It was during those days that she began to think she was dying. She felt as if she had swallowed poison, and it was softening her bones and burning her organs, until finally her insides would rot and boil down and stream out of her rectum in a torrent of sludge and sewage, black and putrid like the pipes overflowing after the heavy rains, flushing the gutters of the narrow dirt streets. She felt that time was reflecting itself in the bathroom mirror, trapping it in a moment that could never be escaped. She sat and glared at her image in the mirror, like an angry cat mistaking its reflection for another angry cat, scared and threatened and ready to attack itself. The bathroom was small, and the mirror so large it took up most of one wall. To avoid it at first she pulled a towel over her head when she had to use the toilet, bathe, or wash her hands, but still she felt the ghoulish presence of the reflection watching her, and she feared that obscuring her eyes only left her more vulnerable to attack and entrapment in the endless moment of fear frozen in the mirror. She began avoiding the bathroom, preferring to shower under the garden hose, and pee in a clay flowerpot which she emptied in the far corner of the yard.
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