"To Be Beautiful Again" A Different Story of Love

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To Be Beautiful Again

The store is bright with florescent light, shining up the shelves of designer perfumes, cosmetics, medicines, toiletries and what not.

???????Just walked in an elderly couple.?The frail, stooped man appears to be in his early nineties as he walks clinging onto the arm of the foot-taller woman looking two decades younger.?She is blonde with her hair teased up like a cotton candy.?Remnants of certain contours suggest she was once stunning, although her face has sagged into ample pouches around her chin and neck.?Heavy swirls of rouge and uneven purple lipstick appear to have been applied in poor light or sight.

??????The woman’s leopard half coat projects a slightly decadent chic.?Her black-leather boots have two-inch heels and creep over her thick calves, revealing the lumpy knees below her tight buttery-leather black skirt.

?????The man’s oversized cashmere coat suggests he has shrunken over the years as he stands before the sales counter with his lady, both looking up at the clerk with a great anticipation.?The gentleman straining up his neck rather painfully, they seem glued to each other.

“What d’you want, ma’am?” asks the salesclerk, peering down the couple.

“I want a Lanc?me lipstick!”

The salesclerk considers the woman’s purple lips and then pulls a tube of lipstick from the Lanc?me section, removes the cap, and holds up the exposed stick between her red enameled fingers.

????“Is this the color you want, Ma’am?” She asks.

????The woman narrows her eyes and nearly sniffs the lipstick.

????Looking exasperated by having stood for a considerable moment on his unsteady legs, the man turns his thin neck slowly toward his lady, as if he were dying to know the lipstick is the color she wants.

“HOU-nee, eez this leap-stick what you wan--?” From such a frail looking man the voice sounds surprisingly loud.

Ignoring his question, the woman continues staring at the lipstick, looking suspended in indecision or in a reverie of some kind.?The old man waits patiently in silence like a loyal dog, as if all that mattered in his remaining life is to find his lady a perfect lipstick.?

?????Finally, she flutters her eyelashes overloaded with black mascara, as if she got a solution,?opens her thin purse, and fishes out the old tube of lipstick.?In her trembling hand, she brings the tube’s purple nub near the tube in the clerk's hand and firmly announces.

“I want ex - AC - tly the color of this one!”

????“Ma’am, this is in fact almost ex - AC - tly the color, except that your old lipstick has changed its color a little over the years.”

?????The woman tips her head to the side.?Her man leans and moans into her ear, “HOU-nee, she tells it's almost ex - AC - tly the same color!”?He then watches her purple lips longingly, waiting for assent.

He waits.?And he waits, aware that she is determined to remain beautiful.?A glimmer of hope lights up his blue eyes as if assured that there will be one more night to cuddle and be cuddled, breath to breath together.

? Therese Young Kim?

(Infinite gratitude to Roderick Clark, Publisher and Managing Editor of ROSEBUD Literary Magazine in which the story has previously been published, years ago.)?

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Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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