The skirt’s edge ended short, an inch below her white panty. She cast down her eyes, overlooking the area belonging to the white panty. She lowered her hand to touch her thick thighs, making sure they were real; so hard. She slid her hand upward along her arm, a pleasant surprise. Not of a very feminine type, but strong, well matched to the legs. She murmured, asking the image, “Who are you? Are you the same woman at the psychoanalysis sessions asking for help each time for seven months? How could the wise man see any notion of a victimized ten-year-old girl in this image?” She could not stop her eyes from going down past her belly button; just a glance was enough to pass through the thin dress. “Shame on you, woman,” she told the image. She closed her eyes, just one glance was enough to find the true meaning of what the psychoanalyst advised. There was a message in the scent: “Remember your origin”.
She recalled the last session with the psychoanalyst. ‘But I need more sessions with you, I still feel my soul tormented.’
‘Open the door and go out, spread your wings into a dangerous engagement. Your consciousness has created and preserved the image of a desperate ten-year-old girl in your mind, to make you afraid of any adventurous effort to decipher the message.’
‘What is the message?’
‘There is something wild in your nature. The interpretation is beyond the field of psychology.’
‘Aren’t I normal?’
‘No, you are not. What if we don’t have psychological terms to describe your behavior? What if there are some silent genes in you, belonging to a very long time ago, that now, due the torment of the event have started activating? You get your consciousness by mirroring the behavior of society. This works for the people who are evolved in the same trend. You can communicate through your smell; this is a very primitive ability in humans. Evolution of the language area of the brain has made this capacity weak and non-applicable. I cannot verify my analysis by your verbal responses, but I can feel its correctness by your change of smell, as has happened recently.
‘So I belong to the wild.’
‘You must go out’
She noticed the woman in the mirror was smiling; not a simple smile, there was some peculiarity to it. The lips were gestured in a smile formation more to show the whiteness of the teeth than the happiness of coming across a friend. An idea came to her mind: why not flirt with her image? Or do some oddity she wouldn’t do normally. She took her underpants off and twisted them around her index finger. The scattered scent widened her nostrils, a strange feeling. A white flash blurred her eyes, frightening her. This is not a woman you can have fun with, she thought. The smile was gone. She was shocked to see that her eyes were not hazel-brown as they just were, but blue; two shining blue irises were glowing in the mirror. The shock made her threw the panty from her index finger. Swirling in the air, it flew behind the opening at the back of the mirror.
She turned back and walked to the kitchen. She needed some distraction from the mirror. The smell of tomatoes had filled the room. She found an appetite to eat meat, which was a strange desire for a dedicated vegetarian. She acquired the new desire from the time she had added those tomatoes to her food. Yesterday, when her downstairs neighbor was barbequing, she could not resist the smell and opened the window, looking down to his balcony; the juicy steaks were sizzling on the rack. It was strange to her that after eating two juicy tomatoes, the meat-eating desire was quenched as if the tomatoes had fresh blood in them. It was not only the taste, but something peculiar in the scent, which had filled the whole apartment. The nostalgia of her past blurrily traveled into her memory, a reminiscence of wildness belonging to a time far before she had been born, like a dance of ghosts around her.
She looked into the dustbin at three empty silver bags of fertilizer. She took one of them out and read the information: ‘Miracle Fertilizer. Add this magic additive to the soil of your pot. The miracle of creation; you will be amazed that your plant grows 15 times faster with an unbelievable taste and strange aroma. Effective in 24 hours compared to the 15 days needed for competitor brands. ‘Certainly 15 times more expensive. It is odd that one would describe his fertilizer with the word, ‘miracle’.
She had bought the additive and tomato seeds from a shop in a remote area out in the suburbs. She was seeking a new way to fill her free time, of which she was going to have plenty. She thought to go and look at different items in shops until she figured out a hobby. It was three days ago that as she was driving aimlessly and talking to herself that she lost recognition of the time and the road. Unknown streets started and ended with shops on both sides closed, until she found one in a place with the least possibility. In a large parking lot, a light on the other side attracted her attention. She drove closer across the lot. Strangely, it was a big store located in the middle of nowhere, in a deserted area at the end of a huge vacant parking lot. She parked her car by the store to ask for directions. It was a big botanical store, with no customer and one old botanist owner standing at the cash register.
