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CHAPTER ONE
Jezebel Looks In The Mirror
I go through this routine every morning; open eyes,
sit up, get out of bed, walk to bathroom, face mirror over sink.
There, I stare at my reflection and say my full name out loud.
Albertine Hannah.
I do this all before I’m fully awake. I have to. I have a
fear of not identifying myself first thing in the morning. If one
day, instead, I wake up and go make coffee first, I’ll be
committed to that other identity, the one everyone in Watson thinks
I am. I will become Anne Hanes.
Sometimes I have nightmares about it. I wake up and forget to face
the mirror as Albertine. Then I remember sometime later, in a flurry,
in a jumble, the way time happens in dreams and I rush to the bathroom,
but it’s too late. I look in the mirror and I’m someone
else. I’ve become Anne Hanes.
She doesn’t look like me, not the way I see myself from the
inside, where I still have the face I had two years ago, the wrinkle-free
expressions of someone whose life had not yet been altered by transgression.
A few times, when I’ve had those dreams, I’ve gotten
up in the middle of the night and gone to the bathroom and done
my mirror ritual. It scares me, but it’s become a compulsion.
Don’t get me wrong. I was the one who made the choice to become
Anne Hanes when I moved here a year ago. I escaped Toronto like
Jezebel with a pack of wild dogs on my heels. I found refuge here
in Watson, small town, small world, the wild dogs here uninterested
in picking up the scent of an impostor.
Lately I’ve been afraid each morning when I look in the mirror
that my face is actually changing. My cheeks look fatter. Could
be all this good clean living. Could be stagnation. I’ve let
my hair grow long, past my ears, a hairstyle I haven’t worn
since I was twelve. My roots are showing, proving my hair is not
naturally black. My eyes scare me the most. I catch my reflection
with a startled expression and I wonder if that’s how I look
most of the time, deer in the headlights, escaped prisoner in the
beam of a watchtower spotlight.
I used to like my face, constant and familiar, proof like a fingerprint,
an extension of my heart, blood and bones – the casing over
my soul.
My face is changing as though it needs to accommodate
my new name, but I am still Albertine on the inside. And that’s
the problem.
Albertine is the one who took that picture. A lot of people didn’t
like that picture. It offended them. It offended them so much it’s
been destroyed, like a mad dog put down with a bullet to the brain.
And afterwards they were still offended. Which of course makes me
wonder, was it the photo that offended them? Or was it me, the photographer?
I am an icy river, an infected sliver, a piece of broken glass.
I’m twenty-nine years old, hiding out in a small town, stalled,
abridged, waiting for the ax to fall. I’m not sure what scares
me more, my past being exposed, or my future committed to a lie.
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