It’s another Six Sentence Sunday! (I’m late on my post – my bad. Better late than never.) Today I’m sharing another snippet from Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. In this chapter we meet Anna, a grad student still grieving the loss of her mother.
On the wall across from her, the family picture they’d taken when she was ten still hung on the wall: her handsome father, her beautiful mother, and one grinning, chubby ten-year-old in the middle. Catching her breath, she still couldn’t get over how beautiful her mother had been.
Still, she reminded herself, her mother had been beautiful because she was so image conscious and had such a distorted view of her body that she’d purged everything she ate for years. Staring at the picture, Anna could see the line from her mother’s dark makeup, the makeup she used to hide her sallow skin tone, permanently jaundiced from all the vomiting. She had eventually died because she wanted so badly to be beautiful. It was why Anna rarely wore makeup and her father constantly told her she was perfect just the way she was, with a few extra pounds and a low-maintenance hairdo.
Stay tuned for next week!