Chapter LXXX - Green Eyes

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-Millie-

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I sit stationary as he paints the peach across my lips, his tongue between his teeth in concentration. He dips his paintbrush back into the cream, then returns it to my mouth, outlining and filling and stepping back to admire. He hums as he does it, under his breath, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. My hair is teased down, set into ringlets. The high is wearing off. He raises my stiff arms, his touch light, and lifts the lace of the previous dress over my head.

I look down.

This is a mistake. My body is increasingly unfamiliar to me; my mind exists as a discrete coordinator, as if my consciousness floats some distance above this sad, strange picture of depleting anatomy. The person I'm looking at is wretchedly thin. All femininity has been stripped away: she is comprised entirely of sharp angles, pointed bone, linear ridges. The geometric girl is translucent in her pallor. Her stomach curves incorrectly; outwards rather than inwards, only slightly, shielding a second, parasitic pulse. It's almost imperceptible. I sense the change, because I study this woman daily. He has yet to notice.

He doesn't see her as a victim of her own, personal holocaust. I can only imagine the world through his eyes: pink-tinted, filling out flesh with his gaze, adding a flush to her cheeks, putting a smile on her face. A painter in his own right. I wonder how long it will be before the weight loss begins to take its toll on my health; with thinning of the muscle comes thinning of the heart walls, and this – in combination with the drug-induced irregularity of my heartbeat – may be the blessing I need. An involuntary suicide.

He can't stop this one.

As new fabric is lowered over my head, I think about the cocaine promise. It works as a deal, established silently through trial and error: I will let myself be manipulated like a china doll, let myself be driven out into the world that now terrifies me, let myself be sat at a table in a restaurant with hundreds of preying eyes on my back, let myself be subjected to conversation I won't hear and carried back to a bed for the inevitable closure – and, at the end of it all, he will give me my little needle and I shall reward myself for my endurance.

Cold metal is laid across my collarbone, and the clasp is fastened behind my neck. Something is pinned to the side of my head. After another few minutes of touching and adjusting and touching again, he moves back, hands together, head to one side. I sense him smile – and then he turns away, returning with a mirror, ovular and ornate and studded with mother of pearl. He holds it up in front of me.

I see myself fully for the first time.

There is something paralysing in the recognition, the realisation that the woman, the geometric girl, the holocaust victim and myself are all one body, bound together by some terrible biological mistake. The horror in my head is reflected on her cut-carved face, made porcelain under layers of powder and cream and peach lipstick. There is a flower in my hair, a white flower, an iris. I don't see myself. I see the dead women they found on the pavement and in his possession and on the mortuary slab. I see the women who died under my name.

I feel a splintering in my mind.

It happens very quickly. I stand, and the room rushes like running water – but I stay on my feet and I tear the iris from my hair, ripping out a small clump of curls in the process. The mirror is knocked – or perhaps I push it – and it hits the marble with a glass detonation. My reflection is broken on contact. The dead woman shatters.

I watch him kneel down and begin scooping the mirror fragments into his palm, picking up the pieces in order to put them back together.

"Stop it."

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