An Old Excerpt from a Story About Childhood

Ann unsnapped the turquoise silk flap that held her sister’s makeup bag closed. I bit my lip, frowned; Ann’s older sister, Audrey, would hate me if she knew we had gone through her things.

Licking the sticky orange-juice residue off her fingers, Ann grinned at me, a conspirator’s grin, and upended the bag.

Lipstick tubes hit the brick steps like shell casings, “thack! thackthackthack.” She shook the bag. One more tube hit the ground, rolling under one of the arcing whorls of a fern.

The mid afternoon humidity necessitated bare feet and arms and legs. We had found shade in the tarnished, leaf-covered aviary in her yard. The green copper bars, covered in mandala-shaped bursts of lichen, cast shadow-columns across our faces as we examined the pigments in their dented tubes.

The heat had caused the lipstick to soften; the pigment to ran as we carefully applied shades of Rendezvous and sheer Persimmon.

Ann was a year older than me and lived five houses down, on La Espiral.

Audrey was beautiful; she had almost translucent skin, innumerable freckles, and a mass of soft brown curls. I think we both half believed that if we coated our lips with enough of her make-up, it might seep into our pores, transforming us into tall, curly haired sirens who smelled like soap and Jolly Ranchers.

That was before we knew what a siren was, or a woman for that matter. I know no more now about what being a woman means than I did then; when Ann and I strutted around in bare f, belting out the lyrics of “American Woman” and blowing sticky kisses at each other through the wavy, bottle-green glass panes of the Aviary.