Paint Yourself Black by Sarah Thomas

We swap sweet mascara lashes for soft kohl pencils in jet black. Melting at the tip in the murmuring heat that comes from within our own excitable bodies. We paw at ourselves, Susie and I. Little kittens in the mirror. Bumping elbows, trying not to blink or slip. Only Betty smudges on purpose. Eyes like smoldering gravel. Crop top and Levi cutoffs. Leaning on the doorframe. Bare feet tapping, always waiting for something. She silences Nirvana on the cassette player and the room holds its breath. I think of Kurt Cobain in his own heart-shaped box. Ghostly white. Iced with satin. Imagine the three of us sliding in there with him, painting his pretty eyes black, breathing new songs into his broken soul.

Instead, we spray a cloud of vanilla musk and walk straight through it into the purple twilight. My older sister, Caroline, is sprawled out in a bikini on the creaky old sun lounger. She looks like Cleopatra when her face is all made up and she laughs as we walk by. Stretching like a lioness, waiting for the moon to swallow her whole.

Susie giggles like a little kid, her hand covering her mouth. I can tell she feels naughty. Her mom is a religious fanatic and speaks in tongues at the Sunday service. Susie tells her mom she’s with Helen from Bible Class when she hangs out with us. And Helen from Bible Class tells her mom she’s with Susie when she goes to visit her secret girlfriend in the trailer park on the edge of town.

We creep in the shadows, until the sickly green light of the drugstore finds us. To keep the pharmacist off our backs, we buy a pack of gum and then gather around the magazines, sharing the latest issue of Vogue. The models look neither male nor female. A strange yet sexy hybrid that makes our bodies flicker in unspeakable places. And there are thousands of eyes in there. A short flick of black ink at the corners. Bright, bursting stars. Gritty crumbling eyes. Eyes that could destroy you.

“How do we do that?” I ask.

“I guess it’s a…feeling,” Betty tells me.

The pharmacist taps our shoulders and glares at the magazine splayed open in our sweaty hands. Betty and I neaten it out and place it back on the shelf while Susie buys baby wipes for the walk home.

In the arcade window, Betty sees the boy she occasionally fucks. He’s playing pinball, bathed in the machine’s cosmic glow, fingers frenetically stabbing buttons. Betty disappears inside, so Susie and I go for milkshakes.

We stare at each other from across the booth for a long time without saying anything. The music in the diner is all dreamy, and I rest my chin on my hand and wonder what it would be like to kiss Susie’s sweet cherry lips. But then she looks at her watch and jumps up saying she needs to go even though it’s not quite ten yet. Before she’s even reached the door, Susie starts scrubbing at her eyes with the baby wipes. I clamp my lips on her abandoned straw, but there is nothing left to drink.

When I get home, Caroline is in the bath, surrounded by bubbles up to her neck. I peer into the mirror above the sink. At the black lines that tease my eyes, making them brighter even though I am suddenly sleepy. I wipe them with cucumber-scented cleanser and cotton pads.

“You’ll never take it off, you know,” Caroline says.

“What?”

“Once you’ve worn eyeliner for the first time, you’ll never be able to see yourself without it.”

I scrub my eyes until they are red in the corners and Mom comes home. Shoes kicked off on the doormat. The clumsy trudge of tequila footsteps in the kitchen, bumping into the table. Caroline grunts and disappears under the bubbles.

I don’t find out Betty is missing until the following afternoon when the police turn up on my doorstep asking questions. Mom, still in her pajamas, nursing a hangover, offers them coffee, speaks in a hushed voice, rubs her temples. I tell them about the boy Betty occasionally fucks, and they write my words down in a little notebook. But it turns out he left Betty in the arcade to go smoke pot in his friend’s car.

Betty’s black and white photo on the missing posters makes her look old and mean. Just like countless other missing girls. We drink from milk cartons with her face on it. I paint my eyes black. Try to smudge them at the edges just like Betty did. The high school holds a vigil. Candles flickering across bodies gathered on the football field. There are pink heartshaped balloons tied to the bleachers. I lay a heart-shaped box next to the white flowers and stuffed animals. I would climb into it if I could. Search for Betty or maybe just sleep forever.

I like to think she ran away to the coast. Betty has a cassette with sounds of the Pacific Ocean on it. Or should I say… had? 

Only the woods know.

Or the creek behind it.

Or the empty highway where, on occasion, hitchhikers have been known to get into cars and disappear forever.

I look for Susie across the flames, but she avoids my eyes and clutches the gold cross around her neck. After a while, the candles start to fade. People get bored and disperse to the parking lot, whispering in low voices, talking about Betty as if they knew her.

Only the balloons remain, drifting silently from side to side, my soft kohl eyes bleeding within their shiny pink hearts.  

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SARAH THOMAS — Sarah lives in a suburb of Manchester, UK, with her husband, son and their black cat called Willow. She has been writing stories since the age of six and has a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Salford University. Sarah has had her work published in The Haiku Journal, Sky Island Journal and Crow & Cross Keys.  

Art by AMANDA YSKAMP — Amanda is a writer and a collagist. Her artwork has appeared in such magazines as Black Rabbit, Riddled with Arrows, and Stoneboat. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, teaching writing from her online classroom and serving as a librarian at the local elementary school.