She could remember her first encounter with the man vividly. As she was going to ask for the directions, he said smilingly,
“Hello, my beautiful vampire, what has brought you here? Unfortunately, we only have flowers, not human flesh or blood.”
“My mistake, I can’t catch the smell of anything here but dead flesh and rotten blood,” she retorted and amazingly, the brief offensive conversation changed her mood, making her relax and she thought to buy something.
She remembered the botanist got in the mood too; his smile grew wider and he started narrating his life story,
“My dear father saved his money all his life to buy this land, in the hope that someday the rich people would build a road, passing by this area. Then we would be among the rich people. As he was dying, he gave his savings to his only child, me, as well as his last and only unfulfilled hope in life. Unfortunately, the rich people were too rich; they built a highway instead of a road, and along that highway were stretched guardrails. The not so busy area became dead empty. However, I kept the promise, and could not spend his money otherwise. I purchased the land and built a store and a big parking lot, the same as he had always described for his beloved son. I am old now and have not saved much for myself. Nevertheless, I was able to save him in my memory.”
“Sorry, I was wrong. Your blood is not rotten.”
She did not feel lost anymore. She turned her head to look around, and walked down the aisles of the store browsing the items, sometimes taking an interesting piece to look at. At the end of one of the aisles, she entered a large open area; a simple advertisement on a sign caught her attention:
‘Many humans were engaged in the production of these fertilizers. They put soul into it.’ Below the banner, there was a cardboard box filled with silver bags of Miracle Fertilizer. She bought three bags, some tomato seeds, and a large rectangular flowerpot.
In her apartment, recalling the story she said to herself, “I’ve run out of the god damn good fertilizer; have to go see the botanist again,” she was talking to herself in the kitchen, looking at the empty silver bag in her hand. She turned on her heels from the dustbin to the kitchen cabinets at her back, raised her hands up, and opened the cabinet door. There was a glass jar filled with crumpled bills and some coins. She took the jar, opened the lid, removed a ball of money, then placed the jar back. She snatched her car keys from the cabinet counter and rushed to the door, it was already late at night.
Upon one last glance into the mirror, “Oh, I am not wearing my panty,” she said with a shameful laugh, noticing that the white underpants had fallen on the floor, in a gap between the back of the mirror and the wall. She crouched down and stretched her index finger while holding the ball of money in her palm. As her finger reached the underwear, she hooked the tip of her finger to the elastic band and pulled it toward herself. The elastic stretched but it was like something was holding it back. The panty was stuck to something at the back of the mirror. She dropped the money on the floor and moved her head toward the gap as close as possible to see what had been tangled in her panty. Her left eye saw in the darkness deep behind the mirror, a wooden frame. She stretched her arm into the gap, felt the wood, and grabbed the outer side of it, sliding it out. A small part of the wooden frame appeared from the back of the mirror. It had canvas stretched over it.
To get the whole of it free from the back of the mirror, she stood up and dragged it out until the frame reached and leaned onto the apartment door. She lifted and carried it to the wall in front of the sofa and placed it on the floor, its back leaning to the wall. She stepped back to figure out the painting. The canvas had been painted with a white paint, no drawing or figure on it.
Whose is this painting and why it was hidden behind my mirror? At least now I know why the nails are on the wall. She hung the painting on the two nails above. It fit perfectly stable on them. She went back and sat on her sofa, leaning back with a fearful thought in her mind, I am living in the house of the wild beauty in the mirror, these things belong to her. The new puzzle gave life to the idea that the woman in the mirror was responsible for all the unsolved cases. She had brought things which belonged to her into the apartment. On the other hand, even if the idea was an illusion, how she could trust her mind? Her fear was gradually escalating, she couldn’t sit on her couch and seek peace of mind anymore. She felt trapped by the woman in the mirror. She had never felt surrender like this, like prey willingly embracing the hunter.
Troubled minds can better communicate with horror. She leaned back to the sofa, feeling the dampness of sweat on her back. She dug her fingers into the sofa fabric, twisting the leather, staring at the painting. Have the courage; there is no session for help tomorrow. She sensed something in the painting, in the whiteness.
