BY CRISTINA CORREA

•••••Unaccountable for anyone or anything, she woke up one day and decided that she didn’t like herself. She wasn’t ready for the dramatics of swallowing, inhaling, or inserting death into her body, so she spread herself out to dry and soon evaporated, turning into powdered milk.

•••••Her parents didn’t know what to do with her: she was always such a good girl, no trouble. Hugs didn’t work. Food sat uneaten. Everything she lived for was now a dead fly on a windowsill. She wanted to rip her veins out and eat them, but she’d never tell a soul.

•••••Her parents decided on therapy. Neither she nor the therapist recalled each other’s names. Neither she nor the therapist took their work home.

•••••The therapist’s office was supposed to feel like a womb. Empty, except for her, and ribbed with hugging flesh — the walls were supposed to be wet with tears and sweaty blood gushing around the corners. Instead, it was filled with semi-tropical houseplants and paintings of cabins, otherwise, the goals of good therapy.

•••••They always chose the same seats. The room was set up on an even plane so that no one was the lesser. But it meant nothing. Seating arrangements meant nothing. The lady with the sharp eyeglasses and flared nostrils, writing fervently on her notepad, clearly maintained the upper hand. She was being paid. She was called Doctor So-and-so. She wore dress suits and Chanel No. 5. She was not nothing.

•••••Things began to sound like they were traveling through other things before getting to her ears. They stopped off the path, got a bite to eat, took a swim and then a nap, asked for directions, spun and looped, got distracted. What could she do about it but have things repeated to her over and over? What could she do but search for the scars of words in people’s lips, wishing fearfully that she could remember what they sounded like?

•••••He is her Grandpa, he is her Papi, he is her half-father, he has been dead for thirty years. But she talked to him as if he was really asking her questions, and really searching for answers. He was. He has no color in his body save that thick, raven hair she inherited like a dowry. He’s still short and fat, as hungry as he is. But he was never there for handouts. He wanted to save his girl. He wanted to break her in so she could live.

•••••She only saw him at night after the moon had swallowed itself and the refrigerator hummed lullabies. He wore a brown suit that was pleated and cuffed exactly as it should be. Sometimes he held a microphone and was announcing a radio program into speakers that existed forty-five years ago. Sometimes he was sitting at a typewriter and asking her questions in choppy, mechanical streams of consciousness.

•••••Today he is following her around her bedroom and yelling at her because she never listens to anything anymore. She ignores him, and he doesn’t like it. But what he has failed to understand is that she cannot hear anything but him. She only wants to hear something real.

•••••She wants to lift it over her head and spin with it. She wants to yell “fuck you” to God and make him shiver the way “fuck you” should make things shiver.

•••••He is standing on the shower’s lip and yelling at her to stop, keep going, go faster, stop. Mosquitoes bounce off the shower tiles through him like bullets. They tease around her ears like a lover, but she is loveless as anyone can be before they are about to die.

•••••“Fight with me, girl. Be a bulldog. Eat your last steak.” He is jumping up and down on the shower’s edge and his eyes are bouncing with the rest of him. “Fight!” He lifts his left fist. It bounces too. He is on a trampoline the dead often travel on.

•••••Her eyes are tight and wet facing her mirror eyes that somehow look happier. All of her is clenched so tight she looks like a seashell. She is trying to cry something out of herself, heaving her hips back and forth against the sink porcelain. She will force it out of herself like a mother, and it will be her. A wet gob of child, screaming and green.

•••••It is not bad luck for seven years. The bad luck starts with the first blow and ends when the last shard of glass is swept or stuck in the last toe. The trick is to sprinkle the floor with water before sweeping it clean. Then your bad luck will be swept away, too. But she is alone with the whispers and yells, and can’t hear anything in between.

•••••“Baby, you have to do it.” Her grandfather is cradling her head between his thick-thumbed hands. He is lulling her with his deep-breathing chest, and it is working. “Baby, if you trust me then you will be okay. But if you don’t trust me, what do you have?”

•••••She has arrested her lungs with her hard sobbing and her head is throbbing like a machine as she tries to hide from herself inside of herself. Leaving here is not an option. The only safeties lie inside. Inside of her, of him, of the mirror.

•••••She has been punching herself in the ribs and chest with the violent frustration of having everything taken away from you by you. She has been watching her face turn redder and wetter with her frustration and is punching herself furiously. She is in a white camisole and white panties. She is as naked as she has always been. She is ready to die.

•••••“Why don’t you fucking listen to me, little girl? Don’t you think I know something about the world? I’m here for you for a fucking reason. Wake up! Listen to me.” His face is all jowls after he yelps. He is all heavy eyelids from worry. Shouldn’t worry have been erased at the time of his death? He doesn’t know.

•••••His arms are wrapped around her shoulders from behind her, but she can’t feel him. She can’t even feel herself. There is a bathtub to her left, a toilet to her right, a radiator and towel rack behind her, and she chooses to face front.

•••••In front of her, the mirror is long and above an old, short porcelain sink with knobs shaped like ugly flowers that turn on the hot water, left knob, and cold water, right knob. She knows this place for every speck of dust from dry skin and foot powder, every dollop of moisturizer that is on the wall, every scrap of toilet paper that has fallen next to the toilet on the floor. She has been inspecting it for the last few hours that her parents were out this Sunday afternoon, and she has decided, it is a perfect place to be perfectly inside of herself.

•••••She kisses her right fist because this is the only way she feels that she can acknowledge her grandfather besides doing what he tells her to do. At this motion, he lets go of her and breathes out a little bit harder than he’s been used to. It was a stroke that killed him. When he died: his heart couldn’t breathe, his lungs only floated, his knees locked outwards, his tongue effervesced.

•••••She pulls her arm back as far as it will go and pushes it with the force of something that will soon be broken. Her fist hits the glass in the middle where her nose’s reflection used to stare at her. Her knuckles feel like an explosion of powders. The glass is in long, thin shards and short, fat shards. But hardly any of them are very small. They are all at least the width of her hand. She is ready now, because she is inside of it. The mirror has opened up to her and she is inside of it.