Flash Fiction	That Quiet Painted Moment by Lyle Rosdahl

She touched up my eye and I saw her in a mirror. One of the mirrors on the ground. I looked like I was much older than I thought I could possibly be: all those mirrors compounding my barely painted face. And then I looked away into the long shadows of the afternoon as she applied more make-up, pulling me a little closer because I started to fall away under the pressure of the cotton, under the surprise of the cotton on my eyelid becoming bluer with each wipe. We would have to leave soon, I was sure. All the reflections of my life lay in the grass shining back up at me. All the cotton swabs of my life, applied and worn off, thrown in the back of the truck or strangely littered among the mirrors.

So many years later looking back and I still see myself in the truck fender distorted when she twisted my head around a little so that she could paint my other eye just so. Then, God, the sunlight hit me right in the eye as it descended under the bare elm branches and I couldn’t see a thing.

But before that it is just us standing in the afternoon light and the dog: scratch, scratch, scratch. Every scrape of his nails along his neck sending shivers of excitement down my spine into my naked feet because I could feel the flesh and the nails and the flesh and the nails. I think now, though, I did it for her. I did it so that she would feel like she was taking care of me; I did it so that she could play big sister. I did it because I was selfish.

Gorgeous, that moment. That stop in the sun. That quiet painted moment above the mirrors refracting, at that exact moment, every possible moment in my life. My sincerity, my death, my birth, my addiction to light, my memory, my guilt. I will drive to the edge of the world if nothing else, to find that hole in West Virginia, that pit-stop, that one shimmering moment, again. Right now, alone for over a decade, I’m driving. Looking for mirrors. Mirrors I don’t think I’ll ever find, but that I look for anyway. The gray twilight lasts forever, now. Reflections have decomposed to memories.

When we finally did pick up, leaving the dog, to move on to the next stop, I noticed that we had left the mirrors. I had left all of the mirrors and no one noticed. I watched them recede as we pitched forward onto the shoulder of the road and then onto the asphalt, a quick twinkle of moonlight in the grass, the wind making me push, finally, against my sister in the pick-up bed. I wiped off the make-up with my dress and we rolled, jerking, into the starless night.