8 Ways Any Girl Can Become More Attractive, According to Science
Margaret Wack
1. The first step is to focus on the mouth. People look at your lips
when you talk and the sight overwhelms them, they cannot even
hear the words for all the glistening flesh. It is best for them
to be stained red, as red as when your stomach aches from drinking
too much wine, always red wine, which looks like blood and tastes it,
too, if you bite your lip beforehand, the sort of wine you can use
words like dregs for, drink that is silty and full of salt and earth.
These are the only sort of mouths worth kissing.
2. Blood is an aphrodisiac. Be sure to paint yourself as red as death
in a white face, the sort of dying that screams sex and demands
reverence. The scent of it is almost better than the taste,
a fertile and disgusting thing that no man can help himself
from loving and hating all at once without distinction.
3. White teeth in a red mouth, glistening like bone and silver.
Do whatever it takes, rot your gums and your tongue
and your smooth, swallowing throat as long as your teeth
shine in the starlight. This is important.
4. People love it when you love them, assume their movements
and their slick, silvery desires, steal their skin and wear it as your own
and consume everything that they hold dear inside your gaping
red and sharp-toothed mouth. This is called flattery.
5. Like Venus and like everyone else worth loving strive for symmetry,
imbue it in your very bones, cut and break and reconstruct them
if you have to. Everyone wants half of a woman and another exact
and beautiful half afterward and again, after
they have had their fill and are ready for a fresh course.
6. Like children and the women in paintings you must have soft Venetian skin
with the light just right, golden and celestial, if you cannot find an appropriate halo
you must improvise. This is skin that can be licked like butter off the rind
of an animal, rich and delicious and dripping over hungry mouths like gold.
7. If your hair is not golden it is best to dye it, or else curl it in an imitation
of salt-swept ringlets that emerge from the ocean all virginal and glistening,
hair that has never known heat or frost or fraying but exists always
in that first, impeccable moment, hair like sunshine that smells like riches,
that tangles itself around the fingers of lovers and will not let go.
8. The most important thing, as everyone will tell you,
is to be confident and nearly shattered at the same time,
a tough balance but entirely achievable, like a stained glass window
which invites such utter adoration and complete worship
and also smooth stones from the river, worn soft
from waves and the pattern of devoted hands, to be thrown
through it, glass that can shine and break and cut and draw blood,
in which all potential rests, beautiful and delicious and all clamoring
to be tasted fine as sugar and shoved down the throat in jagged shards.
Margaret Wack has had her work previously published in Strange Horizons, Silver Blade, and right here in Liminality, among other fine venues. More can be found at margaretwack.com.