The Mirror

she starts the day with a big pot of turmeric and aniseed tea, some half-arsed apology to the liver after the whiskey kicked the shit out of it all night. it steams up the cracked window while the rain does its usual piss-down outside.

she keeps thinking about the mirror she saw advertised in the local paper. ten quid.

round mahogany, old gold trim, heavy as a coffin lid. the man selling it, Franklyn, used to be a doctor — she knew him. his surgery sat right in the middle of Greenock like a bad tooth, and she’d ride the bus there through streets that stank of wet dog and cheap plonk, everybody on board looking like they’d lost a bet with life.

sometimes he wore a deerstalker, the pretentious bastard. his waiting room had a painting over the fireplace, seventy years of damp eating the canvas, green mould blooming across some toff with a shotgun and a fistful of dead pheasants. looked like the birds were still trying to fly out of the frame and couldn’t.

that mirror had watched a lot of faces come and go. her old man’s included. and that’s the problem — she pictured it in the hallway, and there he’d be, staring out every time she staggered past with puke on her coat and the shakes rattling her bones. same bloodshot eyes, same disappointment, same dead-man grin.

forever.

Franklyn was the one who signed the old bastard out when the time came, wrote “liver failure” like it was a surprise. one day he’ll do the same for her — nod, prescribe something that doesn’t work, pocket the fee.

so she never rang about the mirror. let it sit in some other drunk’s house, doing its quiet judging. she’s got enough ghosts breathing down her neck without paying ten quid for another one.

she waits for the call,
last name on the donor list,
the liver, the queue.