Becoming

The thing behind the mirror beats against it as you prepare your salvation, strangely colored liquids bubbling through twisted glass and gases shimmering with heat’s haze condensing down through concentric silver rings. It took so long to prepare, so many failures! But now it’s ready. You know it can’t make any noise, not here, not from behind the mirror, yet as its face contorts in fear and rage you can hear it screaming. It echoes through your mind, wordless and thought-devouring, making thought all but impossible— ...

The doll kneels, moonlight glimmering across her waxy body, glinting off the many winding wires inlaid just below her skin. For a moment all is quiet and serene, the only noise the gentle padding of her witch’s feet on the cool tile floor. Then, the click of a lighter. The doll does not see her witch approach, her closed eyes buried far too deep beneath waxy godblood to even begin to open, but she hears—the hissing static of the flame, her feet on the ground, the strange little gap as the flame touches her wick, as she begins to burn— ...

Someone has left a flower in the silence between moments, that secret place where you long ago learned to go to hide from the world. A place which you had always thought only you could access. Because, well. It’s inside your mind. Right? The flower is pale, almost immaterial. It looks like a pencil sketch. You gingerly pick it up and sniff. It doesn’t smell like anything. Which does make sense—smells have always been the hardest things to imagine with any sort of accuracy—but it’s still a bit disappointing. ...

When she first took a knife to herself, she did not think to find anything more than the release of pain; so she was quite surprised, not to say a bit taken aback, when the knife’s passage through too-rough flesh was interrupted by the wholly unexpected presence of a gearbox, a plastic-sheathed assemblage quietly ticking away just before her wrist’s joint. When she was done being astonished—done listening to the gears and seeing how her fingers twitched when she poked at it—she went looking for more. ...