“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”--D.H. Lawrence

Houses should not have black light display mirrors hanging in long hallways of heavily used areas, any more than they should have twin fish carcasses or scorpion stings or blue crabs without celestial mansions drenched in zodiac water sign patterns.

Madhuri Marmiche reposes in astral memory, the last of a long line of mirror effect keepers to step outside the glass bottle. Her body is taut and energized, her skin flawless and smooth. A dwindling reminder of all that she sees is the wavelike properties in a long oval looking glass. It hangs in the wide hall of the spacious Marmiche Mansion.

The mirror is a flawless family heirloom, passed down from mother to daughter, rewired by its usefulness of talisman, star signs, and crystal ball effect, closely guarding family secrets. Reflecting off its silvered surface is a pretty picture--a section of the winding oak staircase, the cowhide rug covering a portion of the living room, a black lacquered tabletop and wall hangings across.

If she stares harder into the mirror the aberrations appear, but the sun is wedged under her eyelids--perhaps surface clouds rising as her mother had seen in blotches and stains when the constellations changed. Madhuri wants none of the old bruises, the fake sentiments, although true to her Scorpio water sign she is fixedly attracted to self- destruction, the characteristic of her mystical self. What she sees is what she wants--the material truth, the occasions of transcendence as experienced through following the undular movement of the snake, the sunlit balcony capturing a limited view of the beautiful garden as the angle abruptly cuts off. If framing a face, hers, she would be a Masolino painting in the making, a nonpareil, feminine and delicate, harnessed as she seems to be to her refracted reflection straining out of the wall with loadstone effect.

Madhuri Marmiche is mistress of the mansion in a divinely-grounded reality of zodiac stars ingrained in black static dotting the night sky. She lives in ornate French Creole plantation style with the wealth Florin has left her. A flesh-and-blood radiant woman despite her advancing years, her only goal in life is to dig in and never relinquish her grip on that stylistic device--her peek-a-boo gateway to Shangri-La, her dark mirror.

Her grandma had once said, "Never part with this mirror whatever beckons, whatever you may see!" Determined and strong-willed like a stubborn guard dog she tries harder. Skipping heartbeats she beckons the mirror time after time, exactly as she has been taught. And voila! Like a blast of forked lightning, it works. First, her intuition grows stronger, then her perception turns long-ranged, finally her animal magnetism spools rigid, which assures her success. Florin walks into her life. The rest follows. Some goals they say stretch into permanence. This one does, driving the fashionable lady of the mansion into euphoric stupor--the dark magic dynamics in the polished surfaces of a family heirloom holding her life in place in suspended animation like chalazae twin strands, long after her marriage ends on a sour note, long after even her life is meant to end with no visible succor.

That she is lonely and single is a well-known fact. That the scorpion is her star sign is a familiar ploy shared by all lovers of red, maroon, and black. That she collects from obscure corners of the globe all manner of strange calendrical and heliacal artifacts is a dubious but popular story. That she is a rosy woman in fading bloom is a regular favorite her friends enjoy circulating. That she is periodically dependent on an old mirror is a transcendent certainty. Her house buzzes with people, false choices, and gossip.

She has no other blind spots--none but her mirror, in age far older than she, which is its physical effect; in hidden stories far conspiratorial than she, which is its reflective effect; in deliverance far astute than she, which is its cumulative effect. Each morning that she awakens steamed up with the mania and intensity that drives her unhinged for what the day will deliver, be it practical day-to-day work, bills, invoices, shopping lists, fashion magazines, or dismal news of global disasters, family setbacks, it is the mirror that delivers the rest. Within moments her equilibrium settles to afternoon sunlight brilliantly flashing in drifts, swaying palms mimicking a desert island, her beauteous garden lush with green plants, the soothing sea at dusk. And she is queen of her world again. Pleasurable and driven by ennui, deep and mysterious--her water sign.

Occasionally and far between communication arrives to hex her daily routine, announcements of death, ghostly movements from her homeland far away. Her day turns dark. Death is inevitable, she knows. Not even her mirror can mirror otherwise. Of late these mind-chipping communiques have been increasing in frequency. Her folks back home. It throws her off momentarily, her elevated feeling of a high, when it suddenly plummets and she summarily dismisses them from her mind. Unfortunately she can turn vindictive. Otherwise she least expects a tsunami to hit her that way.

