Content warnings: blood, references to violence. 

When my mind runs away in the bathroom mirror, I let myself ponder her. She’s that extravagant, celestial vice of an American celebrity I can write in a prophecy of pixels and rehearsals.

Columnists and socialites will swap gossip when, inevitably, someone breaks a glass of golden champagne on her up-do or she slips on her purling dress down red-carpet stairs.

The crack against the marble floor splits her solid jaw into a second mouth. Darwinian sanguine pools out from under the illustrious fabric, and her fateful form will disappear into the folds.

Expectant cameras catch it first. The shrinking and wriggling of the thing under the gown, sure as any doomed prophecy on a starlet’s lips.

Emerging there, that old fairy-tale toad. He will hop across the marble floor, beady eyes being turned to milk by blinding paparazzi flares. His hops trail blood across the gleaming stone in search of the exit.

‘Ribbit,’ I say to myself in the bathroom mirror.

About the author

Henry Farnan grew up on unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, and now resides on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land where they continue to write weird fiction and questionable poetry.

Photo by Darla Hueske on Unsplash.