Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who wanted to be so beautiful that she would turn heads in the street: she would stop traffic with her wanton looks, her long, curly, red hair, her perfect shapely legs, her winning smile. She thought this would make her feel happy. With this kind of happiness, she thought she could conquer the world, however cliché that might have seemed.
‘I need a volunteer to help me. A friend, ‘ a voice in her head nagged.
But she knew no one she trusted enough, so she enlisted herself. People are so unfucking trustworthy! She had seen what had happened to her mother.
Every day she worked her arse off to become as beautiful as she could possibly be. She exercised and ate the right food, she buffed her nails and grew her hair until it was long, curly, stunning. She dyed it red. She worked on her make-up and clothes to the point where she actually did turn heads wherever she went.
When she walked to work, the neighbour’s driver watched her every morning as she walked past while he was washing the car, until he finally worked up the courage to give her his phone number. He was twenty years her junior.
She smiled and thanked him but had no intention of seeing him.
The young man who made her coffee at the cafeteria at work was smitten with her. Each day, he drew a different artwork in the froth of her latte so she would linger at the counter for a few moments more each day. Once he drew a stylized version of her that she utterly adored.
He was nothing short of beautiful himself. He was twenty-eight. His skin was smooth and dark, along with his dark brown mysterious eyes, which sometimes had traces of black khol and she wondered if he was gay. Once his skin accidentally brushed against hers when he handed over her latte. His skin was like silk. It took a moment to regain her composure.
When she announced her departure, he declared he was in love with her and had been so from the first moment he had seen her. Despite all the signs, she was still stunned at the passionate nature of his declaration. She thought he was perfection, but she refused him. She was leaving and going to Canada and he could barely speak English and she only a smattering of Bahasa Indonesian.
She knew she was beautiful but she had no idea how beautiful she had truly become, how much she had surpassed her original goals.
One day she was sitting in a crowded coffee shop and along with her latte the waiter brought a coaster with an advertisement, requesting entrants for a beauty pageant. There was a hefty prize for the winning entrant.
The advertisement was rather unusual. The photo showed two winners from a 1922 beauty pageant ‘when beauty standards were much different’. Now, you might think … well, you know the 1920’s! But it was not even typical of the 20’s.
Because of that, she thought, ‘I could enter this competition. Hell, I could win this thing!
She went online. The challenging aspect of the entry was that there were no clear criteria. The only requirement was to submit a story, an anecdote of the most important event of her life. She struggled to identify one event, apart from her decision to devote her life to becoming beautiful and so, she decided to tell the story of how she had become who she was: who she had helped along the way, who had wronged her and how she had transformed herself into the elegant creature she had become.
Until finally: she was happy with her application. She chose a simple snapshot of herself to send with the application and emailed it off.
Her attention was drawn back to the image on the competition entry form, the coaster.
She studied the photo more closely. With a rising sense of panic, she realized that there were not two winners, but only one. Her body was draped on top of a picnic table in the middle of an English garden, her feet facing the photographer, falling apart, her head appeared to drop back on the other side of the picnic table, not in view. In fact, her head was propped on table, her chin poking over the edge, smiling. There was a white ribbon tied in a neat bow keeping her hair in place.
The drops of blood had not been visible before.