Then comes the enhanced ecliptic orbit when the Sun transits Scorpius. Madhuri,thrown into whoops of privileged cycle upon cycle boredom, madly re-decorates her house. A makeover of upholstery, floors, ceiling and walls--from pink leather lounge to claw-foot tubs. Re-modeling lasts several months. But what is a few more months for the fulfillment she awaits? She feels a new warmth creeping through her skin follicles. Nothing can destroy her thrumming flesh heavy and sensual, like wine pouring out of a jeweled goblet. The feeling is like a starburst of holiday season.

There is heavy trampling of feet up to the shingled roof. She has carefully selected her colors through the mirror images she connects, filled with magic, from the petal pink rose and green outdoors of summer, in earthy shades of kale--yes, the veggie, liberally backsplashed with scorpion tints and sprinkled in vivid tones of lapis blue and eggshell orange. New! New! Serpens! Serpens! Moon-like and death-stalker, like the hairy pink pumpkins her garden delivers! Like the hairy yellow arachnids her rocky landscape unearths! Only the mirror in the hall is unchanged, hanging rigid on the wall, just the teeniest bit clouded. Fluorescent. Black static. Instead, in her craving for the new, she chooses more brassware and browns and bronze to match the copper edges of her oval mirror, and on a whim proclaims her undying love for this mirror with a sting--a handwritten love-note tucked secretly behind, unseen.

Almost imperceptibly at first, swaying compulsively, winding down the designated view of the cosmos, her dream crumbles. It could not be for lack of planning. Her reasoning powers are absolute, her will and determination total. But her sky atlas takes a stinger, collapsing her peaches-and-cream life to an abrupt halt. The dizzying manner in which it occurs in a rush of movement is least expected, putting a strain, like a dark hand of reproach, to scorch her mirrored obsession. An unforeseen clumsy tumble by one of the overweight beefy construction workers triggers a rivet's loosening jolt from off its moorings on the wall, causing the elegant heirloom to dismantle under its own weight.

Without the stone mantelpiece in place to break its fall, having been removed for the renovations, it lands awkwardly onto the marble flooring, fracturing into a cascade of silver shards. It is as if subterranean shades secretly bubbling in the mirror for a thousand years have at last found release. Forever is too long a lifetime, whenever that may be according to the zodiac. Madhuri has never known fear.

How often had Florin castigated her, "If you don't leave him, I'll break the mirror." She had not given up Ted, not then, and the looking glass crumbles in synchronized wine drops spilling on a snowy white carpet, in red claw aggression emerging from under half-buried logs. Gone is the feeling that she has grown wings. Gone is the feeling of inherited magnificence. Gone is the feeling that she has four pairs of eyes in rich mahogany color that see all things. Struggling, she is seized by a darker triple-striped reality.

Frantic, at her wit's end, Madhuri yells for Lily, her day maid, the pool of workers, the gardeners who are composting the leaves. All rush to her aid. To no avail. None can put back her precious mirror. The sound of the loud crash travels in tugs, is heard everywhere, the further it goes. Together with the hired help she does all she must to ward off the dark thing that must reside in the broken mirror, the evil which will run over, the black light which has come loose. She must contain it or forever doom herself.

She changes all her draperies to black, the good luck color shading the many windows. She fills every room with tiny vials of amber drinkables, the other good luck color. Maroon incense candles fill every square foot of space in every room. She breaks into disruptive siren song, the frenzy pillaging her peaceful daily routine. She feels permanently robbed of sleep, restless, unsettled. One part of her bruises her very soul till she is left with a terrible hollow ache. The other part of her points skywards to the sun- spots in the Serpens constellation, that she is still Madhuri. And yet there is neither stardust nor moon-dust to wrap into her emotional euphoria, fury, or turmoil. "Never let the mirror crack! Above all never let the mirror break!" her grandma has long ago cautioned, without explaining why. It is from Lily who is babbling crazily that she learns a bitter truth, "A shattered mirror traps one's soul." But her soul has left to the starry heavens, wounded and in shock, traveling light years away. She has heard it call from the sun, from the moon, from Scorpius, the day of the first aftereffects. She credits lack of tranquility, no peace of mind, for these madness stories.