There were various shades of white and grey: the landscape of a snowy day. The ground was covered with deep snow, thick fog in the air, and some movement. Grayish shapes were appearing very vaguely, in the mist, and before acquiring a clear shape they disappeared. Then there was plain white again. Nostalgia. She turned her gaze to the window, wishing she could see the same scenery in reality outside the window. She said with a soft voice, “Oh tomatoes, I completely forgot the shop might close any minute.” She jumped off the sofa to her feet, grabbed the car keys, and rushed toward the door. Strangely, all fear had been removed; either the woman in the mirror had captured her, or they could share the room. She had a desire to smile like the woman with glowing blue eyes. She took one last glimpse in the mirror; the reflection of the mysterious shades of the painting appeared once again. This time they brought to her mind some reminiscence of the past; she had been there.
3
The Book
She opened the door. The ball of money and her panty stayed behind on the floor. The elevator door was open and she entered. She looked at the buttons, waited, and thought, how can I manage this time to deal with the landlady’s scolding complaints; to calm her of my two month’s overdue rent, given the money I spent on the mirror. She was there when the men were carrying the huge mirror up the stairs for me. I cleverly walked behind the moving mirror past her front desk. Last time she caught me, I had to listen to her nagging for more than half an hour. Her husband doesn’t seem like a bad guy, though too obedient to her. I have never seen him look at women straight in the eyes, bashful and afraid of his wife’s wrath. Apparently she is the real owner of the building, the business, and her husband. Fortunately, the couple is asleep at this time of night, I hope. She pushed the first-floor button, and the elevator door closed.
The old landlady and her silent husband were working behind the counter at the side of the corridor, exceptionally late this night. She was declaring the apartment numbers of the tenants with overdue rent with her husband bent over the countertop, submissively as always, writing them down on the day’s collection sheet paper. She used to stand at the elevator side of the counter with her husband in her shadow; by the time the elevator doors would slide back, she was there to corner the renters in arrears before they had time to escape. They would either pay with many apologies to lower her naggings as much as possible, or run away to save their eardrums from the nastiest insults, all the way through the long corridor while being followed by her and her mouth.
The elevator cabin was hot. Sometimes the heater did not work, and sometimes it overworked. The air conditioner was always broken. She had been sweaty before entering, and was now sweating further going down five stories in the heat; the perspiration had completely saturated her thin dress. It molded her body like a transparent wrapping. She tried to pull the dress out, to reshape and conceal her cleavage, but the displaced fabric reversed like a magnet to its sinful position. The confined space filled with a strange body odor.
The elevator doors slid back open to the corridor. The old husband was cleaning his eyeglasses to take a few moments away. Somebody went out the entrance doors at the same time, leaving them open. The cold air outside plunged headlong into the corridor, rubbing all the precious perfume from the elevator cabin, vacuuming it from the cabin into the corridor. The loaded air on its way out, in a hurry to steal all the loot gave a share to the old man’s nose. The man dropped his eyeglasses on the countertop, his mouth open, his nostrils widened to inhale a good load of this scent. The stream of the strange aroma burnt his nostrils for milliseconds; his mind paused, then a powerful wave of electricity flowed through his nasal paths with the speed of light to all six million of his sensory cells. The incompletely evolved human sense of smell was unable to assess it in any of the primitive rankings between pleasant and unpleasant, therefore he succumbed under the influence, and was paralyzed.
Floating in the passing current, anchored to the countertop in greed for the source, his upper body passed the visual blockage of his fat wife, and he lay his chest on the countertop, securing his belly to the inside edge of the reception desk in an attempt to get more share of the running air. His head, overhanging the edge of the countertop, faced the woman shyly stepping out of the cabin. His eyes got a blurred vision of a white feather angel parading past him. As she passed the intruding head, the man’s head and two fully open pipes of his nose were detecting her movement like the turning of radars. The unclean eyeglasses were smashed under his chest.
As she was passing the counter, she remembered the ball of money that was missed on her apartment floor at the door. She decided to turn back, but the elevator doors had closed and she heard the screeching noise of the cabin moving up for another passenger. I cannot go back and stand at the elevator with my sweaty back stuck to this dress in front of that man’s widened eyes. Besides, the landlady’s head is bent over a paper and I am fortunate that she has not raised it to see me. This is an exceptional opportunity to flee her nasty complaints. She sweated more when she remembered the money was not the only thing she had forgotten to pick up. Her panty.