Little Black Ponds
By: John Hanley • @necksnapmag
In middle school, we made fortune tellers out of folded paper, multicolored quadrants labeled with numbers and flecked with glitter, boys’ names written inside.
Pick one, I told Samantha under an oak tree at recess, the paper future perched on my fingers. Five of us stood unsteady in our giggly bodies, thick roots tangling our feet.
Three, she said with a poke. Three times I opened and closed the triangles. Pick another, I said, exposing the inside and its new numbers.
One, she said. I flattened the paper and opened the flap, eight eyes bouncing from my face to my hands.
It was a drawing of a skull. I presented it to her. What is that, she asked, apprehensive, what does that mean? The others howled in shock. It’s the Grim Reaper, I said. It means you’ll die before you get married.
I remember Samantha slapping the paper from my hands, stomping it into the dirt with adolescent scorn. It is not my fault she picked the wrong number, but still it makes me prickle, the distance it built. Then on, we didn’t convene around trees, nor did we loiter at the school bathroom mirrors, putting on mascara and talking to each others’ reflections.
I let the screen go dim, then black. There is nothing left for me there. I have sliced the edit down to scraps, a ruthless cut. In these videos, I play an elevated Mary, mimicking smiles. To scrub through the playback— it grates, and sometimes I want it gone. I start to curve to the side, half-sitting, half-lying in the pillows on my bed, and I watch a sideways version of myself in the slick pool of the darkened laptop screen. When did I grow this frown?
It is hard to see the details, like I’m peering into a mirror in a dark room, like I’m playing that game. The blackness pearls like mercury around my face. I let my eyes lose focus, lethargic as they are from the hours before. It is addicting, the hundred-mile stare— I am untouchable, turned loose, I fixate on nothing and nothing fixates back. Pulling my eyes back into focus is like pulling an anchor from the ocean floor. I have been awake for years, it feels, stitching together slices of myself. I like your videos, my mother says one night, but you have circles around your eyes that look purple, they’re so dark. Your art has passed the point of ugliness, I hear. Sleep, she says.
I do pull the anchor, eventually, coming up for air, until I can distinguish between the void of the sleeping screen and the reflection of my face within it. My mother is right in a way: in this shadow-self that looks at me, there are little black ponds where the eyes would be. I know these are not my eyes. I can pull nothing out of them. They seem to pull at me instead; they wait for me to fall in.
I bring my fingers to my lips, trusting my hands to tell me the truth. My frown is there, I confirm, but in the shiny black screen in front of me, I am smiling.
The face – my face – moves the way words on a page move when you let your eyes relax. The mouth is almost formless, a black splotch pushing against the other pixels, stretching. Mary. I find myself sitting up again.
My senior year of high school, I sat cross-legged with five girls on a bedroom carpet stained with eyeshadow. Under a sweatshirt hid a dark red patch where Caroline spilled boxed wine trying to pour it from the spout into our plastic cups. We bent and swayed with laughter and playful pushes, all of us high, or pretending to be. I sat in front of a silhouette of Caroline’s head, her frizzing baby hairs fiery and illuminated by an orange lamp on a nightstand behind her. I could hardly see her face, only impressions in her mouth and eyes. But I knew she was looking at me from across the circle. I peered at her, my eyes lazy from wine and weed.
You’ll die, she mouthed.
A warm stricken panic grabbed my neck. (It was the very same kind I had felt years before when Caroline, in a passing moment as we exited the bathroom, had said to me as if in confession: You’ve been a bitch since school started again.)
You’ll die, she repeated.
What? I asked silently.
We leaned into each other across the circle, Caroline cupping my ear. Her breath was wet and warm, her words the same.
Are you high? she asked. She laughed as she fell back out of the circle, looking away before I could respond.
I am not. My purple eyes are tired but they know what they see.
Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary.
My reflection turns from me, as if to someone behind it. I see her!, I hear it say.