A Thousand Times

Mina brushes out her hair before the mirror and takes stock of herself; one stark strand of silver is in with the rest, buried among the hazel-brown like a pale memory of poor Jonathan. Her eyes are bright, her face fuller and by Jonathan’s account even fairer; her reading glasses leave faint oblong pressure-marks on either side of her nose. (Mina rubs at her face, wearily.) Her schoolgirl freckles have faded but the thin creases between her brows have come to stay, and she looks more distinguished by the day.

The red mark has gone from her forehead, and can never again return. Her mouth is her own. Her teeth are her own. Her skin is her own – it may be bruised, but not pierced.

Sometimes, Jonathan says, he can scarcely believe that it happened at all. She is sufficiently familiar with her husband’s doubts to know this is not a comforting phrase. They have no secrets. He sometimes forgets where he is, and she sometimes when; lost hours vanishing like smoke when called to account, daylit weeks spent in fitful sleep upright in her chair, and in transcription until her hands ache. A month will go by when she does not think of it, having so successfully adjusted her patterns of life as to avoid those rooms entirely, both the bloody chamber itself and the ones in her mind that seem suggestible to the smallest drafts. (The bloody chamber, like something from a fairy tale, like something from Dr. Van Helsing’s struggles with English idiom.) But those rooms are quite empty now, they stand unoccupied. Perhaps one day she will re-enter them under her own power, but until then she cannot say she feels the desire to revisit those nightmarish weeks and days.

Her blood is her own.

Mina brushes out her hair before the mirror. She does not linger there.