Life in Colour by Marie-Louise McGuinness

She was ugly in the way that was cool in the 90’s, her stretched face crammed with razor cheekbones and legs that ran in milk-white lines down from her armpits. She was a model, the high fashion kind that walked the catwalk like a freshly birthed foal in heels that cost more than a studio flat in Epping.  She snorted coke with indie bands in dingy back rooms of the best restaurants, wore silk negligees and fur coats to parties where ecstasy was served on silver salvers as an hours d’oeuvre. She was ideal, a figment, and to many, she was everything.

In the 2020’s she is lonely, eaten up with trauma. Her youth, so long ago, is now merely a collection of mercury–thin rememberings or misrememberings, kaleidoscopic images drowned grey by the hum of a light head and noisy belly, spinning movie reels of dark rooms and wolf-like men. The smothering sensation of her jaw sitting corset tight in her skull, lest the truth oozed out or food spilled in and she lost it all.  The burden of not screaming “No!” but not saying “yes” either.

Would it have been so terrible, she wonders now, her thin body hunched to breaking, to work in a shop like her mother? To marry the boy with the indistinct eyes who wanted to take her home, to live and not just to fuck? The boy whose dreams were much too small for a girl like her.

In her studio flat, with burnt holed carpet, she pulls her mink coat tighter. Cheap vodka tastes like water as she gulps it down, and she chain smokes counterfeit cigarettes without heed. All while thumbing yellow-tinted gossip magazines, pages curled up at the corners.

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MARIE-LOUISE McGUINNESS — Marie-Louise comes from a wonderfully neurodiverse household in rural Northern Ireland. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has work published in numerous literary magazines including Gone Lawn, Splonk, Bending Genres, The Metaworker, Intrepidus Ink, JAKE, BULL and Retreat West amongst others. She enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Art by AMBER ROSE CROWTREE — Amber is the author and cover-artist of two poetry chapbooks, Harboring the Imperfect (Dancing Girl Press, 2021) and The Inviolable Hours (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Though writing poetry is her main medium since an early age, she picked up the paint-brush at age fifteen after filling stacks of sketchbooks with pen, pencil, and chalk-pastel. Other than high-school art classes with a beloved teacher, Mrs. Harmon and tree-loving, Bob Ross of TV, Amber learned her art techniques solo. Early inspiration came through Robert Smith’s (of The Cure) imagistic lyrics and Salvador Dali’s paintings. She lives in rural New Hampshire.