DEAR LIPSTICK

By Natasha Moretti

Dear lipstick,

Some people may think of you as a frivolous thing, A thing best left blotted on tissues or in the hands of shallow women, But

Beneath your waxy skin are crimson veins that run thick with stories, See, you have been worn both by queens and by those who have bowed before their thrones

Stained the lips of suffragettes with your symbol of silent power

Showed nurses in war that the color red was not just reserved for the blood on their fingertips

Soothed scraped knees with your carmine kisses, left your lingering taste of love on someone’s cheek

And when the concentration camps were freed, allies placed you into the shaking hands of women lucky enough to be able to breathe, swiped onto their naked mouths,

Your cherry paint hiding the pain behind their withered smiles, offering a promise of normalcy,

A promise that everything broken could be mended, made pretty

You have been passed down for generations, grandmother to mother to daughter before we ever met,

Before you fell

That morning

Into my mother’s palms

As I leaned against bathroom tiles, wide-eyed, braids shining

Watching her face glow with your soft, brick-red smile

That morning

That I pleaded and pleaded and pleaded for you

Until I felt your heaviness between my fingers as she whispered you were only for special occasions, I grinned, believing

That the clown mouth I had smothered onto my lips was beautiful

But soon

I swallowed someone else’s story, Thought that beauty was squeezing into a cookie cutter, Convinced myself that I had become ugly, that clown mouth of my childhood now tainted

Every day I needed you, not just on special occasions, Until I could no longer slip outside without your perfect, scarlet seal

But

See, I’m older now, no longer need the tainted lie, No longer tied to your black tube, Reach for you only as it pleases me, For a wash of color, For solidarity

For a memory of the little girl with butterfly braids,

xoxoxo, Natasha Moretti

The Reign Of A Tyrant

By Cindy Lin

A few words escaped the quivering, ruby lips of the livid empress. Her icy eyes smoldered with a blue flame as she pointed a quavering, pale finger, jabbing the opposing man in the chest. Two bright splotches appeared on her cheeks.

“You have just declared war,” she proclaimed, sentencing her empire, Alfarata, to five years of blood, anguish and death.

Several years dragged by, and the fighting persisted with no cease. A rotund man, a new and inexperienced inspector, garmented with the military uniform, marched out into a decimated village. He nervously adjusted his hat, asking, “Is this the place?” He got the affirmative and walked on. The stench of iron and rot permeated the area, sickly sweet, nauseating the man. Clotted blood, mud, and filth mired his shoes. He walked on, leaving deep footprints that the scarlet water soon filled. He stopped at the first body, a young man barely fifteen lying face down, grime covering his uniform, blood and sweat sticking his hair into ragged spikes.

Unused to the sights of war, the man gulped, his eyes bulging slightly trying to fight the sorrow entrapping and suffocating his heart. He gave the soldier a tiny nudge and let a strangled cry escape from between his chattering teeth. The boy’s eyes were glazed, life seeping out of them, leaving behind empty, meaningless, voids. His mouth was agape though slightly curled at the edges as if mocking the cruelty he had finally escaped. The officer shuddered, goosebumps rising on his skin. Remorse choked his throat and sucked his soul out until he felt as if he too, was nothing but a void, standing in the middle of the raging humanity, or rather inhumanity. It was so tragic, so wrong, this young boy who had been coerced to fight a meaningless war, then slaughtered. Thinking this, he felt a breeze begin to blow. Neither warm nor cool, usual during the summer, but a frosty one, the kind that rattled in the depths of caves undiscovered, carrying despair and demise. The howls and wails of the dead were carried in the wind, growing louder as the wind became a gale.

The ground was littered with dead. The shrieks of the devils that chased the souls with no repose now rang out as well. The wails grew louder as if beseeching heaven to save them, while being dragged down once again by the withered hands of purgatory. The officer shuddered and took one last look at the body, but the horror that he saw froze him.

“Impossible!” he cried. The boy was crying, with those dead eyes, which had by now obtained a light, lit like a lantern by the fires of some hell. They were no normal tears. As the dead eyes wept blood tears, black as tar, the mouth curled into a smile of mirth. Demonic cackling, unable to be pronounced by the human tongue drizzled from his mouth, his pupils quivered in an unending, feverish dance. The officer staggered back, only to trip against another corpse, one of a little girl, still clinging to a rag doll as if asleep. Distracted, he turned back only to see that the corpse was dragging itself towards him. The terror he felt was inexpressible, and he couldn’t even force a scream. It stopped, and lifting one quavering finger, pointed it at the officer, he smiled. Droplets, like a ruby necklace appeared upon the officer’s neck before spurting out in a torrent.

He gurgled out a sentence, “Why? I haven’t done anything to you!” The officer flung his hands up to his throat, feeling the burning pain creep up into his nose and mouth, drowning him, struggling fruitlessly to keep his life from gushing out, as a dark haze threatened. The last thing he saw as he fell was the young man, now standing up, wounds healed, looking at him. The officer was dead before he hit the ground.