This is her portrayed a child, unconscious, no understanding of a self that is observed, that does not disappear when she closes her eyes. This is the gown of a princess and this is the shadow of a magic whose secret documents only she is privileged to translate to strings of found word nonsense.

This is her lying awake at 4 am, at the top of the tower, hiding from vampires who were never there before, two wet shiny eyes phosphorescent in the moon. This is her too guilty to look into the liquid brown eyes of her best friend.

This is her burrowing beneath an overfull backpack, limbs crammed with everything they could carry. This is her obscuring her face more than any of the new heroines in their fashionable epaulets.

This is her washing her hands with dish soap. This is her private quake of revulsion, scrubbing them red underneath grease she can smell, grease that slides around on the epidermis but will not disappear. This is a stain in her belly. This is her terror at being pushed out of control.

This is her locked Puritan world of work, its illicit thrill of snuck cigarettes and misused half hours spent in wandering comparison to life-sized and wing-boned plastic dolls. This is her discomfort when the supervisor comments derisively on a woman who lets herself poke out through Lycra leggings, and this is her anger at the supervisor's haughty condolences.

This is her ice cold spinny head superpower.

This is her preparing the meal, hands alive working through elaborate garnish, spilling soup expertly into the bowls so that no evidence of transference mars the sides. This is her suddenly too sick to sit, head stuck out from beneath blankets under candlelight, vampires thoroughly in check.

This is the smell of stale smoke and of a bruised rose petal rot that cannot be coming from her. This is the crumb of a rice cake, proof that she is not doing it again.

This is her looking back after decades, discovering that who she was is the last demon of who she is.

This is her girded in steel beneath her gown, faking it, not so much lying as omitting the truth. This is her unreasonably disturbed when she gets home in the sickly dawn, regretting what she'd thought she'd wanted, seeing briefly herself as the object that was appreciated, wanting that again but incapable of leaving the house. This is her showering at length beneath hot hot water, ignoring the makeup, letting her hair remain tangled and matted by the hard stream, crawling confused into sweatpants and back into those same loathsome blankets. This is her not knowing whether she's lost her way, or found it again.