Embittered and worn, she takes to digging into her attic, wearing her old toquilla palm wide-brim hats she finds tucked in a dusty corner, a hand-me-down from her beautiful mother of the water elemental trigon, same as she, as if by shading her eyes she is shading what she can no longer see in the mirror. She is a woman consumed, struggling helplessly with uncertainty and dread. Unable to bear the strange influences any longer, she grinds the broken mirror fragments into fine silica dust using her grandmother's old pestle and grindstone, that has never been used for the culinary purposes for which it is intended.

She selects a suitable spot in her stylishly manicured garden. Using picks and shovels a deep hole is dug in the soft earth, since winter has not arrived to harden the soil. She who has never known what fear is must now face fear, which works in her as a poison. With her many helpers Madhuri buries her magic mirror deep into the earth, consigning the last of the silvered shards under the make-shift graveyard of her old apple tree. Whatever darkness resides in the burrowed mirror beds, the darkness that mysteriously stole her mother and grandma away are also buried beneath the encrustation. She will now never know. Work complete, she shrinks away, shattered at the prospect of blotting out the mirror, the throb of her inner beauty shriveling to nothingness.

Wearily sitting down in a daze, the mistress of Marmiche stares blankly at the empty space on the wall. How resolute her mirror had hung in the busiest hall of the house, real togetherness clinging to it as if its very life were bonded to the plaster, even when Florin was no longer a part of her life, nor Ted. Snatches of disbelief trammel her psyche at the magnitude of what has occurred after decades, way past her mother's and grandma's lifetimes. They were the real mirror's keepers in a way she could never be. She cannot fathom her life ahead. How would she cope? Who would she turn to? What of the celestial atlas that had always guided her? What of Scorpio? More seances? She feels vulnerable. A scream of pure passion is rising from her throat. The sensation is unadulterated--raw. Her lungs seem to claw open again and again. A stinger deadlier than any she has ever known is stabbing her again and again with its bulb of pure poison.

This cannot be her wall, so out of tune, glaring at her mockingly. She must tear the house down. Impulsively she reaches out, touching the empty space, running her fingers lightly over, as if in worship. Having recourse to no other remedy, she coaxes conversation out of the grayness aging from the dusky light. Soon she captures in the space on her wall her same pink roses in bloom, her French windows, the trellis, the sunlit balcony, the artful curve of balustrade. She sees motionless movement, Florin leaving, her brief fling with Ted. Her mother's face on the head of a sunflower. It is as if the artificial and ephemeral are being subtly fused–infused by the binding threads that stretch into the once silvered surface, now embedded into the wall. She sees every nuance of light in ecstasy, and more telling, she fixates on her own nonpareil ravishing sensuality, the one that drove men mad, speaking to it, touching it, tamping it down, soaking up her own exotic charm in a fractured chorus, a capella.

Gradually, with the broken pieces out of the way, it is only a matter of time for the replacement looking glass to arrive. Anyone who knows Madhuri well enough will immediately relate to this logical process in her thinking. Time was bad. It must be dispensed with. The silver lining in the superficial moments of her life has revealed itself. She is a woman literally heartbroken, but she is also a woman who will much rather move on, however bruised she may be. She has the strength of self-importance to see herself through. She will not let her bewilderment be her funeral. She puts seven years of cruel luck out of her mind, laying the follies and presumptions aside, trading the possibilities of ill consequence for the greater purpose of having a real mirror hanging once again in the hall. No more darkness, just mirrored reflections of starlight.

It cannot be an ordinary looking glass. She will scour the earth like a planet spinning in air for its replacement. She will reach impossible places where the best looking glasses are made. From Venice to Murano, from Bali to Rajasthan, she will travel the world in search of a garden-in-flames landscaped mirror, to mirror the one she has lost. And when she is done voyaging, she will custom order her ornate masterpiece--that will combine the silver and silica in rare craftsmanship of dizzying proportions, to compact a one-of-a-kind looking glass fit for an ageless woman of consequence--a-a-a Urania! There, she's said it, it's out! Alive, forever! It will have to be done sooner rather than later. A wild eagerness uplifts her spirits. The old euphoria comes creeping in. She feels her blood running, the tremble of excitement spreading.

