A white nasal trumpet in one nostril, to preserve the airway, to keep her breathing in the other, an NG tube with a blue tail, sucking in charcoal from the giant syringe of nurse Frank. Her head fell backwards and her mouth fell open, baring gentle vampire teeth. All the colors smeared and slid off the canvas of her flawless, dewy skin. Her black and spangled eye shadows dripped in spidery streaks from her teary red lids and her fuchsia lips smudged a wide make-out memory down her chin. If the mother’s face was museum quality, the daughter’s looked at that moment like a workshop mistake. Depthless Chernobyl eyes, those living Picassos. On both mother and daughter, the right eye nestled directly atop the cheekbone, its orbit descended fully an inch below the left. They would have been eyes soldiers would dream on in war, billboard eyes, if not for this freak of composition. They hid deep in their fringes and they almost disappeared at a distance, almost blanks, almost blind.

They were the palest green and shimmered equally with blue and gold. Both mother and daughter had huge eyes, eyes as big as saucers in the fairy tales. Each feature was outlined in thick black, giving the face an expressionist aesthetic. The colors were vivid on her cheeks, lips and eyelids, bright magentas, greens, golds. The mother’s face was buried under a greasepaint crust. The cosmetic lavishments, he discovered, included more than just smell. Side by side, they could have been sisters, the mother in the chair and the daughter on the bed. He could taste it in the air, like the violet candy in gourmet groceries, precious tins that gathered dust. Surely they couldn’t smell it themselves, but Joel could more than smell it. Mysterious, seductive, exotic fresh, playful, feminine tantalizing, sexy. They carried themselves in a cloud of adjectives. Between the two of them, he figured they must have bought all the scent on the Champs Elysee and with it every promise ever made by the commercial producers of stink. Joel choked when he walked by their room, from all the perfume. She was just like her mother, and, well, someone had fallen well enough in love with her to produce this child.

Someone, somewhere would have fallen in love with this girl.

Goodtask vs trevor