text: > Crash noises. The sound of the car tires screeching to stay on the asphalt. Then silence.
  Ahh, where am I?
  
  With difficulty, you try to open your leaden eyelids. No avail. All is pitch black.
  
  "Breathe in and out, Anna. I know I can do it." You sigh between sobs as your blurry and unfocused vision gradually focuses...
  
  Everything is outside down. Your bloody lungs are compressed between the airbags and the car roof. At the same time, the safety belt digs into your ribs like bondage.
  
  I need to get out of here! I need to get out of here!
  
  Your restless mind flicks in and out of conscience like a candle in a windstorm. You have to run away and ask for help.
  
  You sigh. National holiday in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska cornfields, nobody will find you here. You have to run away from the car and found your mobile signal.
  
  "I don't want to die!" Your dry throat sobs on its own like a cord puppet.
  
  > say "I would focus on trying to know where I am and how I can go out."
  Remember the meditation classes Mom signed me up for. Positive thinking and all that hippie shit.
  You feel like your sweat running down your face, making everything sticky and wet. I have to get out of here as soon s possible.
  
  "The first thing, it was to focus on each sense separately as if the others did not exist.
  
  > What can you hear?
  "What can I hear?"
  
  You close your eyes and try to suppress your blood's salty taste and iron smell, and God knows what else to be like a symbolic human speaker.
  
  Little by little, you isolate yourself from the sound of the accident alarm and your own shortness of breath. There is something more subtle at the beginning but more and more clear a hiss and a drip as if something was leaking-
  
  "Damn, this rental car runs on natural gas!"
  
  > say "I have to escape from here."
  "But how am I going to be able to get out of here? I'm blocked in this car!" You shout furiously, trying to dry your own tears.
  
  For several seconds you arm yourself as if you were a fish out of water.
  
  "Ahh", the seat belt digs into your waist and ribs as you try to drag every piece of your weak body out of the metal jail and airbags.
  
  "Damn, it hurts! Ahhhh!"
  
  For several seconds your arm flopped around like you were a fish out of water. It would be so easy to give up and sleep forever.
  
  "Assistance Service for accident victims. We have detected a sudden problem with the beacon of the rental car. Has something happened?"
  
  "I have had an accident. Please call the police to the national guard or whoever is necessary!"
  
  "Don't worry, the authorities are on the way; try to stay conscious at all times."
  
  "... And cutting!", The director says.
  
  > say "Stop patronicing me, darling. This is just a glorified advertisment pay fpr BMW?"
  You don't even want to look at the damn caravan they gave you backstage. If there is a sign of your decline, that 10 square meter motorhome is the proof of it.
  
  "Pff, I finally hate this damn harness full of fake blood."
  
  You grab the towel from your assistant's sweaty hands, feeling his frog eyes fading all over your body, only covered with the swimsuit you wear under your special effects costumes and makeup.
  
  "Don't be so grumpy. Your fans love to see you covered in blood; it is a tradition at this point." His short dirty tongue wallows like a slug between his thin lips, licking himself.
  
  "Don't ... go on there, Sam." You comment, trying to resist the retching urge. You were once someone a star. Just go away, I won't need you for the rest of the weekend.
  
  "I... There is a town theatre special show tonight. I am sure that is good. You could accompany me?" His voice breaks nervously. His hands move out of control as if they were being handled by a novice puppeteer.
  
  > say "My career may be in low hours, but I will never date someone like you."
  "As conceited as ever. Oh, Fallen star. The poison of pride runs through your veins." A crocodile smile appears in your assistant's eyes, almost as if transforming his pathetic figure into something else.
  
  Your heart beats like a military tambourine. Your hands and feet move by themselves as if you are being driven by a puppeteer—theatre within the theatre.
  
  "Shut up, bastard! I... I won't allow you to talk to me like that! " Your hand feels heavy with a pleasant touch... Your eyes are fixed in surprise to the figure firmly grasped in your fist as if it were a weapon,
  
  You see the solid gold figure with a masculine and suggestive shape with a silky and heavy touch. Your most tremendous success in life; a strange sensation fills you like an electric current running through your spine.
  
