6.2

 There was a mirror behind the living room door. This was the first time she’d noticed it, since they hadn’t sat here long enough to need the door to the hall closed. Either there was no-one else in the house or they had stayed in here for too short a time to warrant the lighting of the gas fire. She rose to stand stood before the mirror, the dim light through the lounge window casting her reflection into fragments. The wallpaper behind her was peeling, the bulb above her head flickered, and yet her gaze was steady, fixed on the thought that had been nagging at her from the moment she had woken up: what did it mean to see herself as a skeleton?

At first, the image felt stark, almost brutal. She imagined her skin dissolving, her hair falling out, her eyes sinking deeply into their sockets. What remained was bone — pale, rigid, stripped of softness. To see herself as a skeleton would be to confront the bare architecture of her existence, the scaffolding beneath the surface. Bones did not smile or frown; they did not blush or tremble. They simply endured or were crushed under the heavy foot of progress. Beneath the skin, the muscle, the layers of fat and tissue the were all the same. Spiritual beings inhabiting bone golems and navigating the world by means of flesh puppetry.

Yet endurance itself carried meaning. A skeleton was permanence, the part of her that would remain when everything else dissolved. To see herself as a skeleton might be to recognize the truth of survival — that beneath the shifting moods, the unfinished canvases, the arguments and silences, there was something unyielding. Something that held her upright even when she wanted to crumble under the awful weight of reality and prejudice. Flesh carried expectations — beauty, youth, gender, identity. Bones carried none of that. They were silent, impartial. To imagine herself as a skeleton was to imagine herself free of judgment, free of the gaze of others. It was to imagine herself stripped to essence, to something that could not be misinterpreted.

But there was another layer. A skeleton was anonymity. Without flesh, without features, she was no longer Roisin, no longer the person people saw as she intersected their lives. She was simply human, indistinguishable from countless others. To see herself as a skeleton might mean surrendering individuality, acknowledging that her body was not hers alone but part of a larger pattern, a shared design. The thought unsettled her: the idea that her uniqueness could vanish into bone and leave nothing behind but whatever she left to the world, and if the world recognised nothing of her, then nothing she would leave behind. This is why people built things. Great edifices so that future generations would remember their name, for while your name was still spoken, there was proof that you once had a place here. Rameses II (who was Rameses 1? She could picture nothing to illustrate his life); The Bible, and all the men it named one after the other, though the women were by and large ignored; The Lincoln Monument, The Stevenson Rocket, the Eiffel Tower; Guy Fawkes night, The Trumpful Arch in Washington. On reflection, perhaps not the last two. They were remembered in infamy, the same was serial killers and war criminals generated their eternal longevity.

And yet, paradoxically, to be a skeleton was also recognition. To see herself devoid of flesh was to admit that she was not only surface, not only the face reflected in glass or imagined in stone. She was depth, hidden structure, the unseen truth that carried her through the world. Perhaps the skeleton was not a denial of self but the celebration of a deeper self, one that could not be erased by time or misunderstanding.

She leaned closer to the mirror, tracing the outline of her cheek with her fingertips. Beneath the flesh she could feel the hardness of bone, the quiet certainty of shape. It was there all along, invisible yet undeniable. She thought of the sculptors she admired, chiselling stone until form emerged. Wasn’t her own skeleton a kind of sculpture, produced by nature, hidden beneath the surface?

It was also vulnerability. Skeletons were reminders of mortality, of endings. It might mean confronting the inevitability of loss, the truth that all beginnings are shadowed by decay. It was not a comfortable thought, but it was honest. And honesty, she knew, was the only foundation she had for what came next.