Ravishing

This is an excerpt from Eshani Surya's Ravishing. Surya is a chronically ill South Asian writer living in Philadelphia.

Her mouth drops into a hesitant o when she first looks at herself in the mirror.

The girl on the screen films whenever she can. Her phone’s camera, a hungry eye, beckons. But she doesn’t mind being wanted. The more people keep watching her, keep calling her the best of the best, the more her mind loops with clever visuals instead of memories she’d prefer not to fall asleep to. So she records. So she posts—online. So, she presses her phone to her chest and waits for the comments to come in, all of them for her.

Today, the girl on the screen uses her thumbnail to slice open a box. Inside, a tube. Inside that, a product she layers over her face. Now she starts filming, and as the cream is absorbed there is a twist and a tug, like something caught needs release. It hurts, but in a good way, like floss parting the gums around a tooth, startling the mouth with blood. The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled. She doesn’t flinch. In editing, she speeds up the process so no one notices when things go gruesome.

The girl’s face sculpted, elongated, augmented exactly as she wanted it. She smiles, both at that and at how her view count ticks up as soon as she posts. Her followers send her blue hearts, green hearts, whatever color heart their fingers hit first. Some crimson ones, too. Blood, the girl thinks again, then makes herself forget.

Later, the girl on the screen deletes her video and reposts a better version of it. She edits out one clip—her mouth, in that hesitant little o.

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