Healing Machine for Kate: For the shame of adult acne.
It's some time ago, and you are standing in front of the bathroom mirror trying to cover up your skin before the guests arrive. You're out of foundation, so this butterfly face paint will have to do: two swirly eyeliner wings filled in with an orange fade, a little body tracing the bridge of your nose, antennae zipping into your eyebrows. Perfect. The guests pile in: a tiger, a puppy, a giraffe. They shake off their coats.
“I was out of foundation,” says the tiger. “But I still wanted to look nice.”
“Same,” says the puppy.
“Same,” says the giraffe.
In fact, everyone’s been out of foundation ever since they found out they can use it to make anything invisible. You hear they’ve disappeared the Giant Wheel at Fantasy Island using the same combination of Covergirl, Maybelline, and Sephora products you used to layer onto your skin back when it was really bad. You have to see it for yourself.
The tattooed ride operator shows you into the invisible basket and you climb on in - then up, up, up into the air - the bodies of the other riders moving in a slow circle around you, legs bent at the knees. The ferris wheel grinds to a halt when you reach the top, and there you are in the middle of the sky, with nothing below you and only the pale blue everything above. It's lonely at the top, which is why you begin to flap your face until you take off, the wings working beautifully, as if they’ve always been there.
When you land, you tap the funnel cake vendor on the shoulder and say, “I've seen the face of God, and she is a woman with cystic acne. She has scars from asking the angels to pop her pimples when late at night, in a fugue state, she can only see herself as the skin surrounding her radiant being.”