part 3 third
309 Words
I clenched my anus and felt my organs settle in me. She drew on my face and it felt like she was drawing forever, like she was tracing my whole self because I’d faded away. Like I’d become a smooth dome of skin and she needed to put back what had vanished.
She lifted her gilded hand mirror and inverted it before me.
I did not recognize myself. My skin was pale as death, paler even, and the cupid’s bow of my lips pouted unnaturally. My eyes were smudged dark as if I’d been struck twice. I felt old. Not as old as Maxa, nor as old as my mother before the illness took her, but old enough to have seen all of time in its infinite cycles, looping over and over again.
She unbound my arms and tossed the scarves back into a drawer. I lifted them and rubbed at the marks.
The dress Maxa had bought for me was oddly square – the style, yes, but beneath it my body’s elements were subsumed. My new face sat atop a neutered body, soft and sexless as an infant’s. I shivered, and Maxa produced her mink coat. The hairs grazed my skin and I had the uncanny sensation that a living thing was slung over my shoulders, breathing intimately against me.
Marcel came in without knocking, and he bent to the floor to gather the leavings from the haircut. He rasped them between his fingers with an expression of disgust before dropping them to the floor.
Then we were down in the street, and Marcel was opening a door, and a cab whisked us away. The car bobbed and weaved and jolted over the cobblestones like we were small and we were running and
I could not tell if we were the escaping prey or the fox pursuing it.
- Writer
