Shattered Mirror

This week's Red Writing Hood prompt was to write a first-person piece from the point of view of someone that drives us crazy, really gets under our skin.  Thanks to Abbey, I've got Disney princesses on the brain, so I stretched the idea of the prompt and updated a bit of Snow White as the Evil Queen.  I guess I should note that all references to Vogue are completely fictional, which is probably obvious, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!


My phone buzzes again and again as I sit in the reclined chair, tiny needles injecting toxins into the almost imperceptible wrinkles only my dermatologist and I will ever see.

In the cab, I quickly scan through the text messages, my face either painfully or pleasantly numb; I can’t tell the difference anymore. I don’t even listen to the voice mails, knowing they’re all variations of the same message: Congratulations on the latest Vogue cover.

The magazine hasn’t even gone to print, but word travels fast in a world where what is current changes by the minute.

Bile creeps into my throat.

Delete all.

I haven’t gotten this amount of congratulatory calls in a long time, possibly since my first cover too many years ago. September Vogue might be considered a coup, but I’ve been there before.

Anger pushes the bile back into my stomach, shifting into a cold fist of panic and anxiety.

My hands are shaking as I pull my compact out of the ridiculously expensive satchel on the seat beside me. Helplessly I hold the compact close to my oft-photographed face, turning to let the bright sunlight stream through the dirty filter of the cab’s window.

Thirty, forty, fifty phone calls congratulating me on something that has been my job, my life, for as long as I can remember, something that wouldn’t have been a surprise even two years ago, means only one thing.

Old.

I am getting old.

Staring into the mirror, I can’t see any of the panic that fills my insides, a welcome change from the hollow emptiness that comes from years of coffee breakfasts and diet soda lunches. My doctor is unparalleled, perfectly perched on the Botox scale that so easily tips from unlined to unmoving, toeing the collagen line that divides the lush from the comical. When I shot my first cover, I had never considered letting a needle near the face they were paying me to photograph.

I search the face in the mirror for signs of aging, tiredness, gravity. My face, my livelihood, can’t calm my anxiety. Only thoughts of the Vogue cover, the photo vivid and exquisite in my memory, slow my racing heart.

My phone rings, then stops. Rings again. My agent’s ring tone.

There’s a problem with the cover. It’s not going to run. They’re swapping it for a photo from a small shoot they did yesterday morning, with a young model so fresh her head shot’s not even on her agency’s website. They say her name is Eirwen*; she doesn’t use a last name.

The voice on the phone is reassuring me, but I don’t hear it. Bile rises again, anxiety flamed into anger once again. I hurl the compact against the window, shattering the mirror. Blood pounds in my ears, mocking me: old, tired, hag, finished.

I am twenty-four years old.

*Eirwen is Welsh for "white as snow", at least according to my Google search research