The Wicked One Goes to the Makeup Counter

You can't argue beauty's not an accident, the particular heft and angle of a chromosome's spin. A tarted spangle, bright lanyard twist, the slip of cells weighting this boat uneven from stern to prow. We're all skittery as marbles on  a marble floor. Beauty stays, then goes; it fades, we say, something about years and sun, the nights we slept in makeup and left mascara like ashes on the pillowcase. We burned through every one of our dreams. I wasn't always a stepmother, you know. There were whole years when I was a girl. But now, these ladies sell me moisturizer, stand close in their lab coats, pretending at science in a fog of perfume. They wield a contour brush and my cheekbone pops. The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always fake. And the lipstick's made from beetles, shells crushed vermillion. My color is Fleshpot, they say, it's Folie or Fixation. It's Wilderness; it's Artificial Earth. They can't quite make themselves care. We'll waste it, they know, whatever we've been given.