  "Pathetic, look how low you've fallen, drunkard... Doing small series to promote cars as if you were a starving person filming sanitary towels commercials again..."
  
  No, no, this has to be a dream. It can't be happening. He is treating me like a filthy nobodyYou think, feeling your life shatters.
  
  "How long until you go back to suck her on the streets of Hollywood looking for someone to come in and rub you for a miserable role!" His mocking tone hurts you like a backstab. "What's the matter? are you high again?" The little man splutters aggressively like a faun, almost inhuman.
  
  "What happens to your face is as if ... A mask falls off your face!" With terror, you observe the change. "Is it a gnome?!"
  
  You go back as little as you can in the damn barrack on wheels that they have given you like a dressing room, feeling the aluminium of the chassis hovering over you like the claw of a gatcha machine.
  
  "Coward!" The Oscar whispers in your mind; you can almost feel his golden eyes fixed on you, judging you.
  
  The gnome or whatever the changed and drooling figure your assistant was transformed into, moves, giving off dandruff and a musty smell of death and porn magazines at every turn. You're done, and you know it. He is so close that you can feel his slimy sweat through the oozing pores of his hairy grassy arms.
  
  > AHHH, without thinking, you hit his head over and over with the Oscar
  "I am a movie star. I'm famous. No one can ever call me a failure again!"
  
  "Yes, yes, kill him! don't forget your name and who you are!"
  
  Blow by blow; your improvised weapon hits the Halloween doll. Human? Nothing in it sounds human. It is like a pig squeaking Ree, ree.
  
  "Go fuck yourself! Looser, die!" The fleshy figure bleeds, but it is not like that liquid and fast blood like film ink.
  
  A gorge comes out of the body like that of a clogged pipe while breathing slows and blood dense like jelly and fragments of hair sneak into your nails, your clothes and your hair like freshly cut weeds.
  
  Oscar's ghostly whispering voice whispers like Hamlet's father, "YES, kill him, follow the path of your pride!"
  
  With one last fluid gesture, you open your fists, dreaming of your beloved trophy on the bale of rotting meat on the pathetic third-rate carpet of your dressing room caravan.
  
  And now what the hell am I going to do?
  
  > say " I will let myself go, Be dramatic, and be a new Marylin."
  Your tired, seized muscles clamour to just rest and let this all go by like a bizarre dream.
  
  Before my death, I have to change myself. I can't let them find me dressed and dirty as a nobody.
  
  You watch step by step how the barely warm water in your little dressing room shower made of cheap plastic erases the trace of blood, flesh and skin. Not a flaw in your smooth skin that it has made fall in love for you, from truckers to sheikhs.
  
  "Now, it will only be an instant lost in time compared to my legend." You say on loud, feeling the dramatism of each of the worlds rolling your dry tongue.
  
  For a moment, you are silent, feeling the razor blade reeling nervously in your left hand, a simple firm movement of your left hand... And you can live eternally in the legend.
  Alea jacta est A voice similar to yours sounds in the small room, but it is not coming from your lips.
  
  Your gaze is fixed intensely on the bathroom mirror taped carefully to the shower wall: "I've been the girl on the cover of play man for seven months in the last four years. I have won games... No one is going to steal my position!"
  
  You laugh while you finger your hair, but your blood runs cold when you see your reflection give you back a simian smile and asynchronous gestures of yours...
  
  Your pupils dilate, while a feeling of dizziness and vertigo makes you feel like every drop of water on your naked body is a threat.
  
  The mirrored image courtesy is blowing at you a pin-up style kiss. "Bravo! An impressive show we are mounting, and this time without a public playgirl. "
  
  Is that what my voice sounds like? Your mind wonders. But your curiosity forces you to speak aloud with the one in the mirror. "How is it possible this has to be a nightmare!"
  
  "Pfff! Save all your drama, princess; I've already had too much of you. These almost three decades... All have been about You, you, and you. And what about me!"
  
  Your dizzy lips move with difficulty due to the blood while you just sit in the shower like a scared kid. "You are not real!"
  
  "Indeed I am. You cursed yourself, precious. Now you will feel the disenchantment of horror and misery in your skin. All that is beautiful in your exterior will become twisted and poisoned. In the end, nobody will see on you a human figure. Welcome to the cursed of the mirror. Vampire"
  
  "I am not...." Your blood goes dry.
  
