Six months with black eyes onyx and obsidian shards cut to the quick like the knapped and faceted arrowheads in her wrist. Six months of stormy stares followed strikes of eclectic anger and defeated Milky Way sighs like feathers falling down.

In my mind, all alone listening to the quiet click-clicking finding a friend in the wind whistling over the keys. Winter time in the valley of my talent and my gown billows behind me in ballrooms. A Hollywood diva dancing like Lana—but I was not waltzing among a zillion adoring flashlights.

But falling headfirst into the red bulb Polaroid of the devil’s favorite apparatus. It catches my profile, so unsettling are those tinted eyes. In ruddy dawns I languished.

In my solitary hole—”The Warden wants me here,” I thought—filled with rats with no tails and bats with no ears, mimicking me as I searched for my lost eyes rolling on the floor. Nightmare terrors of myself acting normal at The Overlook as I wink seductively at the ogling ghosts swinging from the chandeliers, my garter showing under the hem as he dips me again and again.

“Welcome,” said I to the new concierge, my own reflection adorned in white gauze as if to marry today, keenly aware of my toeless feet poking out from the ends of my legs. Repeating, “All work and no play,” to myself, like Jack at the typewriter, all the while wondering where he has gone with that axe of his? 

Suddenly liquid torrents of crimson light up the hallway: There, at the end, a pair of two little boys standing like Russian dolls, their eyes not blinking, but their lips parting like question marks, for they do not know where their mother has gone to. “She’s still here, my dears,” I tell them, waltzing one last time in the ballroom before bedtime. Let her kiss you once more, with the unsettling touch of a kitten’s rough tongue, lapping milk from your hollow wooden cheeks.