Hannah Simpson is an author with a penchant for all things speculative, but especially horror. She is a writer for Scene magazine and a volunteer at Inspiring Women's Network, and she spends her free time collaborating on theatre projects with Feccles Drama. You can find her here: @hannahchimpsonwrites on Instagram.

Dull Reflections

Hannah Simpson

I had fallen in love with a poet who could only say the same one line to me. Over and over again, just one line. Not enough for a stanza, a sonnet or a haiku. He was so rich with words and yet when he looked at me there was nothing to be said but that one line, it broke my heart. 

The way he weaved words, it was like his tongue was cut from the finest of silks and it lashed everyone in attendance. And everyone was in attendance, the whole town bundled into that one small room of The Rightful Lockey. From the old regulars who had spent their lives out on the pub stools to the university girls who pooled in together with glimpses and nudges and too much tequila. I, of course, was one of those girls.

Arms linked with Becca and Maddie as we ploughed through the doors and then ploughed through shots and ploughed through the noise with so much more noise. 

Of course, we were singularly focused when he began to speak; our eyes, minds, hearts all tied up in the metronome of his voice. Not that I minded. I knew from the very first moment I stumbled into The Rightful Lockey that he was mine. It was as if he had sprouted from the very most hidden, shameful parts of myself, and everybody loved him for it. I loved him for it.

So, every Friday night I'd watch him on the stage that was really just the floor with a microphone and dimmed lamplight. I’d watch as the lamplight dimmed all that more, and I’d watch as the only light left was in the vibrations of his voice. I’d watch and I'd watch and soon enough I couldn’t just watch. It was torturous to know someone so well without ever having spoken to them. I began to daydream; poetry about the vastness of the world became about what he would think of me.

And then, One Friday night, I couldn’t bare it anymore. Once everyone was clearing out and while The Poet was fiddling with his microphone, I walked up to him and smiled and fluttered and charmed and waited for him to shower me with all the platitudes only a poet could make true. He didn’t.

He barely said anything. Just that one line and a pat on the shoulder. A dull pat which made me dull all over.

When I walked back to our table, Becca and Maddie were pretending to be engrossed in a conversation that had nothing to do with The Poet and me. They were terrible liars, but I gave them the satisfaction of thinking they had one over me all the way until we made it back to our flat. Then, and only then, after a bottle of pinot grigio and a box of pink gin, did I tell them how dulled The Poet had made me.

“Why didn’t he have anything to say to me? Surely, he had seen me watching him all this time. Is there just nothing to say about me?” I wailed while Becca poured the gin and Maddie patted my shoulder.

“Forget about him.” Becca said, or I think she did.

The spot where Maddie’s hand rested on my shoulder had numbed while the rest of me burned like hot coals. “Don’t. I’m sure he’ll come around.”

“Really?” I looked into her eyes, glossy and pure black and hidden beneath even blacker lashes. “Why would he?”

“Because I’m going to give you a makeover, babes.”

…

We waited until Becca had passed out on the couch. Then, Maddie led me into her bedroom. I’d been in there before, but under my drunk stupor it felt completely unfamiliar. Clothes piled on her desk, on her chair, on her bed, on her floor, hanging out from her drawers and spilling out from her wardrobe. Lip-liners were scattered all over and tubes of mascara lay in a heap on her windowsill. Maddie was completely overrun with beauty; I don’t know how she managed it.

“Get naked.” She said as she jumped onto the bed and made the pile of clothes go tumbling down around her. She didn’t seem to care.

I pulled my top off and threw it into the mess of clothes, and then I unbuttoned my jeans and soon I was just in my knickers. Big polka dot granny knickers with period blood stains that never washed out.

She leaned back, her eyes sharper and somehow darker. “Now, look in the mirror while you take them off.” – I did. The mirror was wrapped in strings and strings of fairy lights which seemed to light up my every mole, scar, pimple or roll.

“Pick something out. Something you hate.”

I scanned through my reflection as if it was a map I needed to follow. I was always terrible about reading maps. I didn’t expect to say my tits, but I did, and then Maddie came up behind me, so close I could feel her breath tickle the wispy hairs at the nape of my neck. She reached her arms around me and grabbed my tits in her hands. She squeezed them. She fondled them. I felt a haze wash over me. She twisted them. She kept twisting them, until they popped off.

I think I was supposed to scream. I think it hurt. I just couldn’t stop looking in the mirror; My reflection looked so happy.

She was still squeezing my tits in her hands as she spoke, as if they were fidget toys. “Pick something else.”

BACK,

BELLY,

ARMS,

LEGS,

HIPS,

LIPS,

EYEBROWS,

EARS,

NOSE,

SHOULDERS,

BACK,

BELLY,

BACK,

BELLY,

MY LOWER BELLY,

TOES,

LIPS,

THIN LIPS,

THIN HAIR,

CHEEKBONES,

TOO BIG,

BUM,

BELLY,

THE SPOTS I GET ON MY BACK,

LEGS,

KNEES,

HOW HAIRY MY BIG LEFT TOE IS,

EARS,

BACK,

BACK.

