Assistant Editor Haley Crigger: I love a good, long sentence, almost as much as I love this tenacious young girl, “fierce as a seagull” as she tries to steal the narrator’s yellow purse. Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s cave systems, the brief moment captured in “Mirror” reveals time in all its dimensions and reversals: a scar that is a reminder and a warning; an Hermès bag that is both bait and switch; an attack that is an endless cycle and its interruption, a violation and a sign that “our day is off to a good start.”
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Mirror
The girl who yanks the yellow Hermès bag with my phone, keys, and cards off my shoulder on a quiet cobblestone street along an Amsterdam canal doesn’t appear as innocent as the children stealing wallets on the café terraces near the old church, not as choreographed as the teenagers picking pockets on the squeaky tram, not as revengeful as my ill-chosen target five decades ago, but she’s just as feisty as I was at her age, thirteen at most, and fierce like a seagull while she tugs and tugs, avoiding my eyes at first because it’s better not to know the victim, better not to give remorse the chance to weaken your will, yet soon staring at me through the morning mist with amazement over how I keep the leather strap in my fist long enough to become a contender, someone who arouses her anger or perhaps admiration, because so few gray-haired women resist, and who catches her off guard by grasping her wrist and twisting it just so she winces and feels forced to let go of the yellow bag, and who tells her in a surprisingly gentle voice that the path she’s on is not worth it, that it will lead to scars like the one my revengeful target carved on my cheek, which isn’t as ugly as it was in my youth, not as deterring a mark as I now need it to be, but which causes a sense of horror in the girl that pushes her beyond pity and into reflection, and when I release her fine wrist and she backs away from me slowly instead of running off, I dare to believe that our day is off to a good start.
Claire Polders is the author of four novels in Dutch and one novel for younger readers in English, A Whale in Paris (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Her short prose has been published in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Electric Literature. She’s working on her first memoir and writes a travel blog at www.clairepolders.com.
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