Flash fiction, Robin J Bartley

 Glass stomach

When I was a child I swallowed a mirror and saw myself for the first time. I’m not sure when it happened, why it happened, or who let it happen, but when I was a child, I swallowed a mirror and it tasted like metal. It was shaped like a ring, and I didn’t chew but it made my stomach turn a way I never investigated before. Maybe a part of me was looking in that direction all along but I couldn’t recognize it until I was a child when I swallowed that mirror. I drank some water with it like a pill.

I think I was hungry for something different. I was hungry for glass apparently, as it dissolved in my acids and showed me myself in places that had never seen before. The mirror cracked and I could feel it in my intestine, crawling sandy glass particulate down my digestions. When the silver and glass finally popped my gut shuffled. Things moved around as I did, stabbing myself where I swallowed the mirror. I bled into my acids, into the mirror so I could look at myself. I couldn’t see me from the outside with just my eyes, but in the mirror inside me I saw me, or rather one I saw the other. My reflection broke to sparkly dust in my farts, sharp glass and silver droplets in my veins. I bled myself onto myself, out of myself, so I could see who I was building from the inside out.

When I was a child I swallowed a mirror and digested myself for the first time. It pained and pains me still but so does being a child hurt, to be an adult in time, growing through the glass. I swallowed a mirror and it swallowed me second, cut me up and welded me back together with silver and flesh.