Alice (Prompt: Shines Right Through)
X-posted to fiery_quills
I will freely admit it. This piece is short. And weird.
Enjoy.
She's the reflection in the glass.
Her fingers trace the cold surface, skimming, lingering, and it looks like they're touching skin to skin, but they're not; there's always that space, that disconnect, between them. She's Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass, the shadow you see behind you that disappears the moment you turn around. She can only mimic life, follow and trace the movements of others on the glass, and she mimics it well, light and graceful, so well that if you were to glance at her with the blackness of night behind, you might mistake her for something real.
But when the sun rises it shines right through her, a crystal illusion dispelled by the glare of the sun, and she fades to transparency, shy and retreating, barely there, and people walk right by her without noticing she's there. She huddles in crowds, drowning in too much humanity without enough of it. She stands alone in the rain, staring at herself staring at herself, and the rain pours down and soaks her hair flat, dripping dark and ragged down her face like streams of ink. She's running at the edges. Her reality needs repairing. She doesn't have much time left to fix it.
She's the reflection in the glass, silent, there one minute, gone the next. She can only mime speaking. She cannot say anything on her own unless someone else says it first, and she can mouth the words along with them. No one looks at the reflection, though; not when the reality is so much more solid, so much more real, but she lies there pressed against the glass and she mouths the words she's seen formed hundreds of times before, all the things that the body does not have the courage to say, but no one's looking and no one cares.
She wants to shatter every window, every mirror she slides through, into millions of glittering fragments, falling apart into a myriad of little faces with a myriad of little voices, all soundless, all mouthing the words and meaning them from the bottom of her heart. She thinks that maybe - if only -
She could be free.
I will freely admit it. This piece is short. And weird.
Enjoy.
She's the reflection in the glass.
Her fingers trace the cold surface, skimming, lingering, and it looks like they're touching skin to skin, but they're not; there's always that space, that disconnect, between them. She's Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass, the shadow you see behind you that disappears the moment you turn around. She can only mimic life, follow and trace the movements of others on the glass, and she mimics it well, light and graceful, so well that if you were to glance at her with the blackness of night behind, you might mistake her for something real.
But when the sun rises it shines right through her, a crystal illusion dispelled by the glare of the sun, and she fades to transparency, shy and retreating, barely there, and people walk right by her without noticing she's there. She huddles in crowds, drowning in too much humanity without enough of it. She stands alone in the rain, staring at herself staring at herself, and the rain pours down and soaks her hair flat, dripping dark and ragged down her face like streams of ink. She's running at the edges. Her reality needs repairing. She doesn't have much time left to fix it.
She's the reflection in the glass, silent, there one minute, gone the next. She can only mime speaking. She cannot say anything on her own unless someone else says it first, and she can mouth the words along with them. No one looks at the reflection, though; not when the reality is so much more solid, so much more real, but she lies there pressed against the glass and she mouths the words she's seen formed hundreds of times before, all the things that the body does not have the courage to say, but no one's looking and no one cares.
She wants to shatter every window, every mirror she slides through, into millions of glittering fragments, falling apart into a myriad of little faces with a myriad of little voices, all soundless, all mouthing the words and meaning them from the bottom of her heart. She thinks that maybe - if only -
She could be free.