4

Radiating from the sand was the cruel heat flourishing from the sun, cracking my skin into cripples of liquid lipstick. A tear was a drop of water I could drink, but nothing else because weight cannot be gained. I am a figure of beauty and I can't ruin it.

I lied on my bed hungry and depressed, wanting just the slightest taste of any food. But I've already gained five pounds in the last week, so any more and I'll be a figure of fat on display.

My husband's been insisting me on eating, at least something, but I refuse and he goes to his usual strip club and buys a drink for one of the strippers there, leaving me breathless and crippling in bed. He's such a gentleman, in all truth.

I want to eat but I have to be skinny and pretty. I have to be beautiful and sexy. I have to be a woman and not a girl. I can't look like a boneless hobo nor can I look like a fat hobo.

Magazines keep saying that we have to be a beauty, us girls, so that's why I can't eat. It's the only reason we exist, they say, there's no use in us if we're not pretty when we cry. We have to cry flirtations and breathe love fumes while also feel like making love all the time. We are a sex symbol to the media and nothing can change that, so never eat and always be neat, as the saying goes.

But magazines never mention the power of beauty. They never mention what beauty can do, how it can destroy and manipulate.

They never mention the cost of it, either, though.