Then somebody bends

The mirror stage without stage

She talked to the pet in pet-voice, smushing its cheeks and speaking close enough that her tea-stained breath made its nose twitch. The high-pitched ’Ello!, the very rhetorical questions asked in a voice made monstrous by coming from a kiss-shaped mouth, the affirming reflexive declarations, “Yes you are!” and so on. In a round handheld mirror she showed the pet images it couldn’t understand, first among them itself. Then she showed it one of the younger women who’d approached their castle. In continuing pet-voice, she acted out what the mirror images meant.

Since a dog chased her away, all the young woman first caught of the castle was a cliff-face of a wall, and a garden with its Pompeii forms of snowed-under shurbs and cherubs beneath a cold and clear sky, so quiet a space it was like a huge indoors rather than outdoors. She ran laughing from the dog (a silky King Charles spaniel, smaller than a cat) not seeing the windows which something had put out, but neatly so, or the fountains and birdbaths tumbled to empty on one side. She backed through the gap in the castle-hedge, to humour the spaniel, to no longer enrage it by ignoring its guard-dog duties. It kept yelping to the point it yelled.

Watching out for the dog, she managed next to make it across the gardens, to the front hall, whose heart-shaped…