  > ...
  "Ahh!" Absolute blackness and again the cold loneliness surrounds you like a shroud.
  
  Well, now I know who I am. But how the hell did I get here ?! Oh, and I can't forget where the hell is here!
  
  You sigh, Trying to concentrate on feeling your body beyond the muddy humidity surrounding you like a kind of snail drool.
  
  > There is someone else with you, here you can feel it
  "Perhaps your transformation has made you stupid; concentrate on opening your eyes. I need you to get out of here!"
  
  "You! you are the mirror image."
  
  "Well, at least you remember something of your conversion." A reluctant sigh reaches your ears. "The question is, do you want to continue living or not?"
  
  "What question is that?" You say without even thinking about the answer. Why would you want to be dead?
  
  "Oh, I could give you many reasons for that." The voice in the mirror sounds smug, like one of those cartoons with evil characters laughing outrageously with cats on their lap. "Your human body is dead; only the power that has turned you into a vampire keeps your consciousness and alive. The only way out of your metaphorical crypt is to seek your own strength and energy to live."
  
  "So this sensation that I feel...." You are silent for a moment, immobile in this sticky darkness. "Is this what death consists of?"
  
  "It's all in your head, sweetie. So get up and move your ass. If you spend a lot of time in this limbo, you will never wake up." Something in the voice resonates definitively in your mind.
  
  > kick and hit to get out of the slumber you're in.
  How are you going to kick and hit if you don't feel your body?
  
  You mentally shake your head and concentrate on feeling your flesh and skin, almost as if you were reliving one of your movies or you were the camera of a paparazzi going through your whole body.
  
  Your well-shaped figure, curves capable of causing a heart attack and long legs invite a lewd imagination.
  
  Little by little, you feel a strange ant that rises like electric butterflies throughout your skin. But it's odd how little by little your mental image rots like sunburned celluloid. And instead, before a mirror, you see a twisted and scaly body almost bald with claws and hairy and plump fingers.
  
  "This has to be a dream! I refuse to believe that this is real!"
  
  The voice replies to you. "Ahh, I must admit that you are more stubborn than a drunk mule carrying a cart. You only have to open your eyes to see the reality before you and believe you will not like it. But at least let me tell you about the advantages. "
  "Advantage?" You pout finally open your eyes.
  
  A brave new shitty world. A patio, or at least, is the first word that comes to mind to describe the place. It is 20 30 square meters of a strange and towering fence of stone polished and smooth like an Egyptian pyramid. Your body was lying on an unfamiliar floor of a stone, black as night. Obsidian, maybe?
  
  You place your fingers on its surface, feeling its roughness, a rough old age in the stone. Without a doubt, it is not an ordinary floor. But nothing prepares you to see the nightmare that is your body now.
  
  Your beautiful and well-cared-for long and thin hands are now hairy and plump claws like a zombie from a horror movie from the '50s. With terror, you look around your body, crying tears of blood. What have you done with my beautiful body ?! What have you done to me!"
  
  " Honey ", The sarcasm drips from each of the words from your friend." You have done it to yourself; you have committed suicide after killing a vampire with the curse of the shadows your blood mixed, and now you are fucked forever."
  
  > Are a monster. There is only one way left for me
  "Noo! Before committing suicide, wait, let me explain, please." The darkness surrounding you is not static; now, you can palpate it. The inner force remains pulsating like a heart inside the dark energy, Something inconceivable for human beings.
  
  You concentrate in silence, and like you were inside a vision, your spirit can perceive the energy flowing in you and around you. In a way, it feels like an umbilical cord, whispering strange mysteries to you. You can't figure out why a sad smile forms on your disfigured face, the power is intoxicating.
  
  A sinister grin appears on her harmonious face. Meanwhile, her spectral body gets closer and closer to your body. "We are both on the opposite side of the mirror. I am our connection to the universe of eternal shadow. Not a single being from our astral plane can fully enter the shadows realm, which is why shadow vampires mutate and distort like images of fairground mirrors. We are, so to speak, on two planes of existence at the same time."
  
