She opened her stomach. I took out my lighter, produced a flame, and cast light into the darkness. I saw a single object, a mirror. A square mirror with a baroque metal exterior: cursive, elegant. I saw part of my face reflected in the mirror. I was displeased. A mirror wasn’t doing it for me. There was too much me in the equation. I wanted to lose myself in the stomach’s dark curious inventory, not find myself there. She told me to touch the mirror. Really, I said. Really, she insisted. I thought of that game I used to play when I was a kid, Operation, in which you used tweezers to remove different objects from labeled body parts, and if the tweezer touched the interior of a body part, a buzzer sounded. That’s how I felt when I reached into her stomach to grab the mirror. I worried that my clumsy hand would touch something it wasn’t supposed to, and … buzz. This didn’t happen, but something else, perhaps even more alarming, did. As soon as my fingers touched the mirror, it turned into water. Cold water. I withdrew my soaked hand. I heard her laughing. I could see mirror-droplets jumping up and down in her stomach as she laughed. It was like an earthquake for tiny bugs. My hand started to itch, and then burn. The burning quickly grew severe. When I told her this, she said—When mirrors dissolve in your hands, burning follows. That’s just a law. She laughed again. I didn’t like her at that moment. You could even say I hated her. I went to the sink and ran threads of water over the part of the my hand where the mirror’s cold water had burned me.