# The mirror > Short fiction. Days four to ten, and a woman twisting in a bathroom mirror to look at something nobody else will see, and working out why she minds it fading. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-mirror/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about adults over 18. Nothing happens in this story except a bruise changing colour, which turns out to be enough to think about for a week. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version, including how long marks last and how to look after them, is at [marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/). Day four is when I start looking properly. Days one to three are not interesting. Day one is red and hot and honestly a bit much, day two is sore in a way that makes the drive to the shops an event, and by day three it has settled into the plain purple you would get from walking into a kitchen drawer. Day four is when it starts doing something. --- The bathroom in this flat has one mirror, above the basin, mounted by somebody who evidently assumed that all human beings are five foot ten and only ever wish to see their own face. So the posture required is this. Back to the basin, feet apart, twist at the waist, chin over the shoulder, one hand pulling at the waistband, phone in the other hand with the torch on because the extractor light is useless. Hold. Then the other side, which is harder, because I twist worse to the left. I am forty-one years old and I have a mortgage and a pension I do not understand, and roughly every evening for a week I stand in my own bathroom doing an exercise that would not disgrace a yoga class, to look at the back of myself by torchlight. --- The colours are the part nobody tells you about, and they are extraordinary. Day four it goes green at the edges. Not a green you would call green in any other context, a sort of drowned olive, and it comes in around the outside of each mark first so that everything gets an outline. Day five and six the middles start to go. Purple thins to a brownish grey and then, underneath that, the yellow arrives, which is the colour I find hardest to look at and I could not tell you why. Something to do with it being the colour of an old injury rather than a recent one. They also travel. This is the thing that surprised me most the first time and still does. They do not fade where they are. They slide, downwards and outwards, a centimetre or so over a week, so that by day seven the pattern has stopped being a record of anything and has become a general condition. There is a particular one from a Saturday in March that ended up almost on the top of my thigh, four days after the strap that made it had never gone anywhere near my thigh. --- And I am pleased. That is the honest report from the bathroom. Not pleased in the way I would be pleased about a haircut. Something lower and quieter and much harder to admit to, which is that I like knowing they are there. I like the fact that I sat through two hours of a budget meeting on the Monday with all of that underneath a wool skirt and nobody in that room had the faintest idea. Then, generally around day five, I catch myself being pleased and I go cold about it. --- The cold feeling has a specific shape, so let me be exact. It is not that I think I am damaged goods. I got past that one years ago and I do not intend to do it again. It is: what sort of woman is glad to be bruised. That question sounds unanswerable at half past ten at night in a bathroom, which is exactly where it is asked, and the reason it sounds unanswerable is that it is the wrong question wearing a coat. It is not really about the bruise. It is the old thing again, the one that turns up whenever I enjoy any of this, and it only ever asks about my character rather than about what actually happened. --- Here is the answer I arrived at, on about the fourth or fifth round of having the argument with myself, and I think it is right. I want the marks because they are evidence. By the Wednesday, the Saturday has gone thin. It is not that I forget it. It is that it stops being an event and becomes a story about an event, and I do not entirely trust my own stories. I am a woman who can talk herself out of almost anything given four days and a busy week. By Wednesday I can have half persuaded myself that I imagined how much I wanted it, or that it was smaller than I remember, or that I have made rather a lot out of an ordinary evening. The bruise cannot be talked out of. The bruise is not an interpretation. It sits there in the torchlight being the one part of the whole thing that is not subject to my opinion, and every evening for a week it says: no, that did happen, and you asked for it, and here is the receipt. That is what the pleasure is. It is not about damage. It is about not having to take my own word for it. --- Which is why day nine is miserable, and it took me a long time to work out that I was allowed to find it miserable. Day nine there is a faint tea-stain thing on one side and nothing at all on the other. Day ten there is nothing. My body looks like the body of a woman who has had an entirely uneventful fortnight. I stood there on a day ten last winter feeling something that I can only describe as bereaved, over a bruise, and had the sense to find it funny at the same time. --- The thing I watch for, and I do watch for it, is the next thought along. Because there is one, and it arrives on day ten, and it goes: next time ask for more, so it lasts longer. So there is more proof, and the proof stays up for a fortnight rather than a week. That thought is not a plan. It is grief doing arithmetic, and if I ever let it hold the pen I will end up asking for things I do not want in order to solve a problem that is not about my body at all. I have met the version of this that got away from somebody, and it was not romantic, it was somebody negotiating for injuries. So the rule I made is that I do not ask for anything in the three days after they go. Nothing on day ten, eleven or twelve. If I still want it on Thursday then I want it, and Thursday is allowed to have opinions. --- I told him about all of this eventually, in the car, which is where I tell him things. He was quiet for a while. Then he said that he had wondered why I always looked faintly cross with him on a Wednesday, and that he had assumed he had done something. And then he said the thing that has done more work than any of the rest of it. He said: you know you are allowed to just ask me whether it happened. I was there. I will tell you. It had honestly not occurred to me that a person could be used as evidence. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [How do I hide the marks?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/how-do-i-hide-the-marks/) - [Shame and arousal](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/shame-and-arousal/) - [Sub drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/sub-drop/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.