Clara pushed open the heavy window of her bedroom, looked at the peaceful street five stories below and, for a moment, she thought of jumping. Where the thought came from on such a random Wednesday night, she could not say. As she looked over the ledge, she imagined herself stepping onto the windowsill, her slim legs steady, her hands grasping the wooden frame. She thought how moving her feet would feel, just a little further until her toes would curl over the edge, the fear kicking in, adrenaline roaring in her ears. She imagined peeling her fingers back from the safety of the steady wood behind her one by one and then all at once. The feeling of gravity taking over, those few wonderful seconds of feeling like flying before it all ends. She wanted that – the sudden realisation that she is not tied to anything anymore, no past to silently regret, no future to threaten her, snapping her claws of failure. Just a real present and only that, if just for a few seconds. And then – the silence. What would happen after that? It was of no importance, really.

Jinx clawed at her calves, fuming at the absence of her nightly meal, and Clara straightened to close the window. Right, Jinx would be left with no food, and that was an awful thought. She wished to think her cat would miss her, but that felt like a stretch. Jinx always felt like more of a wild cat than anything else. She barely let Clara hold her on a good day and tried to sneak past her at the door at every chance she got. She had succeeded on multiple occasions but always got returned by the caring hands of neighbours who had become familiar with her clever escape routes. ‘It’s Jinx again, that little beast,’ they would say, after Clara picked up the phone, ‘found her snooping by the outskirts.’ Then Clara would thank them, pull on her trench coat and run out as swiftly as she could, feet covered in blisters from the shoes that didn’t seem to agree with her feet no matter how long she wore them. The cat would meow at her loudly, her only sign of recognition. She always carried a large picnic basket whenever she had to come to the rescue – Jinx wouldn’t let anyone hold her for longer than a few seconds, so Clara had no choice but to trap her in the weaved box until they got back home. What a sight it must have made, the little woman with her angry cat, holding the huge picnic basket with both hands, trying to shush her impatient meowing. Yet Jinx never seemed grateful. ‘Would you rather eat squirrel guts?’ she would shame the little beast, while unable to repress the sigh of relief that left her lips at the sight of her curling up at her favourite spot on the windowsill. ‘I buy you the most expensive stuff I can get, and you would trade that in for squirrels?’

Then Jinx just closed her eyes and slept as if nothing had happened.

Clara wished she could do that too – to sleep as if everything was alright. She remembered the feeling that came with that sort of sleep; she had experienced it as a child. However, those sun-drenched days were long gone, the memory of it all untouchable as smoke. She had not been able to fall asleep on her own ever since she was eleven. She had had a nightmare a week after her eleventh birthday. In it, she was standing in a thick forest at twilight. In front of her stood a large mirror, old as the forest itself. She stared at her reflection, and then, suddenly, the glass cracked under her gaze. Her reflection shifted, as if ripped from her, gaining its own will. The skin of her other self turned sunken and grey, her eyes became cold and ruthless, burning with a dark and foreign flame. Her drained lips curved upwards in a smile, revealing two rows of sharpened teeth. Her other self then lifted her bony hand, curled it in a fist and swung it with all her might against the fragile glass separating them. Clara wanted to scream and flee, but could not. Her feet were tied to the ground with invisible binds. Her other self now reached out a hand through the cracks in the mirror, almost grazing her cheek. It looked like that of a corpse, skin covered in blue and purple, in places peeling open, revealing the muscle and bone underneath. Old blood dried beneath broken fingernails. As she stood there, her other self picked the shattered glass out of the mirror shard by shard and finally steadied her burning gaze upon her again, baring her teeth in a smile. Clara could only stand frozen as the being stepped forward, ripping her throat out with her teeth.

She always woke up in cold sweat, never screaming. The first time it happened, she told her parents. They gave her milk and honey and lulled her to sleep like a baby. But the next night it happened again. Then again. And again. Clara once overheard her parents speaking of taking her to a psychiatrist. ‘I cannot be crazy,’ she thought. But the being kept on coming for her. Only now she stopped speaking of it.

