"Make-Up" 
micro-fiction by dana biscotti myskowski

"Untitled" by Lisa Rae Winant, 28x12 oil on panel, used by permission of the artist.

The blood-red convertible was cold to the touch.  She managed a smile for the cameras, but it was all fake.  She’d just won this car on some silly game show her friend had dragged her to.  She wished she could see him now, but even squinting didn’t work, she couldn’t see five feet beyond the stage, the lights were so bright. 

She loved him.  She wondered if he knew.  Didn’t matter. He was gay from birth.  That’s probably why she loved him so. No complications. Well besides his frequent feminine-like mood swings.  He was probably nursing a wounded ego even now—hurt that she’d been called down to be a contestant instead of him. 

Her fingernail caught on the side mirror and snapped.  She looked at the jagged edge that instantly returned her to her first road trip across the country with GG, her great grandmother who drove despite being nearly legally blind. 

It began as a blissful journey.  She, then only fourteen, had already reached her adult height and, sporting a full double-D, looked every bit the part of a university co-ed.  She enjoyed being mistaken for a college student whenever she told others she was a freshman.  Wearing the logo of the college that held her small town together helped too.  People were so quick to assume, never mind the warnings not too. 

Somewhere on the journey GG nicked a goat that had escaped a farmer’s barnyard, sending them skittering to a jolted stop, one wheel dangling above the chasm of a drainage ditch.  While the goat head butted the car in anger—or perhaps glee, she was never sure which—she and GG assessed their own wounds: a scratch for GG where an extra key had scraped her thigh, and a broken fingernail for her when her hand hit the dash at an odd angle.  It seemed only natural that she should drive the rest of the way.  GG never drove again.

But when more than a thousand miles later she struck the child who raced into the road, dashing from behind a taco truck while she checked her mascara—damn thick-lash lying bastards—GG never moved so fast, scrambling into the driver’s seat before anyone arrived.  They attended the funeral and flew home again.  Took a cab between local stops.

She climbed into the new car now, only because the Host insisted she should, but she knew she’d never drive the bloody car off the lot.  Maybe she could sign it over to her friend to make amends.

(Note: Micro-fiction is an assignment this week for my Media Writing Class, which is why I am publishing this story I wrote for last year's New Hampshire Writers' Project Literary Idol Competition.  I landed the coveted top spot; that's right, New Hampshire: I am your Literary Idol.  Feel free to bow...tee hee.)