Trendsetters by Lauren E. Osborn

The dead woman’s photo passed through us girls like a virus, illuminated in our cracked glass phone screens and threaded through our email chains. Her death was tinted seal sick blue, tinged darker around the corners of her full lips. Her eyes milked white and veins laced her skin in purple web. If that weren’t enough to convince us of her beauty—her ethereal otherness—she wore satin gloves, the same cool color of her skin, slipped chic past her elbow and complete with a pair of raw river pearls strangling her swanned neck. We all asked ourselves: who is she? And: what kind of bitch dresses up just to die? Our youth calloused us to care. We had no concern for the moral questions of what life was led beyond her broken body—of what she might have left behind. Instead, we looked down at our shapeless forms tented in graphic t-shirts and oversized jeans. The soft, round bloom of our cheeks made us want to puke. We had grown wary of lip injections and Brazilian butt lifts. We wanted what she had. 

Some of us used acrylic paint. We slathered our bodies in sticky pigments, dabbed away the bright of our eyes with talc. We scribbled out the color of our lips with washable marker. The authenticity was hard to replicate. When we asked the woman in the photo what her secret was, she would laugh a sound like charm bracelets make when they jingle around the wrists of the popular girls. She would say through dead lips it’s all natural. We knew it was bullshit. We blamed the magic of post-mortem photoshop.  

We don’t know who discovered it first. Probably Barb, who was desperate for recognition past her family’s Malibu mansion. Or maybe it was Stacie, with her thick hair and high cheekbones which refused to sink. The secret is to almost die, they said. Almost. Soon enough, girls started showing up to school with a similar sickly glow. Arsenic, they would boast over lunch, grabbing at each other’s hands to lay on their pulse, see how weak it is? Another solution was asphyxiation, adding the benefit of a bruised collar around the neck. Very 90’s chic. A few of us opened our wrists with pocketknives, spurring the rumor that it was the authentic cause of death—that the woman in the photo wore gloves to conceal suicide’s scars. 

We didn’t want to die.  But of course, most of us died sooner or later from the effort. A group of girls were found broken in the woods—evidence of ritual sacrifice carved into our flawless foreheads—necromancy gone wrong. Some had set ourselves aflame hoping that the char of skin would spur another trend. The smell, however, was rank. Others had drowned in bathtubs, swamps, or lakes. However, once we were dead dead, there was no regaining what we lost. The bottomless blue of skin would sink into sallow rot. The eyes would gloss pearly white, later lapsing into a mess of goo. Fungus mushroomed from between our legs replacing a sex we no longer needed. Eventually, our ghosts would hatch from the chrysalis of our bodies. We would look down on what we abandoned—posed and picture perfect—only to discover there was nothing left to see.

Lauren E. Osborn is a writer and PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared in The Adroit, DIAGRAM, The North American Review, Carve, Willow Springs, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at Laureneosborn.com.

15 March 2024