She drew her finger back from the bottle. It wasn’t yet time.
Unwinding the top from a tub she delved her fingers into its contents; smooth white cream with the sweetly tinged aroma of contentment. Burying it in her pores and sweeping it up beyond her cheeks to her hairline feeling it melt beneath her fingers.
Foundation next; pouring a creamy skin tone pool onto a sponge and wiping it quickly and carefully until it covered all the features of her face. Only her eyes, wild blue and excited, peering out from a blank canvas and drawn back to the bottle softly glowing in the light of a lamp that had become the last rays of a sun in the twilight.
Eye shadow, blue to match her eyes, trailing colour across the arc of her eyelids, where the firmness of youth had been betrayed by swiftly forgotten years. Then mascara and rouge, stretching her face to rediscover features lost in mire of unfamiliar sagging flesh. Each applied with growing impatience as excitement rolled and tumbled free, drowning out the sound of children’s voices; scavenging seagulls shrieking abuse through the gap in the curtains that refused to close.
The sheer unabashed pleasure of it all drowning out too the sound of a car engine falling to abrupt silence just below the window a million miles away.