4.

Her reflection peers back at her, hair scraped back and making a pale oval of her face. She is intimately aware of her mirror self, the side that only she can see. Moving closer, she inspects herself, the white paper skin, the tracery of lines as fine as spider’s webs, the faint down of hair at her ears. Her breath fogs the glass and she turns away, the misty Rorschach fading.

The table is littered with pots and tubes and glass bottles of perfume. Her make-up spills out of pouches and dusts the wood with glittering ash. She wields her tweezers with military precision, stray hairs seized between pin-sharp tips and ripped out by the root. The skin stretches and reddens below the perfect arch of her brows. She pats tiny pearls into the shaded hollows beneath her eyes and smoothes cool cream over her face.

She builds up a mask with her foundation, a smooth beige plastering. The dew of a highlighter dotted along her cheekbones and at her temples where she can feel her pulse and the clench of her jaw, blusher roseing the pads of her cheeks. Her eyelids are as bright as beetles and her lashes are fattened and sooty black. She draws in her eyebrows with sharp dark strokes and they slash her forehead.

She paints her lips a deep bitten crimson and lacquers them in sticky gloss. Her scent drapes her with violets and musk.

In the day she is a gaudy butterfly, powder dropping lightly from fragile wings as she spreads and trembles in the sun.

Alone her lover peels back the layers and sees her tawny in the soft light.