Sue stood in front of the mirror, in a pair of white and blue-stripped panties. Looking at her size ten, forty eight year old body, rubbing the scar of her missing left breast.
She still wanted to cry, when she thought of how ten years ago her life changed, when she found a lump in her left breast, and went to the doctors. There were the visions of her impending death. After the tests, her worse fears were con๏ฌrmed. The doctor told her they got to it early, and her life could be saved.
Unfortunately, there would have to remove her left breast. Six months after the mastectomy and radiotherapy, she returned home to her husband.
A year later her husband Stan, ๏ฌled for divorce and left with a lady down the road. Each time she looked in a mirror, she saw a mutilated lonely forty-year with no future.
Over the next four years she fell into a deep depression, and began to cover all the mirrors and shiny surfaces in the house. When she went outside she would wear larger and baggier clothes to hide her body from the people around her. She had had the medical cabernet in her bathroom stocked with razor blades and sleeping tables, for when she could summon up the courage to kill herself.
Five years after the divorce, while she was shopping, she heard a male voice calling
'Suzanne is that you?'
She turned to face a man in his mid thirty.
"Suzanne that IS you. How are you?"
"Oh, okay I guess," Sue lied, confused as to who this person was.
"You don't remember me, do you? I would come and talk to you in hospital, about my father who was having treatment for leukaemia".
"Oh right. I remember you now. Kind of."
"Back then, I was a little sel๏ฌsh. Using you as a sound-board. I think you need, to use me as the sound-board now. Coffee?"
They found a coffee shop, and talked about life after cancer, and how there were coping with it. After about three hours of tears, laugher and every thing in between Rob said to her "I had the same suicide thoughts about two years ago. A friend helped me through them. I am going to do the same to you. We are going to your house now, and no arguments"
Ten minutes later they walked into her house,
"First take me to your bathroom, and then to your bed room.
As they entered her bathroom, the ๏ฌrst thing Rob saw was the mirror on the medicine
cabernet, covered with newspaper. Rob ripped the paper off and turned Sue's face to the mirror.
"Open your eyes. Open them. Look at yourself! What do you see?"
"No I can't! I look horrible! That's why my husband left me!"
"If that's the case, use the razors and the pills to end it now. Look I'm here. I can make sure you take more than enough to end it!"
He yelled in her face as he turned her to face him.
"No fuck you! I'll not die, just because you say so. The cancer did NOT kill me! My asshole of a husband did not kill me, and you won't kill me ever."
"Good, that's the spirit; hold on to that and lead me into your bedroom. We have one more thing to do before we throw this lot away"
In the bedroom, he found the ๏ฌoor to ceiling mirror, attached to the cupboard door, covered in newspaper. He turned her towards the mirror and stood behind her and said, "I want you to rip the paper off the mirror."
He watched her slowly clench and unclench her ๏ฌsts and walk to the mirror. With shaking hands she reached out. Grabbed the paper, and ripped it off.
