Mirror Mary

"Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Ma--"

Jennifer gasps as a face seems to peer through the dark bathroom mirror. She can’t even see herself or the stalls behind her anymore and she knows no one could have hidden in the tiny bathroom. Couldn’t-shouldn’t-wouldn’t-doesn’t matter because there’s a woman where no woman should be. Flames flicker into life where eyes should be. It's not the candle on the sink; Jennifer snuffs it with her fingers just to be sure. It goes out as her fingers scorch and it's not.

The woman with eyes like twin candle flames dancing in the dark peers out from the other side of the mirror. The flames without wicks glimmer and grow as they seem to spy the girl in the bathroom.

Entranced, Jennifer reaches out and places the hand with the waxy-blistered-burned fingers on the silvered glass. A pale hand comes into the not-quite-light on the other side of the glass to mirror her own, and Jennifer imagines that she can feel a cool heat radiating from the hand. It numbs her burned fingers and she sighs, but not with relief.

The other woman draws close to the so-fragile-so-strong barrier and peers closely at Jennifer. Her pale, pale face seems to soften, candle eyes dancing and twisting in some unseen breeze, and suddenly Jennifer feels smooth-cold flesh beneath-between her fingers. The woman's hand has tangled with her own and is gently but insistently pulling her forward, down into the mirror.

Jennifer doesn’t even cry out as she passes through the icy-cold-weird darkness that was the mirror, into a world full of wet red velvety warmth and a pair of arms that soothe and arouse.

Sometimes the long hands at the ends of those arms hold long slivers of shiny steel that scratch and scrape and hurt, but then it changes to oh sweet agony and ah bitter pleasure. Then sometimes the searing shards are covered in someone else's blood when Mary comes back from a mirror and that makes it all the sweeter.