The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

A Mirror Meets a Girl
by Angela Yuriko Smith

The reflection, a girl, omnipotent with cause and effect, cold feet, alone, death. She doesn’t work for the meritocracy because inevitability and complacency are for winners. She is the grindstone, a loser forfeiting nothing, a servant of anarchy until…

… she sees her reflection and a voice screams, rough like stone made molten, lava sliding from her ear holes, rising from her throat like an objection, a rejection to escape from her soul, still steaming from giving a little life to another: a small cost here, a hand up there because in giving it’s unfair until the second when the last breath snaps a nerve and that voice is a feast of karma ripping through the veil with discordant sacred symphony to say… 

I will fill your empty bowl with a return of nothing and feed it back to you until you burst.

A girl thinks on that
and feels her soul untether—
her end wreckoning.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space and Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.