StillPoint: Colette's Mirror Play

You enter through a cold glass door, inhaling manufactured flora laced with root gum and plastic that reaches the back of your throat; a room that smells of the faded lavender of angelica, the waxy rose of Geranium, extract of vanilla unnecessarily braced with resin. Powders are re-applied; you catch your reflection; there is the hum of tongues, muffled by a corporal red carpet, the chime of glasses and smell of acidified milk on silverware.

You are Colette. You came in from the cold, you have told us, in the opening line of Mirror-Play—a perfectly Colette vignette of two and a half pages—though you do not like it here, in this Salon de Thé .

Read entire piece at StillPoint literary journal website.