Mirror Fast

She was beautiful.

Unreal. Impossible, but true. The kind of woman strangers stopped to look at. A second. Just a hitch of foot and eye before they swerved away, continued on their way, and forgot that the world contained anything less than mundane. Her skin was taut, porcelain; the shine of serum and lotion locking in place like a fresh coat of wax. Her body was sculpted by the temple of repetition: early mornings, controlled breathing, the click-clack of machine and weights against a gym’s oiled floors. She was curvy where curves were allowed: waist narrow, hips precise, arms chiseled but not bulky, legs long and unthick.

Her hair was a cathedral built on discipline; not a strand ever astray. Perfume clung to her skin in wafts of luxury. Her beauty regime was an unbroken litany: three hours each night, a ritual of creams and oils and exfoliants and masks and the patient pulling and prodding of flesh into willingness.

Life was easier this way.

She could not deny it. People met her eyes now. Talked to her as if she mattered, as if her thoughts were things that could be spoken. Shopkeepers smiled with their eyes, not a twitch of pity. Boyfriends were easy to come by; they gathered like moths around her flame, flickered, burned out, and were replaced before the ashes had time to cool.

But she did not live life as she had before.

In some ways, it had been so much harder when she was fat. Stairs that left her breathless, clothes that fit only in certain stores, the sideways glances of strangers. But she had still laughed more. Gone to the movies with friends who would whisper during the previews, mouths full of popcorn with extra butter. Roamed night markets and eaten hot fried dough that would burn her tongue. Her friends had been like her: fat or chubby, soft-bodied and open-hearted. Kind. Loud. They told each other everything, and when one wept the others would stay until the crying became something else.

She had left them all behind without a backward glance.

Her friends now were gorgeous—razor-boned and glass-eyed, women who complimented each other’s dresses while silently tallying calories, who smiled at a party only to ridicule each other’s hair in the bathroom. Their cruelty was quiet, perfumed, and constant. She worked to keep pace because to fall behind was to fade.

There were no photographs of her before. None in this house. Not in the pristine white frames on her dresser, not in the gold-edged prints on the wall. The camera roll on her phone began three years ago, the day her cheekbones first cut into the landscape of her face, the day her jawline no longer disappeared.

She hated the fat girl she had been. The one with thighs that touched, who had filled sleeves to the seam, whose face was a moon eclipsed. She hated her with a clean, pure venom that felt like righteousness.

But she saw her now.

It came first in a dream—thick hands grasping the sides of her shirt, the heavy panting of lungs too large for this life, a smile that was too full, too open. The fat girl stood there in the soft light, eyes sad, mouth wet, cheeks flushed with the simple comfort of existing. You still don’t love yourself , she said.

She awoke with her heart battering her ribs. The sweat stuck in patches beneath her perfect breasts, in the crooks of her elbows, behind her knees. Vile, sticky proof of a body that could fail her. She showered twice that morning. She added another half-hour to her workout. She bought a new serum that promised to wipe away any trace of fatigue.

The second time, the fat girl materialized in a downtown window, polished and clean. She was eating a cone of vanilla ice cream, her lips shiny. When it dripped, she licked her fingers. People walked by without sneering. Without looking away.

You still don’t love yourself , she mouthed again, white ice cream on her tongue.

The days thickened with her. She appeared in the reflection of her blender’s steel body, smirking, a smear of tomato sauce on her chin. In the glare of the television set when it went black, a basket of fries cradled in her arms like an offering. In the gleam of the bathtub’s curve, her thighs spreading into the water.

The mirrors were worst.

At first, it was only a shimmer: her own sleek figure melting, swelling, fullness blooming where smoothness should be. Then the process hastened: cheeks ballooning, lips splitting wide in an impossible smile, eyes bloating black and wet. Skin sagged and folded, but each fold twitched as though alive. She realized, with almost clinical clarity, that this was not a haunting. This was not her past self. This was her self-hatred given shape, given weight, given hunger.

This was everything she had starved herself for, compressed into a single truth: she had sacrificed joy, love, and comfort for a body that would still never be enough for her.

And the thing in the glass knew it.

Its mouth yawned, revealing tooth upon layer of tooth. A thick, gray tongue slithered over them, slick with saliva.

You still don’t love yourself.

Her stomach clenched. She wanted to vomit, but instead she lunged for the porcelain cup by the sink. She hurled it. Glass cracked but did not shatter. The reflection swelled forward, features bubbling like wax near a flame. Limbs lengthened, distorting into grotesques of her own, each finger sharpened into something jagged and wet.

She struck again and again. The cracks webbed outward. The monster’s eyes multiplied in the fractures until the mirror was filled with hundreds of them—each one her own, each one hating.

She grasped a shard from the frame and thrust it forward.

The reflection screamed without sound, and she realized, horrified, that her own mouth was moving in tandem. Her arms thickened mid-swing, her hair coalescing into wet ropes, her skin splitting at the seams of her joints. She stabbed again and again, each blow sinking into the soft pulp of her own thigh, her stomach, her chest.

Blood ran down her arms, her legs, her feet. She caught her reflection in a remaining shard and saw no perfect woman there now, no beauty, just the swollen, grotesque face from the glass, her own features drowned in flesh and teeth.

She tried to speak, to protest, but her voice came out layered—hers and the monster’s at once:

You still don’t love yourself.

The realization hollowed her. Every gym hour, every sleepless night in front of a vanity, every plate of food she had pushed away—it had all been for a prize that crumbled in her hands. She had won nothing. She had killed joy to preserve beauty and beauty had rotted in her grip.

Her knees buckled. The mirror shard clattered from her fingers.

The thing—herself—knelt with her, their blood pooling together until it was impossible to tell whose was whose. She reached for its face, or maybe her own, feeling the softness give way beneath her fingertips.

She lay down beside it, staring at the ceiling.

For the first time in years, she let her hair fall into her face.

When the darkness came, she did not fight it.