Lily brings her a cup of unsweetened masala chai. She sips mechanically at the steaming hot tea, lost in contemplation of the tea hill farms in Darjeeling, the land of the red scorpions, as red as the tea. Tears rarely reflect in her doe-shaped dark eyes. But when they do, they swim like dewdrops on a black orchid. “Like a fawn in summer rain,” Florin used to say in happier times, when he admired her sultry beauty, when there was no talk of separation and the urge to leave did not exist. Or if it did, talk was so scattered as to be nonexistent. Strangely, Ted, for want of something to say, makes a similar observation. If ever she was a Florentine woman of substance, a real woman of Florence where the best paintings lay, how differently the matter of her eyes and face would have ended--on a work of art restored forever, as a face in the mirror, at the crossroads of destinies, unable to die. Loving Ted, not of her sun sign, how dearly he had loved her!

Only she knows how hooked she is into her wondrous old mirror bordered with rows of twin fish, emperor scorpions and blue crabs in rich copper, the three water signs. How Florin despised it--her evil device of dark, still water, lying in wait to entrap him. One time through some ruse he tricked her into getting rid of it. It was the day their former house burnt to the ground, every room charred to bits, except the mirror. None could explain how the mirror had survived. Florin thought the object evil. He thought its strange longevity tied to her a double evil. He could not get rid of a vacuous vanity; neither it seemed could she, and she a law of the mirror unto herself.

In time Florin no longer pictured his wife's exquisiteness. With her glorifying the mirror daily relationship between the couple deteriorated. Later with Ted it grew worse, although with her strong following of social media friends to echo her every remark, she was a rock star, renowned for her glistening skin, cascading tumble of curls, posed mockery and arboreal splendor. Unfortunately both Florin and Ted saw her in multiples of disheveled, crumpled pink petals, in mirror images of broken shards. It was surreal.

One day Lily comes in running frantically to inform her with great alarm etched on her expressive countenance. Someone has tossed broken mirror pieces on Madhuri's side of the dividing fence. The pieces of broken glass appear similar to her buried mirror, and also appear to have lain there for several months. Some are just as deeply buried as her own. Madhuri immediately voices fierce displeasure, quarrelling vigorously with all her neighbors over the southern and northern wall. A slanging-match ensues. Neighbors swear they have no broken mirrors in their homes. Never did. In fact, strange as it sounds, there are no mirrors broken or otherwise in a ten-mile radius. All have made sure. From that day a strange round of fresh bad luck commences, their permanence so ugly and self- implicating Madhuri is in a new quandary. But such is the path of the constellations.

She takes many unusual steps to ward off the renewed attacks. She often wonders about subsequent developments. She can no longer casually dismiss any of it. She suspects her neighbors of playing dirty. She does not know why her thoughts are morbid, except she must attain a stilling if worse consequences not rush at her. What follows in rapid sequence is hard to grasp, even for one as steeped in celestial consultation as she is with Scorpio. One time it is a brush with the law in two separate incidents. Each incident lasts several months of fines, court appearances. Accusations take nasty turns. She resorts to spells, voodoo permutations.

More spells later, with wooden crosses, iron nails, petals pressed into wax paper, holograms redesigned to curtail external interferences, she suffers three killer bee stings which see her in hospital. One turns acute. The sting is of the notorious blue scorpion, although initially not suspected. Her face swells, her neck bloats, the swelling spreads downwards, her spine tingles, resulting in leg paralysis. But she has only the friendliest of bees buzzing each summer among her potted magnolias and glory roses, producing only the sweetest of madhu--“honey” her namesake, chosen by her mother and grandma for the color they share with the scorpion. They could never harm her. Not so say the zotavola bees, a dreaded hybrid species larger than coconut crabs rife that summer in many gardens, gouging her with stings. She has no idea what she has done to her broken mirror to deserve such harm. The bees are relentless, even in death. So is the avenging blue scorpion.

Madhuri sobs her heart out. None of this has happened before, or if it has, there has always been Florin to take care of the unusual. But worse is to follow. She cuts her knee, then takes another fall and gashes her throat, deep and bloody. She almost does not make it. She has no clear recollection of how or when, or if she does, is reluctant to. A large mirrored shard is found by her side. It looks familiar. It lies face up, glowing full-blown cloudy yellow, the black light dazzling in a swirl of stars. No evidence emerges whether her wounds are self-inflicted or perpetrated by an unknown outsider. Her household falls silent. So do the neighbors.

