to play a little game called What? What is fucking going on? And I don’t want to hear any more bullshit excuses about not getting enough sleep or food poisoning or motion sickness or anything like that. I want the real fucking deal.”
Heidi sighed, eyes still dead. “What do you want to hear?”
“The truth would be a nice place to start this trip down bullshit road,” said Herman. “Nice place to end at, too. Even though I’m afraid that you’re going to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
“What are you so afraid of?” asked Heidi.
God, her fucking nerve. She wasn’t going to just come clean. She was going to make him say it. “What am I afraid of? Same old junkie business, baby.”