Der Spiegel

Just so you know, "Der Spiegel" is German for "The Mirror", but the story will not be written entirely in German. This is prose poem/short story about a girl risen from the dead walking through her town reminising her past

 

Our next visiting site is the street where the dance hall lies. I remember the dance hall very well, it was where my best human friend got killed because she ignored all the warning signs her boyfriend gave to her that he was the worst person she could’ve gone out with. She ended up dead that night on the middle of the street and her body got split in half by a truck running her over. The streetlights reveal that there are still some small traces of her blood and guts on the road. I missed her after she died, but I felt very little remorse for her because everyone told her, even her boyfriend that he was not a good guy, but she refused to listen and paid the price. That place leaves too many bad memories to stay for long. I pick up my cat and walk down the shining black road back to the fields. There wasn’t much else to see in this stupid old town. I could stop by my house, but that place holds many traumatizing memories of my mother putting an invisible ball and chain on my ankle and only letting me free when she felt it necessary. She also tried to change me into something I wasn’t. She thought I was just going through a phase, like most mothers like to say about their children when they are not normal. I was not normal, I was different and whether society, and my mother liked it or not, I decided to be myself and stay different. What is the definition of normal anyway? Who decides what is normal? Society does, that’s who. Society has given me no reason to even think about pleasing its sex-obsessed, hateful, use and abuse type of world. The schoolyard brings back even worse memories, especially the playground at my primary school. I was the kid that no one really liked because kids are mean and the kids I tried to be friends with were especially mean. I was alone for my entire childhood, even when I did play with some kids, I still felt like an outsider and like I shouldn’t be there. Many people have fond memories of their childhood, I have virtually none. Often what happens in childhood can have an effect on a person when he or she grows up and part of my reason for being such a reclusive animal lover was my pleasure-deprived childhood.

Despite how attractive and amazing people have told me I was, I’ve only had one boyfriend during my short life, and it was both the best and worst months of my life. He was handsome, sweet, fun to be around and easy to talk to. But, he had his flaws as well. He was severely depressed, and angry with the world because his parents maimed him by abusing him. He tried to drown his pain with opium, which eventually led to his passing. I spent days weltering in my misery and crying and crying until new oceans and rivers developed. I missed him, but I got through it reminding myself that he was no longer suffering from the malicious abuse he got from his parents.

My cat and I stop at the cathedral in the middle of town. I love the cathedral because it’s so dark, yet beautiful and spiritual. Gothic architecture is one of the most beautiful styles of architecture I’ve ever seen, and to think that the word Gothic now has a grotesque vibe when it exits one’s lips. Darkness resides within the cathedral, but there is also light shining in from the stain glass portraits of the Virgin and Christ both metaphorically and literally. I’ve always felt a sense of security, and a feeling of fear whenever I’m inside a church. This time I open the heavy doors and go inside to find that the interior is unusually dark. A few candles are lit along the walls for my cat and I to see. The incandescent light from the candles provides a warm, yet creepy look to the stone corridors giving me back my feelings of security and fear being in the House of God. A huge candle garden stands on table with a white tablecloth and a velvet piece on top of the table but under the candle garden’s gold pieces. I advance beyond the candles and into the church part of the cathedral with the crucifix on a tall wall and the altar and pews below it. If I were still alive I would’ve gotten down on my knees and prayed, but it was much too late to pray because my life on earth is over.

I exit the cathedral before any priests can find me and think of me as a demon from Hell. My cat and I continue our original journey back to the fields beyond the town. We don’t just stop in the grasslands, we go even further out to the hills and climb them until we reach a mysterious valley. The moonlight reveals a dusty, foggy mirror at the bottom on the valley. I approach it to see I’ve become from death and decay devouring all I used to be. I wipe away the wet dust away from the glass to reveal myself to myself. The creature that looks back at me is far worse than anything I could have imagined. My long, smooth dark hair became a tangled black mess on my head with a few twigs stuck in it. I ran my hand through my hair to untie some of the knots and a huge clump fell out. My eyes are gone, but I could still see. My skin looks like snow covered in dirt, scabs, bugs and mold. Finally, my flesh is rotting away and some of the bones, muscles and organs are visible. The bones are especially prominent on my hands, arms and legs. I could see why that man sped past me when he got a good look at me, I look horrible and I knew that I’d progressively look worse and worse until I became nothing but a skeleton in a dirty white dress. I put my bone hand on the mirror and sigh before leaving with my cat.

We sit up in a tree for the rest of the night looking out at the night sky. I hated being dead, but it wasn’t like being alive would’ve been much better, especially with the way the situation was now. My friends, both human and animal were dead and my mother would still be petrified of me being different. It wouldn’t be worth coming back to life now, there would be nothing to live for in that life anymore. I feel a sense of relief from Scarlatina burning my body, evaporating my throat and letting me die in my warm silky deathbed bordered by a canopy of translucent lace.

The sun is rising, and the moon is dying. It is time for me to go back to the mausoleum and take a permanent nap in my coffin until the day the sun burns out.

