"Mirrors should think longer before they reflect." -Jean Cocteau
I don't believe anything has ever truly been said on the complexity of mirrors, except for in, perhaps, a Louis Carroll novel. Therefore, I must ask you to bear with me, and, I promise, I'm not high, I'm merely the narrator of a group of junkies.
When you look in a mirror, any action you do is repeated. But, what if you were the reflection? What if you were the one who had to copy and mimic all the bad decisions the person on the other side made, and you had to live with it? That'd be a let-down, I imagine.
It is for this reason, and for this reason only, that Sara has always looked at mirrors with a strange sense of keen interest and also faint fear, for, if you don't look, there is nothing to be reflected. However, there Sara stood on that warm day, looking in that mirror and pondering its power… of course, she was also incredibly high.
The mirror reflected the exterior, as mirrors are quite famous for doing. But, what if it had reflected the interior? Thoughts like this often crossed Sara's mind when she looked in mirrors. She was completely unable to explain why she found this so strange, so foreign, yet, she understood it very well in her own mind.
After staring for a few minutes, she took a tourniquet that sat atop her dresser and fastened it around her upper-arm. She proceeded to turn it, as the title suggests you do, until it was tight around her arm. She then held the bar in place using her teeth while she grappled for her loaded syringe with her hands.
Clearly, this was normally done with two people, seeing as it's a much safer procedure with another helping with the handiwork. However, Sara was confident in her abilities, seeing as she had done this so many times before. When she stuck it in a vein, it was simply child's play.
She pushed the plunger and the liquids shot up into her system.
Her husband would be angry. He was normally angry. Eugene, a man who previously seemed of reason, became incredibly possessive when he married Sara, possessive to the point that it was creepy. "Where are you going?" He'd ask. "When will you return?" He'd ask again.
Those are two normal questions, of course.
"Are you sleeping with him?" "We will not discuss this again until you're sober." "Are you sure you're not sleeping with him?" "Are you sure you're not high?" Oh, but the suspicion, it was not the worst. The worst was the belittling. He believed that if he could assert his place as alpha, perhaps she would stay.
It had worked thus far.
Eugene looked into his mirror and, though he tried to focus on shaving, all he could look at was his skin. His dark, dark skin. Despite living in New Orleans, Eugene was a black man who believed in white supremacy due to his upbringing. Because of this, his insecurity levels were through the roof - all he could see when he looked at himself was a failure, and that was all due to his genetics. Though 1969 was bringing on many changes, his beliefs were not changing at all.
His insecurity caused him to become paranoid when he married Sara. He knew there were better looking men all around, men that society would accept as 'good men.' Of course, society didn't accept him as a good man not because he was black, but because he was a lonely, violent taxidermist who worked with axes in the backyard when he wasn't working on a new scene involving dead animals.
Eugene also knew about his wife's "people," the radicals, and he knew about their sexuality and their "free love." Finally, if that was not enough, his wife constantly avoided him and, instead, spent time with her two radical pals, Tom and Roxanne. Tom was a fairly attractive young man ('for a flower child,' Eugene would say), and, deep inside, Eugene knew he was a threat to his relationship with Sara.
