By ANNIKA LISS
You are the Bloody Mary in my mirror, the specter that haunts my every waking thought, drenched in all you believed I was to you. You are the Bloody Mary dripping in my wake, a trail of never-drying footprints that smear when I look back, a skeletal, clenching intrusive thought I can’t quite bear to shatter. A lurking shadow caked in grime, and I just flesh and bone and my dripping, dripping heart.
Drip
Drip.
Drip.
You were already jagged when we met, teeth bared in a snarl that never seemed to point at me. I was a soft, fleshy, mortal thing. We never really changed, you and I, just became bloodier: you broken glass and I belladonna, sweetness that turns sickly before you’ve finished tasting it. You never finished tasting me. I always thought you knew the sweetness was a front; after all, aren’t you the master of warping reflections?
Day after night after day, you follow me. Dripping. Bloody. Hands clasped, squelching, flesh on liquid on flesh.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
You would say you taught me to transmute my tongue into a knife, my clasped hands into a noose, and in some ways you would be correct. You were my first victim, after all: the first bloody body in my bed, light refracting from the shard sliding out of your neck, tearing the artery. You think you taught me how to shred reality to pieces, but I could snap long before you dug your grave between my empty ribs. What you never understood is that I was never the soft one. You may have covered yourself in thorns, but you don’t know what it means to stand in the rain and pray you won’t drown as it pours down your throat:
drip,
drip,
drip.
drip,
drip,
drip,
her blood pools in my skirts, my nails digging into her salt-strewn hair. The world was not good enough for her and you not good enough for it. I’m sure you think I tore you open because I couldn’t bear to watch you leave one more time. Would it shatter you again to learn the truth—that it’s never been about anyone but her? Her with her corn-silk plaits and dewy eyes and dripping, slanted smile. Her who you could never replace, the ghostly competition you couldn’t open your eyes wide enough to see.
You are the Bloody Mary in my mirror I will never escape. You tired of our games so quickly, so how is it that you are always here? Always watching, smirking, dripping? Was it me you saw when you clawed at my curls, my blouse, my neck, or was it everything: the stars and moons and planets clenched in your dripping hands? It was never you I saw, not when you had me shoved up against a wall, cold brick against my back, your warm hands digging into my hips. You were like her, in that way. Always so bloody warm. The glass is freezing, I know, I don’t touch it, of course, not with you inside, my dripping, devastating Mary.
You never liked your name, Mary, too soft. I always thought it suited you.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, why won’t you leave me alone? I can’t stand your scarlet stained teeth dripping onto scarlet soaked skin dripping on scarlet torn neck dripping
drip,
drip,
drip.
Lamb, you used to call me, because of my curls, because you claimed I was soft. Did you mean to slaughter me before I became the wolf I’ve always been and you believed you were? Did you think you loved me? It would’ve been so fitting: tall, biting ‘grew up on the wrong side of the tracks’ falls for sweet little soft girl, like the taglines on the rom-coms you always bought for me, even though horror has always been my favorite. It’s the only genre that feels real. Not that you asked, not when you knew me ‘oh so well,’ two peas in a pod. Joke’s on you cause I’m the pod and I’ve swallowed you whole, you soft, squishy thing. Did you really think you’d never meet someone capable of consuming you before you used them up, burnt them to a pool of melted wax with a half smoked cigarette?
My bloody, Bloody Mary. I am drowning in your stench. It slides down my throat like molasses, sickeningly sweet, and I want to cut myself on your teeth, let my intestines unravel and shred on the glass that glitters the ground. Would you come for me, if I lay shattered and shredded and dripping, knowing you are nothing but an absence of her? I would come for you. I would come and laugh and sprinkle salt over your lacerations like a demonic ritual. I would rejoice in the thickness of your blood tracing rivers through the lines of my knuckles. I would press my soft, squishy ears into your soft, squishy chest and listen to your heartbeat slow and slow and stop. And then I would lay there, waiting. Waiting. I waited for her for so long, so long, watching her eyelids, resisting the urge to peel them from her face. Did I pry them from yours? I haven’t seen you blink in so long. My bloody, Bloody Mary, I see you watching now as my fingers trace your cold, cold cheeks. You watch as I pull my head back, arch my neck until you are hidden from view. I fall into you one final time, you break into my eyes, my lips, my arteries. You came back, my Bloody Mary in the mirror, you came for me.
Writer | Annika Liss ’29 | aliss29@amherst.edu
Editor | Grace Escoe ’26 | gescoe26@amherst.edu