I picked from the list at random. It didn’t matter. Really, the ones I hated the most were equal to the ones I hated the least because I was with Maddie and she was so overrun with beauty, it was infectious.

She threw my tits to the side and clawed into my lower belly with her nails. When they chipped away, she used her nail files to shovel through all of the guts, until she hit bone. She grabbed the entrails and clean bit into them, so that her mouth was coated in the warmest shade of purple-red.

Then, she kissed me. It started out tender, and then longer, and deeper so that I could taste my guts right in the back of my throat. Once she was satisfied, she hooked her teeth around my bottom lip and ripped. She did the same with my top lip.

When she pulled away, she asked me “what do you want?”

I looked into her eyes, pitch black, and I saw a reflection of the most beautiful thing; happy and calm and completely inhuman.

I wanted so desperately to be that thing. I begged. I moaned. “Please, more. I need more.”

She plucked my ears and my nose off with ease, and like the pop of a corkscrew, blood gushed down me and made a puddle at my feet.

She scratched my bum clean off. She pulled out my hair in one big clump, which took most of my scalp clean off too. She plucked my eyebrows away, and she crushed my hips together like an accordion until they crunched gone. She pulled my nails out with her teeth and then she just pinched my toes into nothing.

By the time she got to my back, the rest of my skin had already been peeled off. She reached into what was left of my anus and pulled through my spine. She threw my spine onto the pile of bones as the last bits of me sagged to the floor.

My eyeballs watched her in segments, as they floated in the puddle of blood and bowels. First, she was stood, then she was on the floor, crawling in me, then she was naked, dripping with blood, then she was up again, crawling again, reaching, grasping the lipliner, pouting her lips, pulling out my bones.

She turned to my eyeballs. “You want him to fall in love with you? To dedicate every line to you? Well, he will.”

My right ear had rolled under the bed, so I couldn’t catch her tone very well. Still, her eyes were sharper than ever before. Sharp enough to make me feel afraid for the first time since I’d stepped into Maddie’s room.

Maddie began with my femurs. She cracked them like wishbones and arranged them into the shape of a square. Then, she grabbed my spine and bent it into two big lovely triangles. She placed my humerus and my radius bones on the top and she used the remains of my bowels to glue it all together.

She broke my teeth apart and placed them into the juts of my bones, so that I appeared like a kind of geode, with the first of my crystals only just reaching the surface and bathing in the light. She scooped up my ears and folded them in with my skin. She did not give me back my eyes; there was no need.

When, finally she was done, she pulled my skin taut and gift-wrapped me up.

I felt all of the colours of the rainbow wash over me like a tidal wave of light, and it was glorious! And at the very same moment I felt the absence of light like an abscess at my teeth, panging with pain at every point on my body.

I was a Prism.

No really, I was a Prism.

Maddie had made me into a reflective Prism so that I would always be loved by whoever I turned my attention towards. Whoever set their eyes upon me, would see the most coveted of their visions reflected back.

When she was finished, she turned her back to me, picked up my eyes and cried. They rolled over her hands, taking in every wrinkle and crevice as her tears washed them free of the blood.

“I’m keeping the eyes.” She choked out in between her sobs.

…

I rolled into The Rightful Lockey that Friday night, and I listened to The Poet with an unencumbered admiration. Every line echoed inside the frame of my bones. Every word pressed against my skin and re-wrote themselves in my veins.

Once The Poet had finished his set for the night, I rolled over to him. As I waited for him to speak, I wondered what he might be seeing? What was his most beautiful of visions? What would it inspire him to say? I was giddy with the excitement of it, that I might finally hear the poem I had been waiting for, for months!

I felt his hand on my shoulder first. Followed by that same dull. Then, he spoke. When he spoke, he did not speak like a poet, he spoke like a man.

I listened to him, as he rambled and stumbled, in a hurry to get it all out. From this, I inferred his most coveted of visions:

A man in a suit, with a big kind grin, flicking through a big red book. The book is sopping wet and dripping with blood.

To this man, The Poet told everything. Every secret, every shame.

He told the man about the time he shat himself in the middle of class and had to sit in his soiled boxers until the end of the day, as more and more of his classmates asked about the smell.

He told the man about the time he slapped his mum in the face, to stop her screaming.

He told the man about the first time he slept with a woman and how she begged him to hit her.

Soon enough, every confession blurred into the next, until I had heard his whole life in spots. They broke out on my skin.

When the bartender kicked us out, The Poet took me back to his flat. There, he washed me in his finest liquor. He rolled me over in his hands, feeling every bump, every ridge, every tooth.

“What are you?” he asked. It rang out like a dull thrum in my Prism.

When I didn’t respond, he pulled me into his chest and said, “whatever you are, I think I’ll keep you.”

And he did. The Poet – whose name is Brian by the way – he keeps me in his room, leaned against the door. I don’t get to hear him in The Rightful Lockey anymore. Instead, I hear him all the time. I hear him ramble to the man with the red book or to his reflection, or just to the stretch of skin and bones.

When he’s gone, I try not to hear anything. Instead, I focus on watching, and I watch as Maddie cries.

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