Sometimes, to get the best reflection, you have to smash the mirror. As each shard of glass falls to the ground the sharp, piercing sounds take with them the last fragments of her clarity, leaving her askew, unbalanced and adrift.
Here, in the dark space behind the mirror, she is weightless...
She blinks, waiting to become accustomed to the darkness, waiting to see what will unfold now that she is unfetter, unlaced.
"Time to lace you up again, I think. After all, the show isn't over yet."
She feels the soft brushes of fingertips ghosting across her ankles and lets her eyes flutter open, again. The light floods in and blinds her, momentarily. She closes her eyes and, lidded, turns them towards the harsh dressing room lights. Red and orange and yellow and veined...the bloody warmth of the womb reflected in her eyes.
Steeling herself, she opens them again...looks down.
A solemn, dark eyed woman kneels at her injured feet, industriously winding the silken ribbons of her toe shoes up her too pale legs. Perhaps, she thinks, she should be frightened. Perhaps, she considers, she should ask this strange woman how she got into her dressing room...
But those are questions for the Nina with the unbroken mirror to ask. This is the Nina behind the mirror so; instead, she simply offers, not unlike a comment on the weather, this:
"I just killed my rival, you know."
The dark eyed woman's eyes lighten, imperceptibly...or are they just taking in the reflection from the dressing room lamps? Who knows? It is not ours, as the poet said, to question why.
"No...you haven't. Not yet, not really." She replies, deftly tying each bow. She stands, unfolding like a wilted, blackened flower being dragged, unwillingly, into the sunlight.
Nina looks up at her, blinks, and looks again.
"Then who's in my closet? Hm?" She sneers, calling upon her newfound bravado and clicking her teeth together, luxuriating in the sudden thrill of pain as they grind together.
"When you know that, you'll know everything you need to know." The woman replies, grinning lopsidedly, as if there is something really very funny to be seen, here, but Nina's eyes are still adjusting to the harsh light on the other side of the mirror to see the whole picture.
She turns back to her things and pauses to run her fingers over the tube of lipstick secreted away from her idol. Hadn't she given it back? Hadn't she? Memories begin to blur into each other, like the whorls of grease paint swirling down the drain.
Wipe of white, smear on black...the show must go on.
Fingers trembling, she reaches for her makeup, but the other woman grabs at her fingers and twists them back. She winces, and sees again the way she smashed her mother's fingers in the door as she left. Every birth comes from pain.
"Let me do this for you. It's the least I can do. You set me free and I've been trapped for so, so long..." The strange woman trails off, humming a song under her breath.
It sounds like Piaf.
Nina closes her eyes and lets the humming wash over her like a lullaby, like mother no longer angry with her, like the music box unbroken and wound up for her as she drifts off, safely, to sleep.
Cold fingers brush against her cheek and she feels something heavy and wet on her skin.
"You're supposed to use a sponge." She murmurs, lazily, not bothering to open her eyes.
"Not for this...never for this."
The cold, damp paint—a t least, she assumes, in her lidded world that it is paint—slowly covers her face, cooling it, recreating it, making it wholly unreal and stiff and hers alone.
"There...tell me what you think."
Nina sleepily opens her eyes once more. Each time she opens them is another time her head crests the wave. Each time is another breath of air before being sucked down, beneath the black water. Each time she thinks she can see the shore beyond...
But that's a concern for later. For now, there is her new face to consider.
The solemn, dark eyed woman stands behind her, covered up to the elbows in dripping white paint. Grease paint shouldn't drip like that—like viscous milk, like albino blood.
"It looks perfect." Nina murmurs, hardly seeing herself. There is an impression, like something glimpsed briefly in the street while walking too fast, all wrapped up in you, alone. White face, black eye makeup: very dramatic.
She blinks again, rapidly, watching her eyes go brown, black, brown, black...red.
"I...I have to go dance now." She murmurs, her voice a very small cry in the deep, dark well of her own creation. Help me, I've fallen and I've no arms with which to pull myself up. Help me, for it is all feathers, feathers, feathers...
The strange new woman helps her to her feet, solicitously, gently.
"Knock 'em dead." She quips, with a sudden flash, again, of that hidden-secret-joke-you-can't-see-yet smile.
Nina nods, dully, knowing somehow, already, that the sacrifice has already been made. She walks stiffly out of the dressing room, her new legs still sore and aching as she tiptoes past. She feels the brush, like butterfly wings, of lips on the back of neck and thinks, then, that the deal has been sealed.
Onstage, she will be beautiful. Onstage, she will be perfect.
And after? After, there will come the fall and the key that unlocks her way back to the real world, the world of Nina before the mirror broke...that will be inside her and things will go too bright, again, as the doctors remove that secret key so she will close her eyes...
To be pulled, once again, beneath the wave.
Where the dark water surrounds her, washes her clean and reverberates forever with the beating of dark wings.
And when her eyes finally open, she'll have washed upon the shore where her dark-eyed saviour waits, arms open, ready to catch her...
...and take her home.