She loses her confidence then, although she does not falter in her resolve. She is a Scorpius after all--brave under attack, oblivious to conscious judgment. She continues in her determination to release the ghosts, or whatever is messing about with her life. Never one to let disillusion humiliate her consciousness, she re-buries the newfound mirror pieces under the same old apple tree graveyard where her former broken mirror is buried. But then the apple tree dies. It takes a few days. She feels betrayed. Her gardeners suggest re-digging up the crushed glass and re-re-burying all of the mirrored dust in a fresh new location--the spreading oak being the chosen spot, overhanging with Spanish moss, that beckons tipsily. Fearing for the life of her ancient oak, that it may suffer the same ill-fate as the apple tree, she thrusts the thought aside. Over-stimulated by feng shui and other potent considerations, as a last resort she turns to the bottom of her garden waterfall as the final resting place, the one that feeds her koi pond of one-of-a-kind golden red arowana. But then her goldfish may die. The workers, in fear, slowly leave.

In reality, a dampened Madhuri, hampered by her martyrdom, heart bleeding from the old breakage from which she is struggling to recover, fighting to regain her old mojo, has been living down her bitter pill of seven years low servitude cosmic sentence, unable to steer mirror-ward. She needs to let go, say her friends, the faithful throngs on FaceBook--the same way she let go of Florin, of Ted, ultimately of her mother and grandma.

Without wasting a single moment longer, putting aside wiccans and spells, zen routines and feng shui activators, she places the order for a brand new mirror with blue butterflies and maroon scorpions in quartz to off-set the ill-luck karmic juju gripping not only her, but chillingly the entire neighborhood. A butterfly transmigration, a Scorpio good luck, the very thing. In a sense to also combat the ill-effects of the killer bees running riot that season like a mad contagion.

When the mosaic mirror arrives carefully concealed in several layers of foam and bubble wrap, it is cleverly sealed in suspended layers of safety animation, the work of several lapidaries and a data and goods processing crew of mavericks, which has taken many months in the making and delivering. She is filled with an excitement and a renewed optimism such as she has never felt before. Her euphoria is once again at fever- pitch. The craftsmanship of the replacement is superb. She need have no qualms. She need no longer dwell on her old mirror, lying in a silvered, albeit shriveled heap, despite how dreadfully and desperately she misses it, worse than anything she has known, and may always miss it. This will do. Her world will set right. The permanence of her life span, her flight to the stars will resume. No doubt of it. No more bad luck to brood on.

She can go about her daily routine with eagerness and hope, her daily tasks, her devotion to her goals with comfort and devotion, footprints functionary--gathering armfuls of fresh sweet-smelling roses and lavender from a welcoming garden. Her spirits unspool, uplift. Wrestling with the latency underlying its glitter she sets hereditary superstition aside, thoughts of her mother and grandma aside, and gracefully yields her inner womanhood into the new mirror.

Her neck stretches forward. Fine hands their fingertips a shade of rich crimson beat a light tattoo on the blue butterflies crowding the edges. True to form and skirting the matter of forever-and-ever to a distant corner of her mind, she deliberately executes the mirror walkthrough, so alive she is trembling in every fiber of her being.

She hangs the new looking glass in the very same exact angle on the wall in the main hallway of her spacious Marmiche mansion, exactly where the old mirror had previously hung, not a fraction out of place. The scorpions artfully lean into the butterflies, slender and devastating. The size and displacement of water gray overtones in the quality of the heavy leaded glass is the very same, looks the very same--silver and exact. Almost a twin of the former, one could say. Except that its gilded edge is no longer copper, and the twin fishes and blue crabs have been replaced by overlapping butterflies in blue to match the emperor scorpions, each tiny layered sliver of glass in the mosaic catching the flaming light, setting off many suns, simultaneously, down to the brilliant outdoors. She is stunned. She accepts that the molten mirage will endure. Forever. One way or the other it must endure. She is a keeper. Her mirror is reborn, and so is she. The extreme excitement grows liquid, no longer illusory.

