#137 Guardian

by Grace Lee

Don’t leave me, my eyes beg silently. She’s been saving money since that week she couldn’t walk. I’ll become a makeup artist, she whispered to me.

When our father goes to work at the factory, she tosses her pre-algebra book aside. In the glossy pages of Glamour, she studies techniques for layering eye shadow, memorizes distinctions between warm versus cold skin tones, what colors harmonize best. She practices on me, her life-sized doll.

“Make fish lips,” she says. She applies a rosy powder to my pudgy cheeks.

“Now pucker them like this- look, get it?” she demonstrates. She paints a layer of 99-cent lipstick across my peeling lips.

“Ew, it tastes nasty!” I recoil.

“You’re not supposed to eat it,” she sighs and rolls her eyes. “You’re such a child. When I was your age...” her voice trails off.

I giggle, “Last year?”

“Sit still,” she commands, impatient to finish. With a few soft strokes, she makes memories and bruises disappear.

She shields my face with her left palm, her right hand posed around the Aqua Net can.

“Close your eyes and hold still. I’m serious. It’ll burn.”

This is one of my mother’s favorite stories: In Seoul, she would send us off to preschool and kindergarten on the city bus. As my mother waved and smiled, my sister instinctively placed me in her lap and wrapped her arms tightly around my torso with serious eyes.

Mommy never worry about you, she laughs, because you have good big sister.