Wetlands by Charlotte Roche Page A

ultimate lashes. The best way is to use the end of the brush, where the mascara accumulates, and just glob it onto the lashes. The goal is for people half a mile away to think: “Wow, she’s a walking set of lashes.”
    Mascara is always advertised as not being sticky, and the brush is always supposed to keep the lashes separate so there are no clumps. But for me those are reasons
not
to buy a mascara. When my relatives and neighbors figured out that I never remove the mascara and just put more on every day, a panic broke out.
    “If you don’t remove the mascara from your lashes, they never get any light or air—and then they’ll fall out.”
    I thought: It couldn’t be any worse than it used to be. And I thought up cool tricks to avoid water ever getting on my lashes. After putting so much money and effort into my lashes, I can’t just let them get ruined in the shower. And besides, when months’ worth of mascara slowly dissolves in hot water and runs into your eyes, it burns. You definitely don’t want that. So I shower in stages. First I wash my hair and wrap it in a towel so the water can’t get into my eyes. Then I do the rest of my body from the neck down. For a while I missed my neck and black, greasy smudges would accumulate in the three indentations at the base of it.
    When that happens, if you rub your neck, dark, sticky little rolls form that smell like pus. So you either have to wash from the face down or you have to rub these rolls off your neck regularly. But the important thing is that your face never comes in contact with water. I haven’t put my head underwater for years—not in the bathtub or in the school swimming pool. I have to climb into the pool by the stairs like a granny, and I can only swim the breaststroke because your face, or parts of it, go under water with any other stroke. If someone tries to dunk me, I turn into a fury and scream and beg and explain that it would ruin my lashes. That’s worked so far.
    For years I haven’t seen water from below the surface. Obviously that means I never wash my face either. I think it’s overrated anyway. When you take your makeup off withmakeup remover and cotton balls you’re kind of washing your face. Just keep your distance from the eyelashes. That’s the way I’ve been doing it for years. Only one or two lashes have gotten stuck in the curler. And they grew back. So I’ve proved that your lashes don’t all fall out if you don’t remove your mascara every night.
    My ex-boyfriend Matt watched me curl my lashes once and asked me whether a row of eyelashes was the same length as the inner pussy lips.
    “Yeah. Approximately.”
    “And you have two of these curlers?”
    “Yep.”
    A gold one and a silver one.
    He laid me down on the bed. Spread my legs. Pushed aside the ladyfingers and gently clamped my dewlaps with the eyelash curlers. That way he could hold the inner labia away from the hole and look deep inside. A bit like when they force Malcolm McDowell’s eyes open in
A
Clockwork Orange . He asked me to hold the curlers and pull them as far apart as felt good. Matt wanted to fuck me immediately and cum on my stretched lips. But first he wanted to take a picture so I could see how pretty my pussy looked all stretched apart. We clapped our hands with joy. Well, he did. My hands were busy.
    When you stretch these crinkly flaps of skin all the way out, the total surface is as big as a postcard. At somepoint Matt drifted out of my life, but his good idea stayed with me.
    I like the feeling I get from stretching my lips with the lash curlers until they look from my perspective like bat wings. Actually, I wonder if that’s why they’re so big and peek out from the ladyfingers? No way. I’m sure they were always so big and long and frayed grayish pink along the edges. All of this goes through my head as I’m ignoring Dr. Notz. Now he wants to leave.
    But here comes Helen with the photos of her ass.
    He needs to tell me which side is