With time Clara grew so terrified of going to sleep that her mind refused to rest at all. On the fourth night, she tiptoed into her grandmother’s room and skimmed through the small cabinet next to the bookshelf full of Bibles and hymn books. ‘You shall not steal,’ her grandfather would repeat every Sunday at church while holding Clara’s hand in his iron grip. His voice was more overpowering than any pastor’s ever was. There was the same flame in his gaze then that Clara saw on those nights he drank endlessly from his glossy bottles kept under lock in the same shelf as the whips and belts. After a while she noticed a pattern. If he drank gin, he’d get the belt. If it was whiskey, the whip came out. ‘You should obey your elders, you know that, Clara?’ he would whisper to her, the tang of whiskey in his breath washing over her cheek, his large hand heavy on her knees. Then Clara would nod and say her prayers before going to bed.

The large, dark glass bottle she found at the far end of the cabinet felt old and heavy in her paling hands, but she undid the cap with the eagerness of a drug addict looking for his dose. A few pills slid into her beggar’s hand, cool and foreign against her skin. They glistened ghostly white in the pale streak of moonlight shining over Clara’s crouching form, and the unnerving feeling she felt rising in her throat at the sight of it was the only thing that kept her from devouring them all at once. She felt her grandmother shift on her mattress, her soft snoring suddenly disturbed. Clara didn’t glance back in the dark. She swallowed the pill with no water and clutched the rest tightly in her fist, then made her way down the pitch-dark hall as silently as she could. 

In the safety of her bedroom, she looked at the pills once more. Clara felt like she had just committed a crime. But no matter how wrong it seemed or how guilty she felt, above all, she was just exhausted. There was no space for anything else. She hid the pills in a small tin box under her mattress. Then everything fell into the dark.

The pills didn’t make her sleep, they just ripped her from consciousness. She felt nothing and dreamt no dreams. As the morning sun spilt over her windowsill, she woke with no memories of the night and no sense of rest. Her body felt less glass-like, but the exhaustion was still there. Yet for Clara that was a significant improvement. If she could go to school, appear not crazy in front of her parents, not fall asleep on her desk and wouldn’t have to see that bony hand again, that was all that mattered.

Ten years had passed since that night in her grandparent’s bedroom. Through the years she realised her dependency on the small tablets, but every time she tried to lower the dose or to stop, her shadow-self would slither beneath her closed eyelids and extend her rotting hand towards her once again. Or she would simply not sleep at all, spending all night staring at the ceiling. With her friends she made a joke that it came in handy during exam season. During her junior year, she once stayed awake for five days. What a ghastly scene her small bedroom was then, the makeshift table an ex-lover had put together from wooden boxes all covered in cans of Redbull, the lamplight in between, throwing long shadows behind everything it touched, notebooks and paper rippings scattered all across the floor. But Clara was working, newfound energy pulsing in her veins, eyes darting feverishly from one page to the next, hands scribbling down notes with utmost certainty. She almost caught herself thinking that it was not so bad, that she could live like this, and then the hallucinations kicked in. Her ghostly other self stared at her through every mirror in the apartment. Still in the body of an eleven-year-old, but as terrifying as ever. ‘Hello,’ she seemed to seethe at her through her rows of teeth, black eyes blazing in the low light, ‘I am still here’. Clara woke up before the first rays of sunlight touched her window, her knuckles bloody and aching, to the sound of her flatmates vacuuming broken glass off the bathroom floor. She remembered nothing but the tang of blood on the day of her exam. 

Clara filled Jinx’s bowls with food and milk and walked over to the fridge to fix herself a sandwich. As she lined up the ingredients and put the kettle on, she glanced at the luminescent clock casting a white glow over her table. It was almost 4 a.m. Jinx was drinking up her milk, and Clara sat at the kitchen table, watching her. It had always fascinated her, the calmness with which she ate every time, even though she was constantly famished.