The sun hides under the ground for the night and the moon shines a dim white light over the world. Nightfall is here and I’m becoming restless in my grave. I’m sick of lying in this white silk coffin with roses in my hands over the heart that no longer beats. I open the coffin with my frail and decaying limbs and step out into the mausoleum I now call my home. The ornate pillars and buttresses of the mausoleum are cracking and seem to be loosing strength in keeping the ceiling up. How long have been asleep in that coffin? I wonder to myself as I walk up the dark and spiraling staircase to the cemetery above. After I open the heavy mausoleum door and step out on the cold, damp grass, I feel as alive as I did when I was living. Sadly, though, the gravestones under the tree in the distance remind that I am no longer alive, but merely the living dead haunting the world as we know it. A world that was impossible to live in, a world I wanted to escape from all my life. It was a world where hatred, fear and intolerance thrived, a world with impossible standards to live up to, a world I never fit in, nor wanted to.

Things haven’t changed much as I walk down the streets of the old town I used to call home. A speeding car drives by at least ten miles over the speed limit. I jump back onto the sidewalk so the car doesn’t hit me. The man in the car looks frightened as he drives past me. I wonder what a few months of decomposing in a coffin caused me to look like. I’m sure I’m not even close to what I used to look like prior to my death. People told me I was pretty back when I was alive. They told me my long, dark hair and big, brown eyes were beautiful, and that I had an enviable tan as well as a pretty face. Obviously I don’t look that way anymore otherwise that man wouldn’t have sped up as he drove past.

A crow caws on the streetlight looking as regal as it always has in its dark and disgusting glory. I have never been fond of birds, especially crows because they sing an annoying song, chase people and animals around the yard and eat garbage lying on the side of the road. I did like ravens and robins though. Perhaps it was because ravens made me feel like I was not alone in my own personal darkness, and because one of Edgar Allan Poe’s great poems was named The Raven. I always enjoyed seeing my first robin every spring with my mother and cat because it told us that spring was here and that the long, harsh and frozen days of winter were no longer there.

I’ve never been in favor of two-legged creatures. Not only did I get annoyed with most birds, but people made me sick. I’ve never felt a connection, or any real sympathy towards people because I had a condition that caused me to have problems understanding people and interacting with them. I preferred to hide from them in crowds of people that didn’t know my name or in secluded areas where only I knew the location instead of going to parties or a small get-together. I did have a slight interest in human rights and thought discrimination and dehumanization were horrible and unnecessary, but I never did a thing to eliminate it. Instead, I sat in my dark corner and watched the radicals fight for me. Rather than fight for humans, I fought for creatures with four legs. I was going to create a sanctuary for animals with all my friends, but I died before it could happen. I deeply regret not making one sooner.

Suddenly a stray cat with a protruding spine walks past me with her tail in the air. She reminds me of my own cat when she greeted me by lifting her tail and I’d gently pull it. When she turns around to face me, it occurs to me that this bony, scraggly cat is mine. She looks up at me, meows and runs off into the dark mist at the bottom of the hill. I take off after her wondering what she was trying to show me.

We stop at the gallows on the outskirts of town where there lie a myriad of bones from the deceased. These skeletonized corpses are the remains of the diseased, the disturbed, and the evil. People who were seen as outcasts, demons and unclean would be thrown into this ditch and become chained or hanged because the townsfolk had no desire to live amongst them. I continue to follow my cat by looking at the moonlight reflected off her lustrous gray fur. She stops beside a decapitated corpse on the boards of a guillotine and looks up at me with her big green eyes and meows. The moonlight shines on this corpse to reveal his blood drenched face. It is my friend that the world saw as an outcast, a misfit, and a creature of the Devil himself. I never believed any of the garbage I heard around town, but I had no idea that the people hated him so much that they let him die such an agonizing death. The moon continues its journey across the sky and the pale light reveals that my dear friend was also stripped of his clothing and all that remained of him was his haggard figure covered in rotting wounds bordered by dried up blood being devoured slowly by maggots. I take his hand, stroke it with my own and let my ebonized tears fall on him.

My cat signals me to follow her back into the town and runs down the roads until we reach a duplex with a barbed wire fence surrounding the tiny yard. The moonlight shines over the yard to reveal piles of reeking garbage, rotting animal carcasses and other animals barely alive either resting in agony or walking around as slowly as frozen syrup. My cat looks up at me with the “sad eyes” as the animals simultaneously whimper, moan and bark. It doesn’t take me long to figure out that this is where my cat died. My mother must have gotten so annoyed with her meowing that she put her up for adoption and she got adopted by an animal abuser. It broke my heart to think that my mother would do something like this, but my mother has hurt me before, more than I’d like to talk about. Before I leave the animals alone for the night, I open the gate to the fence and let the able bodied ones run out and into the street. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but what’s a dead girl to do? Go to the police? I hoped that they’d be safe for the night and find a nice warm home someday.