The Mirror Made Me Sick

• Lisa Xia, Grade 10, North Sydney Girls High School
• Short Story
• 2010

3rd in the 'Word Express 2010' competition

My name is Chuck, Charlotte really. I’m seven years old, and I’m sick.

Chuck looked at herself. In the mirror. She didn’t see herself. She saw a distorted image which infested her whole world. She quivered at her animosities and blurred her thoughts with the comfort of water. The water however intensified the hunger her stomach protested, though she clasped herself to satisfy her physical hunger, and her mental hunger for beauty. She sat in a passive state, slumped on her bed, cross-legged, and looked off to think about something else.

Pity and sadness ran across the mother’s eyes, as she glanced at her shrivelled daughter entrapped by her vision of herself, her innocence tainted by her own self consciousness. The dim state of Chuck’s bedroom, gave the house a chilly state, it even made Chuck seem intangible, though in some spirits, Chuck was not Chuck anymore.

The shrill routine call for dinner is left unattended to with the conventional rush of footsteps in the past. The dinner table is silent, with the mother and father staring at each other with glances of hopelessness and devastation. Chuck’s chair is left empty. Her plate left untouched, as the Mother scrapes the full plate into the bin, and imagines that Chuck has consumed it.

Chuck is behind the kitchen door, smelling the food, yet not daring to walk in and eating, it would let her parents think that it was ‘okay’ to eat, and it wasn’t. It was imperative that they understood that; it was not ‘okay’ to be all chubby and therefore it was not ‘okay’ to eat. She passes several truth bearers (mirrors in actual fact), but has not plucked up the courage to look at herself, for she doesn’t want to be disappointed ... again. She flips through her ‘popular’ magazines, smiling at the glamorous models sporting a size O, though unknowingly, she is being indoctrinated to detract from her life. She cocked her head to the side for a minute to question her decisions, but she shook her head and mentally evaded such inquiries, because being beautiful was all that subsisted within the hollows and dells of her moralities and her mind.

‘Charlotte?’ A dubious voice sounded the air, and alerted her to her mother’s presence. There was a slight pause, as if none had anything to say to the other. Charlotte’s recent habits tended to not sit well with her mother, and consequently, there had been a growing emotional disparity between their relationship. Chuck considered herself motherless.

“Do you want to eat something?” The question was asked so cautiously, that it almost seemed that her mother expected a curt rejection from her distant daughter. But this time it was different. Something was different about charlotte, and she lifted her head high enough to stare her mother in the eyes.

Chuck decided to tell her the truth.

“I don’t know how to ‘eat’ anymore. I think I’m sick Mummy. The mirror made me sick.”