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by M.K. Hobson
Fantasy, 16 pages.
Originally Published in Shimmer, 2008
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On Thursday, after her four o’clock client had left with ten nails shining Pomegranate Desire, Seff found Mrs. Dee sitting in one of the molded plastic picnic chairs in front of the Venice Nail Salon. The old woman was dressed up in a flower-print rayon dress and a black straw hat with a frowsy silk rose. Her thin lips were clenched like a fist. Her hand hovered at her throat, at something black that hung there.
Mrs. Dee’s appearance in the Venice Nail Salon was as unpleasant as it was surprising. Mrs. Dee was set in her ways—she had a regular appointment every other Monday, with Mavis Bruni—and it was unthinkable that she would ever have her nails done by Seff, a despised wildcat who’d led her boy Big Dee into sin and misbehavior and who, she sometimes noted loudly, didn’t even have a proper beautician’s license.
Well, what of it? Seff answered the charges mentally. It took two to sin and misbehave, and besides, she only had the station two hours a week, filling in for Mavis Bruni who liked to go home early and read romance novels.
“What do you want?” Seff said, wiping her hands on a towel. The presence of the old woman made the back of Seff’s neck tense, and set her body trembling for a cigarette.
Mrs. Dee startled and turned abruptly. There was terror on the old woman’s crumpled-paper face; she quickly rearranged it into a kind of disdainful peering. She peered at Seff for a long moment, and Seff flushed, feeling Mrs. Dee’s eyes lingering on the fresh bruise below her left eye. Big Dee had given it to her just two days before, when he’d caught her swaying out of Stockmen’s Bar with a couple of loggers who’d just gotten paid. Since she started going around with Big Dee, Seff often had bruises. She never called attention to them, never tried to explain them away. They were what they were. Some women thought they might help her, they handed her furtive slips of paper with helpful phone-numbers scribbled on them. Seff tore these up into tiny pieces. They all expected her to give him up. But she wouldn’t. And even the most sympathetic of them eventually gave up in disgust.
“I want you to do my nails,” Mrs. Dee said, finally. Her voice sounded unsteady, as if she were speaking underwater. “I want them to look nice for my funeral.”
Seff stared at her. Then she went to the counter, tapped out a cigarette from a pack of generics. She lit it, leaning her rear against the edge of the counter, arms crossed. She breathed the smoke in deep, the nicotine making her blood sizzle pleasantly.
“Well, I guess Mavis won’t mind if I stay the extra hour,” Seff said. “Go choose out a color.”
* * *
Mrs. Dee came back to the station carrying a sober mauve, a departure from the cheerful reds and purples favored by most women in the town. She’d made the selection carefully, touching then dismissing dozens of colors; Seff had time to finish her cigarette and another on top of it.
Mrs. Dee settled herself before the small table, arranging her large body on the narrow folding chair. Seff made a great show of sweeping her little hand-brush over the workspace, cleaning off every speck of acrylic filler-dust. When she was done, she sprayed a paper towel with some Formula 409 and wiped everything down with pointed thoroughness. She didn’t look at Mrs. Dee, but she could feel the old lady watching.
Seff didn’t really believe Mrs. Dee was going to die. The woman wasn’t much over seventy, and still heavy and vibrant, with plenty of good juice in her. She was a churchgoing woman with nothing good to say about anyone, and she didn’t smoke or drink. People like that lived forever.
When Seff was done cleaning up, Mrs. Dee laid her hands on the narrow formica counter. Even pop-veined and flecked with brown spots as they were now, they were also plump and shapely, nicely-formed. They must have been her pride once.
But it wasn’t Mrs. Dee’s hands that captivated Seff’s attention, it was the thing hanging at her neck. A crumpled-up black thing hanging on a dirty piece of string. It looked like a piece of jerky, black and faintly gleaming as if it had been recently oiled. Seff wrinkled her nose. She doused a fat cotton ball with acetone and began removing the bright red polish from Mrs. Dee’s last manicure.
“You better not make my cuticles bleed,” Mrs. Dee said in a low grumbling tone. “I went to an Chink girl once, she tore up my cuticles awful. When I told her what I thought about that, she made out she didn’t understand a word I said. That’s the only reason I come to the Venice. Mavis may not be a Christian woman, and I don’t approve of the way she lives her life, but she runs a good clean shop, and she doesn’t let no Chinks tear up people’s cuticles.”
Seff removed the polish, building a garish little mountain of cotton in the plastic trash can at her feet.
“You ain’t supposed to call people Chink -- [End of Preview.]