She poured herself some tea, lit a candle that filled the room with the smell of lavender and placed a mirror in front of her. She remembered how terrifying it was to look in the mirror once she woke after her nightmares as a kid. For a while she kept all of them covered. But after discovering the deep slumber her grandmother’s pills would induce, she slowly started getting used to her reflection again. It had taken a long time to make that heart-sinking feeling disappear as she beheld her own gaze. She felt like the spell was about to crack any minute now, like it would all shift again if she looked into the glass for too long. But it didn’t. It wouldn’t, she told herself.

Clara studied her features. They were nothing like the creature from her nightmares anymore. The little girl was gone; in front of her was a woman. She saw the fear draining slowly from her eyes with each passing second. She placed a hand on her neck. She was alive, with warm blood running through her veins, with warmth in her brown eyes. The constant state of exhaustion had thinned out her features, yet there was life where her dream-self appeared hollow. Clara touched the cool glass. It fogged slightly at the contact. She made a fist, then straightened her fingers again, carefully studying her reflection in the mirror as if making sure it followed her.

‘Mine,’ she told herself quietly. ‘I am mine alone. I belong to no one.’

She had no idea where those words appeared from, but she felt they needed to be said. Clara felt them swirling in the air between her and the mirror as some sort of an ancient spell spoken among them alone. She smiled at herself, as a parent would at a child, a comforting, assuring smile. ‘Yes,’ the smile seemed to say, ‘I am my own.’

As Clara pulled the covers over herself that night, she did not reach for the pill. Jinx curled up beside her, and the warmth of the small animal seeped into her, steadying her trembling hands. She blew out the candle, turned off the light and let the darkness consume them. Jinx’s eyes glowed yellow in the dark, watching over her, as if she knew. Clara exhaled, sliding a hand over her black, shiny coat. She almost never let her touch her, squirming at every attempt of affection. But tonight, somehow, she curled up next to her. ‘I am with you,’ she seemed to purr. ‘I am here.’

She stood in the forest. A pale moon was shining through the trees, bathing the old mirror in front of her in blue light. As she took a step forward, she saw her reflection forming. She was eleven, dressed in her pale nightgown, with ruffles and lace at the bottom, socks on, too big for her small feet.

The glass cracked, and she felt ice in her veins. Her reflection changed, gaining her free will as it would every time; her skin became grey and bruised, clumps of hair fell from her scalp, eyes turned from warm brown to cold onyx. Her other self raised a fist, ready to crush the glass separating their worlds once again.

Clara stepped forward and spoke.

‘What do you want?’

The creature in the reflection stopped in her tracks, her bony hand still in the air, piercing her with her black gaze. She felt its surprise, could read the confusion on her bruised face.

‘You belong to yourself. You are yours, Clara,’ she said to her reflection, as softly as she could. 

The being’s lips parted as if she was about to reply. But there was no sound. She could spot her rows of teeth, but the arm she had lifted lingered in the air. Clara stared at her, into her black eyes, with all of the certainty in the world. ‘You are yours’.

The being lowered her hand, confusion plastered over her face. She didn’t lower her gaze, staring at her in intrigue as she repeated the sentence. Then, something shifted. Tears glossed over her black eyes, specks of the familiar dark brown returning. Clara took a careful step forward. Her other self did not move, still staring at her in confusion.

‘You belong to yourself. Your body is yours. Your mind is yours. You make your own choices.’

Clara picked the glass separating them out of the heavy frame. She saw her own hands split open, felt the warm pooling of blood at her wrists. But she picked out it all, shard by shard, until there was nothing left but the empty carcass and the little girl in front of it. She saw her dark gaze drifting down to her bloodied hands. Clara stepped over the frame and wrapped her arms gently around her white nightgown, the blood from her fingers seeping into her fragile body, the colour and fullness returning slowly to her battered cheeks.

‘You are yours,’ she said. ‘You are yours alone. No one will ever touch you again.’