Rouge

by Mona Awad

Because what is the face, what, finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature. —Elena Ferrante

“Envy is when you hate someone because they have something you want,” she said simply.

You were such a lonely little girl, weren’t you? Whispering to grass. Befriending sticks. Dreaming yourself into movies and books. Every screen, every page, like a door to another world, remember?

I can imagine her feigning interest in their lives. Sucking his admiration like marrow from the veal bones she used to enjoy with parsley and salt.

My mother’s dead, you know, I want to tell him. I just left her funeral. This drink, it’s deeply important to me.

You should be kinder to yourself, she says to me softly, her eyes staring right into my eyes. Like they know. They know exactly how cruel I can be.

Mother used to describe my music taste as Otherworldly Funeral. Or Bleakest Party. Can you please turn down Bleakest Party, darling? Some of us have chosen to embrace life.

I’m wearing a dread of liquid gold that burns like the sun. I’m wearing shoes of reddest blood. The mirrors are cracking all around me. The waves are saying, entrée, entrée.

I’m going the way of roses, Belle, she said at last, dreamily. Remember the roses? Te souviens-tu?

“The only journey that matters in the end, Daughter of Noelle.” “Retinol?” I whisper. “The soul. A journey of the soul, of course.”

In the distance I see the woman in red walking away hurriedly under her red umbrella. A red umbrella on a sunny day. I don’t think it’s strange. What I think is: What a brilliant way to keep out the sun.

“Yes, please. And what is this scent, may I ask? Apocalypse? Sage?”

Deep water, what deep water? Just a beauty house. Just a beauty house full of caring fiends—friends.

In the waiting room, I drank the blood vessel water. The pomegranate seed water, I mean.

I fall asleep staring up at the stars Mother pasted on my ceiling. Because I was afraid of the dark, she put them there. There, she said, better? Like a night-light but less childish. She didn’t even get the constellations right, Stacey told me when she slept over. So each night when you look up at those stars, you’re looking up at the wrong sky. You’re looking at the wrong heaven. So? That’s fucked, Stacey said quietly. But it explains a lot.

“Who says I want you to save me, sir?”

“Your fairy godfish.” She laughs. “Maybe it wants to go home in your bag of samples. Will you take it home?”

If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief. Anything at all can be there.