Cracked

by Anna Fiorella

The bathroom, a room certainly ordained private, seemed so dangerously public to Samantha. She stood slumped in front of the cracked mirror, frightened every time she looked up to catch that menacing reflection. Applying layers of her drugstore lip liner was tedious because her slender fingers flinched and her hand shook.

In the corner of the bathroom were lifeless cockroaches and beetles. Samantha noticed a survivor out of the corner of her eye, an abandoned ladybug struggling with one antenna. She stooped low and lifted it to rest at the edge of the sink.

Outside the bathroom door and to the right is a movie set; move down this hallway and there are the bright and unforgiving lights that Samantha focuses on in the lenses of the cameras. The set is low budget, although viewers of Samantha’s movies praise the acting rather than the mise en scene. The head actor sat in a chair near the set, smoothing his eyebrows in the reflection of a compact. That thin robe he wears hardly disguises the main attraction, his claim to fame.  A cigarette rests stiffly between his lips as the smoke drifts upward. 

Samantha sat on a plastic toilet seat with the tips of her fingers in her mouth, feeding into old habits. Her dime store blush is trailed by hot tears. She bunches some of the one-ply tissue paper next to the toilet bowl and dabs around her jaw. The movement shifts her out of a top that is two cup sizes too small anyways. Her fear engulfed her like forest fire, and the mirror was kerosene. 

A knock reverberated on the bathroom door. A booming voice on the other side advised her to take a right outta there and hustle her little ass to set. There is no answer. Samantha leaned over the toilet bowl to make it all go away. Her cheeks were on fire and her throat contracted from the burn. She pulled herself up to face the mirror as her fingers wander limply over her reflection. 

The voice who had told Samantha to hustle was irritated when he returned to the set and told the crew that this one got cold, to bring in the other girl who can really take this guy.  This other one was a brunette who walked stiffly toward the same bathroom to freshen up. She opened the door and saw sequined garments in the trashcan and corpses of insects in the corner. Most peculiar to her was the pile of nail bites on the edge of the sink. There were words written clumsily on the cracked mirror in sultry red lipstick. The brunette whipped around to go tell anyone that these new girls they were bringing in were freakin maniacs.