For a long time she stands transfixed to the spot, staring in wonder, shaking like a harp string played by Urania. She sets aside all tendrils of alternating misery she has been battling of late, absorbed by the heightened gusts of nervous exhilaration choking her every breath, by the sheer brilliance of the piece, looking like a fine piece of rarest sculpture. Such a pure magnificence the mirror possesses, her happiness is white-hot. And in the reflecting pitiless glow that the new mirror casts upon her she sees nothing but her own flushed womanliness, ornamental and demure, the concentrated essence of a scorpion unmatched, liquid-glowing back. In times like these she is relaxed. There is a wonderful youthful softness about her the mirror seems to capture.

She draws nearer to watch that loveliness grow larger, as she is used to. She steps away to watch her shapely form grow smaller, and then flit past again, quivering in unholy joy--a dainty blue butterfly in flight alighting on a trembling autumn leaf or the still tip of a scorpion's tail. It freaks her out--her unconscious persuasion teetering, as if she has alighted frail and mysterious in a different reality on a broken flower stalk.

The defect at first imperceptible to discern in the obsidian quality of the Venetian finish is a hairline crack so fine, the misconception is hardly noticeable at all. It appears to be a mere figment of the imagination, running the entire length of the long oval mirror, and seems by some mistaken knowledge to occur every eleven minutes. Or so it appears by Madhuri's exhaustive, time-tested astrological calculations as drawn in the natal charts. The horoscope produces brilliant insights, realistic analysis of all major journeys of her life, marriage, love, health, all consistently accurate. But now this--Urania's mirror, steadfast as a muse has adopted a peculiar planetary position. That's it!

Once again she loses all sense of judgment when under attack. The new mirror has taken eleven months to arrive. This is common knowledge. The old mirror has taken eleven hundred days to stay buried. This fact is also common knowledge but critical to examine. Authenticity is everything, as those around her will say. So absorbed is she in whatever she is witnessing through the surface glassiness, the mechanism of mystification grows rhapsodic. Just her way to get steadily sarcastic, her most visible personality trait under compulsion.

Her mental state cannot get any precisely stranger or precisely clearer. She is past being baffled. Clearly, even the new looking glass is cursed. She breaks into a cold sweat that oozes, soaks into her outer shell. Her legs turn to rubber. She crumples in a heap, tears spilling in waves. But what is it she is seeing that functions in a jumble of such regularity she is driven to a fever of despair? It cannot be!

Her new exoskeleton turns soft. Hair follicles wither along the line of her epidermis. She pulls herself to full height, facing the mirror. The process of sclerotisation is occurring even as she moves. Her outer skin is hardening at an uncontrollable rate. So that her reflection rather than being unaffected by distance and rather than staying constant in size as one might expect from a normal mirror, when she moves away instead of growing smaller her figure grows rotund and larger, and when she draws closer instead of growing larger she turns jaded and smaller. And out of the unusual fractured movement in the mirror grows a steady fluorescence, which gradually blots and returns, shining in ribbons.

A new craving comes over her. Outstripped by the smoke-on-mirrors approximation effect and with nothing to do for it, a motionless Madhuri Marmiche pulsates in elongated strokes in time with the ebb and flow of the mirror, letting in the black light. She is past flirting, past euphoric dream, past layered disillusion. She is precise. She is looking into a wall of a thousand mirrors just as her mother and grandma had before her, trapped in the gleams of the old, trapped in the new, the one she has stepped into. She examines her new sclerite with indifference. A thousand eyes look back, effacing the very little visible gleams, distilling what she sees.

Plagued by her sensations she is devoured into the cracked part of the whole. The fracture swallows her up. This will intensify and change in her next instar, when her exoskeleton sheds and she assumes a new form. A secret ephemera sparkles darkly bent along the length of the crack, glowing like a blurred sun, bursting to emerge out of the mirror. She dissolves into its refractive error. Even an insect must grow wings out of a grub to flutter free, its passage complete--a butterfly in blue. Unconsciously, unknown to her, that is what the mirror is mirroring, in and out, a replication of her own signals. In! Out! In! Out! Fluorescence complete in the black light display, the dusky scorpion's reddish complexion glows a brilliant blue.

Houses should not have black light display mirrors hanging in long hallways of heavily used areas.