excerpt from my novel

the main character's name is hannah, she has nightmares, this is one of them:

I am standing in my bathroom in front of the mirror, brushing my hair before my shower. My long red curly hair always gets even frizzier when I brush it. I hate my hair. I look into the mirror. My cheek bones look more defined. I lift my shirt to count my ribs: one, two, three, almost four. There is a gap forming between my legs. I look down to verify, to make sure the mirror isn’t tricking me. I see no gap between my thighs when I look down.

I look once again into the mirror. I see an 11 year old girl, short, chubby, reminiscent of those little toys that babies play with, the ones where the people are made out of balls and they roll around and look like fat people and they slide down the slides. Weeble-wobbles, I think they are called. I look like that. Like every other obesity-ridden American. I poke my stomach. It is squishy and soft and jiggles and I don’t want to touch my skin anymore because it is getting bigger and squishier in front of my eyes. The little girl is crying now. She is shoving Swiss Rolls and brownies into her mouth and chugging soda and crying. When she is finished she throws up all over me, like the scene in The Exorcist. She vomits her sins onto me through the mirror. I am covered in bile and digested sweets.

I look again; she is gone. There is a skeleton in her place now. A lifeless corpse of a person, like a holocaust survivor. I reach up to touch the mirror and the skeleton does the same. Our hands touch and she grabs me and I am inside of the mirror and she shows me her bones and they are horrifically lovely.

“You are worthless.” She slaps me in the face and throws me back through the mirror. I crumble to the floor and my tears flood the bathroom and I look down and there is red curly hair on the floor. My hair mixes with my tears around my ankles on the floor and I cannot stop crying and I look into the mirror and my hair is falling out before my very eyes. I reach up to touch my head and pull handfuls of hair out until I have just a few patches left and I can’t stop crying.

I open my mouth to scream and notice something about my mouth in the mirror. I lean forward, open my mouth wider. My teeth are decaying. They are rotting in my mouth. They are falling apart in crumbles that I can feel and taste on my tongue. Behind me the skeleton girl is standing with her arms crossed laughing at me. I fall to the floor, surrounded by my hair and tears and rotting teeth, I close my eyes, and I scream.