She put down her fork and looked across at her mother.

She had been sitting at this table for nineteen years now, swallowing as many of her hated vegetables as she could before gagging. She despised string beans, the way their faintly furry pods squeaked against her teeth and sent shivers down her spine. While she waged war with her revulsion, trying to force herself to eat the nasty things, her parents would talk about family, work, politics. As a child the words had zoomed over her head, which was bent in her effort to defeat her vegetables; but as she grew, they began to collect in a semblance of sense in her mind. Joining in her parents' conversation was something grown-up, intellectual and sophisticated, as well as a distraction technique. If she could dazzle them with her conversation, they might not notice as she tucked the awful string beans into her napkin.

But as she began to voice her thoughts, she must have shattered her mother's perception of her. She could imagine herself in her mother's mind, a tiny porcelain figure in Mary-Janes and a frilly pink dress. Her fragile face was lovingly painted with an equally fragile expression. Her little brown curls were painstakingly arranged. But when she opened her mouth at the age of fourteen, she must have taken that figure in hand and dashed it against the wall. The shards fell to the floor in her mother's eyes, but she had been too young to understand it then.

She grew to understand in the coming years as she say at the table, swallowing as many of her mother's subtle digs as she could before gagging. Those tiny shards of broken perfection must have been honed to a mirror shine, because they seemed to reflect and magnify her every fault. At first they were only faint blemishes projected onto the screen of her mother's speech, but by the time she was seventeen and disillusioned to the world, the images came crisp and clear. The sharp edges of the broken ideal and the sharper points of her mother's words had been cutting her so stealthily that she had never been able to figure out why she was bleeding before. But something in the way her mother arranged her younger sister's pristine dress and blonde curls showed disappointment in its truest form.

She had grown to understand but said nothing, out of respect and even love for the woman who had given her life and yet wounded her so deeply. But tonight, her mother's words had been enough to spark the fire of indigence. Having already put down her fork, she replied with a tone so icy that it froze her tears so they would not flow. It even froze her mother's face into a look of inexpressible anger.

"How dare you blame me," her mother said.

After that, the string beans were no longer so unbearable. The bitter remnants of words in her mouth - the ones she had spoken and the ones she hadn't - had dulled their taste, and she swallowed them silently.