Oh Dear
She folded her arms and lay down, her shape forming that of a sarcophagus; was she already dead? Her make-up was drawn on just so and her clothes tailored and matched. A chic outfit from the rack of some Haute-couture fashion house. It was red velvet number, some frivolous buy – complete with a price tag with an unhealthy number of zeros – and Blahnik heels.
She felt hollow as she stared at four walls that seemed to lean in on her. Who the fuck was she doing this for anyways? She had asked herself this a thousand times. Her Father had always been a stern man, a domineering career man, a harsh man – a psychiatrist. She certainly didn’t do it for him, the bastard. He was a bastard and maybe that’s what made him so insecure. Her mother? Her mother was a pez-dispenser-ditz, a compendium of too much time, too much money, too few real friends and too many little-helpers. Mommy dearest, oh Mommy dear, Liz thought to herself.
She was always precocious as a child, you might say Liz was one of those sensitive kids – the type that build and shape up layers around themselves, only to have the veneer scratched away by themselves and the passage of time. These slowly unwoven cocoons, these patchwork threads of human-beings. She smoothed out a ruffle in the fabric with her immaculately manicured cuticles. A bubble caught in her throat. Chocked up. Why was she so weak?
She slapped her face. Why couldn’t she feel anything? She slapped her face again. She slapped her face harder this time. SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! Her eyes smarted but she felt numb. A tear, a solitary river wound its way through foundation and blush. Liz got up and searched for her little snuff box. Damn her father! Damn the bastard for treating her like some kind of Guinea pig and not as his child. A new estuary formed on her face as she frantically ripped through the mess that was her life. Her life, these things were her and she was these things. It was true she thought, the things you own end up owning you.
Found it! It was on the vanity the entire time. She opened the little snuff box, a little silver piece, her Grandmother’s. Oh, if only Granny could only see her now. She fished out a few pills from her little treasure chest. If only Granny could see her now. She had passed away when she was twelve and she was the closest she had ever come to something real, someone who just “was” and someone who wasn’t putting on airs. Cheap, vapid air. People bound up in layers of Gucci and no class and class-As and the Hamptons. Cheap people, disposable friends made up of stuff.
Liz glanced up to the mirror. She did it to check her make-up, at least that was the principle, but really, she was checking to see if she existed. Her mother flashed before her eyes and the mirror left her wanting; was she already dead?
