Shunt

It was all slower than motion. He put the mirror in front of his face and peered into it. The decreasing light among the flickering branches at the edge of his vision rippled across his features, as if he were a drowning man. Scarlet Lady sat back into the shadows beside him, having settled out of profile, once she had encouraged him to take a look into the dark mirror.

It was a handjob, so he had only one set of fingers free to dab at the pouches under his wriggling lashes. Pulpy to the touch, it made the eyeballs bulge from their sockets and threaten to burst out from their wild stares.

“Don’t forget the nose,” hissed Scarlet Lady, again reminding him of her continuing presence at the back of his mind.

He took the fleshy wadge and squeezed it so hard, the sealed nostril bulbs became just snot between the fingers.

“And the mouth...”

He made as if to reply, but instead wrinkled up the lips into a kiss shape: laid them gently to the coldness of the glass. He attempted to tongue...but the shimmering glass had several ingrowing edges across its iceweb surface.

It was the mirror tonguing back at him with a jagged shard that audibly splintered into the soft palate.

He turned questioningly, almost innocently, towards Scarlet Lady, as the light seeped from the laddering black veil that her face had become.

Blood drooled down his chin, as if he had over-filled at the human pump.

He had recalled the windscreen heading towards him at breakneck speed; and instantaneously, with the realisation he and the giggling girl had forgotten to fasten their seat-belts, and had a gratuitous vision that only death in the first few milliseconds of its life could make him forget.

(published 'Dementia 13' 1990)