I hope to finish this someday... you don't know yet, but it was meant to be set in the Harry Potter universe sometime in the 1960s.

A round, sweet child’s face. Soft cupid’s bow lips press against each other pensively. A little mushroom nose. Pretty, chubby and rounded, rosy cheeked; curly brown hair tumbling onto light-set shoulders exactly like a china doll. Most people would adore this image.

     Eris studied the mirror, frowning.

     She hated it.

     So weak and powerless, underestimated, ignored… The only people that wanted to be around a child were the people Eris wanted to avoid.

     Her hard grey eyes roved the reflection hungrily. What if those lips were thinner? She tightened them hard. No, they needed different proportions. In her imagination, she tightened them a bit here, widened them a bit there and pricked them up a bit there. Her eyes needed to be smaller now. She squinted.

     Fighting to hold these mental images together, she ran along the contours of her face, imagining, deepening, lengthening, warping…

“She can do that for hours,” whispered Doctor Simons just outside the doorway. Alex took another look at her. From this angle her face was mostly obscured by the mirror she was holding up steadily; an ornate, antique-style hand mirror with the initials E.D. engraved in curly italics across its back. Above them, the name ERIS was scratched out in childlike capitals.

     “Poor thing,” he simpered.

     “Yes…” Simons nodded. “It was a present from her mother.”

     The sad gravity to his voice made him ask. “Did something happen to her mother?”

     “Her mother… She can’t bear the responsibility of having a special needs child. She… dumped her on us, to be frank, and comes once a year to give her a smile and a birthday present. And that’s it. The mirror is the only thing she has to remind herself of her family.”

     “What about the other presents?”

     He shrugged. “She likes the mirror.”

All this time she had been trying to imagine herself Adult. She felt there was a goal to reach somehow, a point where her imagined self would be so real it…

     She wasn’t so sure what would happen. But she had to find out.

     It was like holding water in her hands: the better her picture became, the more easily it collapsed. Her imagination couldn’t hold it all together; one image pushed out the other. She focused. Her eyelids tightened. I won’t let it fall apart. I won’t. Her head throbbed. The sound of her heart thrummed in her ears. She stared, not letting go, building upon the image piece by piece…

“What’s she like with people?”

     “She’s very clever,” Simons nodded proudly, “always knows things… but she can scare people sometimes.”

     “Well, special needs children can be quite scary if you don’t understand them,” Alex said knowingly.

     “Yes, but…” the doctor looked uncomfortable. “Never mind, you’ll see.”

She squinted and pulled in her cheeks slightly. She could almost see it… She had crossed a barrier somehow, it was happening! She dared not even think it in case the picture ran away. So deep into the trance, there was nothing else in the world.

“Does she go to school?”

     “She has had fits sometimes when there were too many people. We keep her in the hospital school. It’s not very nice for her, but what can we do?”

She was adult, she told herself. I am adult. Her imagination gripped her. The image seemed to flicker…

“I’ll introduce myself, shall I? It would do her good to have a break. She looks tense.”

     “Go ahead.”

Her vision blurred and swam. She focused the image, refined it, bending her entire soul to the task. She felt a sensation of incredible power running through her…

     “…ris…”

     “…Eris?” something was tugging on her. She resisted, but the reflection was already disappearing. “Eris?”

     A stranger was shaking her on the shoulder. She growled bestially, threw the mirror to the other end of her bed and lapsed into gales of tears.

     “There there, I know what it must be like for you. I’ll tell you something; I miss my mummy sometimes too.”

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