Revlon Bluebottle

"Where're you going?" An open question. Open enough to hold all the ambiguity in the universe. Vague enough to ask the soul's shape through an empty milk glass.

What to do? Answer? Run? Respond through the pin-tip aperture of a lie?

The girl took a sip from her glass and swallowed, but the thickness still hung at the back of her throat, cutting off her words. She shifted her weight. Right hip, left hip, right hip. It made no difference which she chose: both told the same story.

She coughed a little, came up with a stillborn reply. "I don't know" A tight-lipped lie.

She had to look away. Under her blank stare, an indifferent bluebottle fly lighted on her glass, picking up a trace of dark lipstick on its hairy feet. It inspected the electric silence for a long moment: the young woman, the no-longer young woman, both compounded through the iridescent eyes of a Berry Crush Red stained fly. There was nothing further to know, nothing more to analyze. It picked its sticky feet off of the empty milk glass and flew onto further kitchens and looser lips.

Flies know nothing of regret.

The younger tasted her mouth's bitterness, and realized with a resigned nod that that was why the Revlon Bluebottle was ugly. When another girl, another day, would have seen beauty, she now saw the world through milky-glassed adult eyes.