"I spent an hour looking into the mirror and watching the irises of my eyes change into different shades of brown and black, and dark, dark grey. I was crying one minute, watching the fat tears slid down downy cheeks with a detachment that I can get like the times I wielded a sharp object and examined it with surgical concentration and trace the veins that map out in a web of life on my arm. And the tears were welling from the heaviness, the pressure in my fluttering chest. Like ravens. Like the dead raven I saw stiff and unrelenting in death, yet like soft decaying fruit, decorating that small corner of the field.

Then like a bubble, it popped. And I was smiling, smiling. A frantic smile, then a smothered giggle. Then a light cheeky smile with the head cocked questioningly at an angle, which became a puzzled self conscious grin which deepened as I watched myself in the mirror, trying to make sense of what I was doing."