  "Explain yourself!" You say without blinking at the ghost almost touching your face if this is a battle, God if you will fight.
  
  She finally backs away, staring at the strange earth beyond the obsidian pavement you are sitting on. "It's what I'm doing instead of escaping. I am our connection to the universe of eternal shadow. Not a single being from our astral plane can fully enter the shadows realm, which is why shadow vampires mutate and distort like images of fairground mirrors. We are, so to speak, on two planes of existence at the same time."
  
  "So you represent my lost beauty while our body has been transformed into a monster?" You don't even waste time hiding your scepticism.
  
  "You can see it like this. If one of us dies, we both will perish. " For the first time, a grimace of genuine emotion appears on the beautiful translucent phantasm's visage. "But there is one crucial thing if you drink enough blood, we can easily maintain the glamour of my appearance before the whole world will be yours except for modern electronic devices."
  
  > say "Does that mean that I will be obliged to live in anonymity?"
  "There is a whole magical society out there. I think it is not as big a loss as you feel. Either way, baby, it is this or a painful undeath until the true death."
  
  You sigh, "so either I accept it or I die, that's it?"
  
  "Everything is a question of survival, or you move your ugly ass, or you die between pain and torment."
  
  > Looking at the ghost eyes. You finally sigh, "I would rather die than living, knowing that I am a monster."
  "You want to die. Voucher. But what about me? I do not want to die!" The ghost rages furiously, glowing in the dark like one of those glowing stickers they gave away in the gum you stole when you were a child.
  
  "You shouldn't exist in the first place! You are a magic mumbo jumbo!" You slap in vain the air.
  
  "Egotistic bitch. You certainly deserved the punishment of...."
  
  You both leave your verbal fight half-prepared to jump on top of each other.
  
  The air of the strange stone courtyard disappears utterly due to the sticky tentacles of dark energy, pulsing around like jellyfish from emptiness.
  
  The only light that reaches your eyes is the sparkle of your rival laughing like a drunken Valkyrie only contained by the power of the surrounding magic stone and its connection to your body.
  
  If I die, she dies. My advantage is that I want to die..
  Without knowing very well how your body arms itself like a cornered wolf. Huge claws embedded with dark energy. "My body, my right to choose!" You cast as a battle cry before attacking and surprising yourself at your sarcastic laughing. It sounds to you like an 80's feminist anthem.
  
  "If you want to die, why don't you just let me control your body like a puppeteer?" Her voice, like her body, floats and reverberates following the beat of the wind. You close your eyes, sniffing the fragrances of the pines wood with your hyper-developed senses.
  
  "You think I am a stupid emo teen." You sneer at the ghost. "I don't know if I will remain powerless, buried in my own body for all eternity." You say.
  
  "Grow a couple of balls and accept the reality you are in. One of the dark tentacles grabs you as you try in vain to resist the crippling embrace.
  
  No! You gather your waning willpower trying to control the tremors of your new body. So tight and stiff parched, sterile. Useless.
  
  "This is not fair. None of this is. I did not ask for all of this. And hell if I am not going to accept it!"
  
  I'm going to die. And God, if you're going to stop me, you just let your anger take complete control of your body. Throwing yourself with all your dark energy forward, rushing into the quicksand.
  
  "NO!" The ghost yells, but both she and you know that it is too late.
  
  "Ahh!" you scream, feeling how the earth absorbs you as if you were shit in a cat litter box. Rotten blood and smoke seep through one of the hoppy, hairy pores of your shattered body.
  
  "Once, I was beautiful. That was the only thing I had. Without that, I... I am nothing but dust in the wind." A sarcastic grin appears on your face. "Hey, at least I remember the lines from my own movies!"
  
  "And now you want me to put the background song so that we die like in a French three-quarter movie." A laugh chanted between your dying faces as the darkness begins to broadcast the music of Kansas like on a radio.
  
  I close my eyes
  Only for a moment, and the moment's gone
  
  All my dreams
  Pass before my eyes, a curiosity
  
  Dust in the wind
  
  All they are is dust in the wind.
  
  Same old song
  
  Just a drop of water in an endless sea
  
  All we do
  
  Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
  
  Dust in the wind
  
  All we are is dust in the wind.
  
  Oh