Nothing Less Than Perfect
by Kristin Osani
She sits on her hands, fidgeting as the spell she plastered across her nose hardens into a starchy glaze. It itches like a pox-hex flare-up, but she resists the temptation to rip it off.
“It takes sixty seconds exactly for the spell to do its job, dearie,” the witch warned her when she bought the Snout Shrinker at the department store sale that morning. “Not fifty-nine, not sixty-one. Six. Zero. Got it?”
It’s the longest minute of her life.
A glance at the ornate hourglass on her vanity tells her she needs only endure for another thirty grains of sand. Then, instead of the giant schnoz nature cursed her with, she’ll have a tiny, flawless button nose, just like the ones she’s always envied on models and actors.
At least until the next full moon, when the magic will fade and she’ll have to do this all over again.
But between all the other enchantments she submits her ugly self to — eye embiggener, jawline de-squarer, tummy flattener, hip sculptor, ankle brightener, knee un-knobby-er (she’s sure she’s forgetting twice as many) — what is one more? It’s worth all the magic and money she spends, all the hurt, to close the canyon between what she is and what she wants to be. What she needs to be. What she should be.
Still, this must be one of the worst beauty spells she’s experienced yet. Even the waist-whittling she did last month at the salon downtown didn’t make her this nauseated, and that procedure lasted a whole agonizing hour.
There’s only one grain of sand left, and it’s tipping over into the funnel as she watches — plus, she flipped the hourglass over a teensy bit belatedly, didn’t she?
With a grunt, she tears off the strip.
Her nose comes with it.
The pain, though expected, is explosive. It bursts over her vision in bright spots of agony that spill out of her eyes and trickle wetly down her face. When her sight returns, she stares at the lump of flesh in her palm, the hooked bridge, the bulbous nostrils.
Eagerly she looks to the mirror, but her charm-straightened grin fades as she notices a thin filament of the spell has failed to detach from the very tip of her new nose. It is tiny now, yes, but it still lists heavily to the left, remains a bit too triangular to meet her standards.
That’s what she gets for bargain buying.
Grumbling, she scratches one magic-manicured fingernail at the stuck bit of spell. After a few seconds, she manages to peel one end off. She pulls, the filament growing longer and longer, her nose growing smaller and smaller until it disappears altogether with a little pop.
She stops. Stares at her reflection.
She looks so much better this way.
The filament of spell still dangles from her face. Experimentally, she keeps pulling on it. Her sunken cheeks go next, to her delight, and then her too-thin lips. Her double chin. The bags under her eyes, and then her eyes themselves, so that she can’t see what else the spell is taking, but she can still feel it. A weight lifting from her broad shoulders, even as her shoulders themselves shrivel and disappear.
She pulls and pulls and pulls, giddy with excitement. A sharp ache reverberates somewhere deep inside her, but she muscles through it. The magic takes her flaws, one by one by one. Her rough elbows. Her bowed thighs. Her too-big calves. There are so many. Too many to list.
All of them. She needs to get rid of all of them.
She gives one final tug.
The last thing she feels, before her corporeal form disintegrates into the ether and her thoughts scatter to the corners of creation, is relief.
At last.
At last, she is perfect.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristin Osani (she/her) is a queer fantasy writer who lives in Kyoto, where she works as a freelance Japanese-to-English video game translator when she’s not wordsmithing, working on nerdy cross-stitching, or cuddling her two cats (three if you include her husband). Her fiction has appeared in FlashPoint SF and is forthcoming in Ghost Orchid Press’s Beyond the Veil: Queer Tales of Supernatural Love anthology.
