"You should wash your face," the albino girl in the mirror says. "You look like some sort of hobo."
"I didn't know it was so dirty," Dancy replies, embarrassed at her own raggedness, and almost adds, I thought the rain would have washed it clean, but then she thinks better of it.
There's a stingy violet-brown sliver of soap on the sink, but when she turns on the hot water, the knob marked h, she remembers how badly she has to pee and turns the water off again. She loosens her belt, and the pearl-handled straight razor tucked into the waistband of her jeans almost falls out onto the floor. She catches it and slips it into her back pocket. The razor, like the duffel bag, was her grandfather's, and he carried both of them when he fought the Nazis in Italy and France. Dancy didn't take many things out of her grandmother's cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it, and the bodies inside, to the ground. But she took the straight razor, because the old man had shaved with it every morning, and it helped her remember him.
After she pees, Dancy wipes off the seat with a big wad of toilet paper, even though there's not a drop of urine on it anywhere. She drops the wad into the porcelain bowl, flushes, and the water swirls round and round like the hot wind that always swirls about her angel.
"You look like hell," the albino girl in the mirror says and frowns.
"I'm just tired, that's all. I didn't sleep very well last night," which is the truth. She slept a few hours in the backseat of an abandoned car that someone had stolen, stripped, and left in the woods, and her dreams were filled with images of the things she'd seen and done in Bainbridge and Shrove Wood, the angel and the things that want her dead and damned, the past and the present and the slippery, hungry future.
Dancy turns the hot water on again and uses the yellowish sliver of soap to wash her hands, her arms, her grimy face and neck. The soap smells like soap, but it also smells very faintly of black-eyed susans and clover and sunshine, and she doesn't remember ever having smelled that sort of soap before. When she's done, she dries with brown paper towels from a chrome dispenser mounted on the wall. All that hot water's steamed up the mirror, and she uses another paper towel to wipe it clear again.
The albino girl is still there, watching Dancy from the other side.
"That's better," the girl in the mirror says. "Don't you think so?"
"It feels better," Dancy says, "if that's what you mean. And I like the way that soap smells."
"You know, I think you're running out of time," the girl in the mirror tells her, smoothing her hair with her wet hands, just like Dancy's doing. "I don't even think you're going to have to worry about Waycross, or Sinethella and her hound, or the nine crazy ladies in their big house in Savannah, not the way things are going."
"I don't even know what you're talking about. Who's Sinethella?"
The mirror girl looks skeptical and furrows her brow. "It hasn't even told you about-"
"He tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it. He tells me-"
"Just enough to keep you moving, and not one word more, because it knows the big picture would shut you down, send you running off back to the swamp with your tail tucked between your legs."
"I don't have a tail," Dancy says, wishing the albino girl in the mirror, the girl who isn't her reflection after all, would shut up and go away.
"You might as well, as far as the Seraphim are concerned. To them, you're nothing but a trained monkey, an ugly little freak of evolution they can swindle into wiping their Heavenly asses for them."
"Is this another test?" Dancy asks the mirror, and she imagines balling up her fist and punching the glass as hard as she can, imagines the blood and pain, the glittering shards and the silvery sound they would make falling into the rust-stained sink.
"Christ, you can be a tiresome little cunt," the girl in the mirror sighs, and now her face is changing, years rolling through her rose-colored eyes like waves against a sandy shore, waves to diminish her grain by grain and draw deep lines in her pale skin. And, in only a moment more, the girl in the mirror is a grown woman-thirty, thirty-five, forty-looking backwards at the lost child she was, or Dancy's only looking ahead to the lost woman she'll become, if she lives that long. Or maybe it works both ways, Dancy thinks, and she reaches out, expecting their fingers to brush, but there's only the cold, impenetrable surface of the looking glass and her own sixteen-year-old face gazing back at her again.
"Just a trick," Dancy whispers, even though she doesn't really believe it. "The angel said there would be lots of tricks."
The girl in the mirror says nothing more or less than Dancy says, and does nothing that she doesn't do, and Dancy Flammarion turns her back on the sink, and whatever it might, or might not, mean. She makes sure her jeans are zipped, and tightens her belt again, and unlocks the restroom door.
Dancy's holding a red and white can of Campbell 's chicken and stars soup, the label enough to make her mouth water, and she thinks briefly about trying to steal it before she sets it back on the shelf. She glances towards the screen door leading out to the cloudy day and the old man and the front of the Texaco station. There's a shiny black pickup truck idling by the pumps, and the old man is talking to the driver. No one who's looking for her, just someone who's stopped to buy gas or a pack of cigarettes, someone the old man knows, or maybe he talks like that to everyone who stops. Maybe he offers everyone a wintergreen Certs and tells them to be sure and flush.
"He's a son of a bitch," she hears the old man say. "When the Good Lord was handin' out assholes, that cocksucker went back for seconds."
The driver of the black truck laughs, laughs the way that fat men and very small demons laugh, and Dancy looks at the can of soup again.
"Son of a whore wanted his money back," the old man says. "I told him sure thing, just as soon as ol' Gabriel starts playin' taps."
The man from the black truck laughs again, and Dancy's empty stomach rumbles.
And then she looks the other way, towards the rear of the store. There's another screen door back there that she didn't notice before she went into the restroom, a door with a wooden plaque hung above it, but she has to get closer to read all the words painted on it. Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces, the plaque declares in fancy calligraphied letters like the ones on the cover of her grandmother's old Bible. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged. Isaiah 13:19-22.
"I'm doing my part," she whispers, reaching for the brass door handle, smelling the musky wild animal smell getting in through the screen wire. "Now you better keep him busy long enough for me to finish this, you hear?"
The angel doesn't answer her, but then it rarely ever does, so she doesn't take the silence one way or another.
The door creaks very loudly, like the hinges have never once seen so much as a single drop of oil, the hinges and the long spring that's there to snap the door closed again. Dancy steps over the threshold, eases the noisy door shut behind her, and now she's standing on a small back porch cluttered with an assortment of crates and cardboard boxes and greasy, rusting pieces of machinery that she doesn't recognize.