COURTNEY CLUTE
Flat Out Fabulous
Even though she’s dead, I steal my older sister’s MAC lipstick from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom we shared and wear it when my parents aren’t home. The shade is called Flat Out Fabulous: a creamy fuchsia that applies like butter. I’ll kiss the mirror, and when enough days pass that the mirror is full of lipstick kisses, I clean it with a makeup wipe and start over. It’s not like my parents visit the bathroom. Not when there are traces of her here: a wad of her red hair stuck to the shower wall, a bottle of her favorite lavender hand lotion, the plastic Tampons she used next to the cardboard ones I use.
She wore this lipstick when she was feeling rebellious: when we’d sneak out our bedroom window on Friday nights, when she ripped up a failed trigonometry test she was supposed to get our parents to sign, when she slipped $20 from our mom’s wallet. But I wear Flat Out Fabulous because I miss her, and I never wear makeup. At least, I couldn’t around her, when she always looked so radiant.
I loved how the fuchsia transferred onto whatever she put her mouth to—red Solo cups, water bottles, a chicken tender sub, her nailbeds when she gnawed her cuticles—like she just had to leave her mark.
Where do I leave my mark? I was the mousy girl who followed in her shadow, who sat in the back of her tiny car—the one she died in—too many bodies squeezed into the backseat, tequila sour on their breaths while they chatted, and there I was, always mute. Sometimes I think she only invited me because she felt bad for me. She never said this, of course, but I saw it in the way her fuchsia lips pulled into a sympathetic closed-mouth smile.
I twirl around the house to the music on her Spotify account, licking my lips and tasting the unintentional candy flavor of Flat Out Fabulous. “Fuck you!” I scream at the oven we burnt chocolate cookies in. “Suck a dick!” I say to her bed, running my fingers through her Sherpa pillow case.
Eventually, I hear the garage door rumbling, meaning my parents are home. I don’t know where they go. Maybe to the tree that killed her.
I rub the lipstick off with my hands, scraping the residue against the wall behind her framed senior picture, a painting of fuchsia streaks, the strokes varying in length depending on how much time I have before my parents open the door. I hope she’d find it beautiful, the artwork I create in her honor, adding to it day by day. I like the idea of Flat Out Fabulous being behind every trace of her in the house.
One day, I’d like to take the lipstick and paint the house, marking everything in bright pink, including myself, and leave it there for my parents to see when they get home.
Courtney Clute has an MFA from the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Fractured Literary, Emerge Literary Journal, and Z Publishing’s Florida’s Emerging Florida Writers: An Anthology. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. You can find her on Twitter at @courtney_clute.