Closed-Off Letter to a Mirror-Girl

Poppy Mullins

Content Warning:Bullying

I’ve had mirror-girls before.

Cooked-chicken-skinned advocates peppering their Instagram accounts with vague slogans.

There’s always I in inclusivity; diversity is not a matter of opinion.

Calling it ‘Diverse Education’ is the first step towards all of us learning together.

My scowl drips sweat beads of spite onto my phone screen

as if smearing the florid misquotations of long-dead activists

revealing the cynicism that always lags behind such common courtesies.

Unfortunately, this feeling doesn’t delete the post.

Instead, icons telling me to

call it ‘Diverse’, not ‘Inclusive Education’

and to respond to the Royal Commission responsibly

offer me a corporate grin.

I find myself looking at the red and purple stripes bordering each message.

I wonder if it’s the same colour that’s painted on the burnt-out kitchen walls of the SIL house.

I wonder if it was looking at that red

that made that young man’s support worker forget to turn the stove off before he left the house.

I wonder if he’s watching his client

now lying in a hospital bed

catheter coiled around his arm

thinking oh well, he’s in middle age and his parents won’t let him live on his own anymore

but if everyone calls it ‘Diverse Education’

our friendliness with each other will solve everything.

Mum just sighs a long deep sigh and hands me the form.

Reason is buttoned to the top of her tone.

‘You’ll never get anywhere in life if you always have to stop at the border.’

She sighs again. The exhale’s softer this time.

‘For God’s sake, just see it as proof that people your own age aren’t psychopaths.’

She places the pen in my hand.

I wish the obscure marks I made on the form

right underneath the words

Tick this box if you would like to attend the in-person National Youth Disability Summit 2023

had not been the debris of my hand struggling to perform a wobbly tick.

I wish I had written the clean lines of a ‘NO’.

That way, I could’ve grown out of looking for a mirror-girl much sooner.

 

Hair as spiked as the pain of pins and needles surrounds me.

They sit, wheelchairs hunched against the polished oak of the table.

The first girl is short and loud.

Each time she speaks

the spray of pimples on her cheeks, pink and juvenile,

seem to shudder red with the weight of her anger.

I watch her finish an expletive-laden account of being denied a diagnosis

for another, rarer, type of disability.

She pulls her lips taut and looks down at her tray.

Her four companions nod, making sound effects of comfort.

The puppy-yelp of my apology lands in her ear.

She gives me a glitter smile then says, ‘Oh, thank you.’

It’s the kind of voice you use when a toddler shows you a stick.

The four companions wrinkle their noses as if to echo this gesture.

They have their backs turned to me.

Then, in tones preset to the scrubbed distance of western judgment

they begin to discuss the pitfalls of the social model of disability in Taiwan.

My lips feel dry and my ears ring with the noise of the room.

To ask each of them what music they like would be as stupid

as putting a crack through your bedroom mirror.

 

A sheet of paper is handed round after the midday break.

My words are written in six seconds.

The girl with the shuddering pimples talks first again.

‘This government would never give us funding for a day where students with disabilities

could talk about what they wanted in their schools.’

A fifth girl has joined the group and gives me a glitter smile of her own.

‘I love your idea. Self-care is so undervalued.’

I give one low nod.

I want to tell her that self-care

is a weapon used by bullies

to question whether you really were paying attention in class that day

whether your brain really is built for literary analysis

to ask well, if you were so sure of what you were doing, why did you stumble over your words?

Why didn’t you just tell her how you wanted to evaluate the argument

and ignore the way she looked at you?

I want to tell this girl

that self-care was a glib suggestion made

whenever I felt angry that a teacher aide hadn’t hit the save button on Word

or as Darlene, my teacher aide in Maths and Literature

asked me for the tenth time

under the swelter of exam conditions

on which line she should put the equals sign.

To make my voice heard now, I would have to shout.

I don’t like shouting

and there are no dirty glasses left to smash against the side of the table

so I keep quiet.

 

I wish it were a book you’d written, or a film, or a piece of music

that made me set you apart from all the conferences and rabid absolutism.

In the end, it was a photograph of you in a red dress

the old-fashioned kind, with a wisp of skirt that was just tulle

and wrapped around the footplates of your wheelchair.

You were parked in front of a red-brick building

the context of it now swallowed up in patronising praise.

The caption’s still there though

reposted from a newspaper article

The Disabled Youth Emerging Writers Award lands square in the lap

of young disability advocate with quadriplegic cerebral palsy

I didn’t turn around and announce to Mum

bent over the stove

that I was going to start sending my poems and cheap disability-focused versions

of British literary novels to your journal.

I just did.

 

When the fork is raised to your lips, I become aware of how still your hands are

encased in the cloak of your blue leather splints.

They twist and pull at the knife

self-assured, like a child star on the set of their second film

whittling the small chunks of ham

until the size of each piece

is small enough for your mouth.

Mine act like pickpockets on their last late-night job.

I reach for the humid plastic sleeve of the menu

my fingers deciding to scrub

at the red and white checks of the tablecloth.

You ask me how the hedonistic values of a European synth group

could be a model for achieving equity within schools.

I tug at my scarf like a nervous six-year-old at their first school assembly.

‘Well, the idea of doing what you like can be seen as a type of equity

because it’s about the individual…I just thought it was an interesting research topic…’

There’s nothing reassuring about the smile you give back.

Your voice is brittle.

‘Yeah…you see, the magazine tries to publish diverse youth voices…your article’s great…

but it’s all a bit Euro-centric, so…we can’t really…do anything with it.’

‘Um, well, how could I change it then?’

‘Look. Don’t bother changing it. It’s not the sort of thing that would be easy to submit again.’

It’s then I notice

that the lipstick around your mouth

is a lightish pink colour, the same type of pink Mum’s artist friends wear

when they want someone to tell them

how young they look.

I let illness be my excuse for leaving the café

just after the waiter brings our pot of tea.

 

I wonder as I write this.

Is it vanity to view someone’s despair with suspicion

unless their tears spill out into self-depreciation?

Is it vanity to see glory as grotesque

unless it’s shrouded in a dress, or smells of expensive perfume?

Is it vanity to hate yourself

but to show it off as self-acceptance?

I don’t know.

 

My left fingers squirm, embarrassed by the cool smoothness of the glass.

With my right hand, I still them.

I keep looking at my hands

in the bathroom mirror

for a full ten seconds.

Author: Poppy Mullins (she/her) is an aspiring writer of domestic gothic fiction that explores how far the social model of disability can excuse the enacting of immoral behaviour from young people with physical disabilities stuck  in environments where they cannot express their deepest thoughts, regardless of how violent those thoughts might be. Poppy is also interested in exploring how existing in different spaces as a young person with a physical disability impacts the creative ambitions of those seeking to find a place in the mainstream art sector.

As a part of this, Poppy’s particular ambition is to explore how different subcultures of music help young individuals with physical disabilities navigate the challenges of finding a pathway through the mainstream art sector, with a focus on finding positive rather than cathartic outcomes.

Artist: Damon King is a mature age student in the third and final year of a BFA in Creative Writing at QUT. Over the past decade, being an artist of mixed media owned and dominated the creativity side opposed to my writing. Street art and graffiti was the starting point, then came multiple exhibitions, studios, and showings on professional levels. Artwork being purchased and commissioned from all over the world while building up a healthy presence on social media and travel-got my name out there. My writing has just re-discovered itself in the past few years, and it has been an exciting ride so far, so I am very interested to see where this takes me… @skullcapper @5kullc4p @johnnymahogany F.B Skull Cap (Brisbane artist) 

 Edited by: Ricky Jade and Benjamin Forbes