the prospect of beauty
originally written for a local competition but not sent in due to various reasons cries ;A;
original story
wc: 700~
prompt: the prospect of beauty
Kong Xiang Ting is twenty-one, with pretty hair and pretty eyes and a wardrobe of floral dresses and soft cardigans. Kong Xiang Ting does a double degree at NUS and works as a freelance stylist on weekends and fights actively for animal rights in her spare time.
Kong Xiang Le is seventeen, with average hair and average eyes and a wardrobe of darks and pale brown potato-sack uniforms. Kong Xiang Le is trying not to fail her promotional exams and has to beg her parents for pocket money and mooches around on social networking sites when she isn’t doing anything else.
Xiang Le’s friends think she hates her sister. Xiang Ting’s friends don’t know her sister exists. Xiang Le runs from her problems. Xiang Ting doesn’t have problems. Xiang Le slams doors and throws books and can go for days in that wretched household without saying a word.
Xiang Ting opens the door and picks up the books and asks her what’s wrong.
Xiang Ting is beautiful. Xiang Le is not.
Xiang Le wonders sometimes if dichotomy between siblings is irony or nature. Xiang Le would write poetry about all the things she hates about Xiang Ting if she had the patience. Xiang Le wishes she could rip pages out of time and correction tape out history and rewrite it so she was the one that came four years earlier and stole all the good genes before Xiang Ting could.
Xiang Le wonders many things.
But Xiang Le also comes home and scrounges for leftover coins from this week’s $25 allowance, and puts them in the teddy-shaped piggy bank from her childhood labelled the “Beauty Fund” as usual. She counts them out sometimes, and marks days down on the grotty AIA Life calender that’d come with her parents’ bank subscription on her bedside till she has enough again.
On the day marked with an “X” in purple Clean Colour pens, she goes out with the coins to Guardian and searches. The lady asks her what she wants- she shows her a picture of the Maybelline Baby Lips® Very Berry Spring Ltd. Edition lip balm, hastily snapped on her phone in semi-darkness, and is told that that’s long run out of stock. Xiang Le refuses when the lady offers her the Rose Rush flavour instead, and leaves.
Xiang Le goes to Watsons. She goes to Sasa and Tangs and combs the entire of Orchard Road, until she comes back home after four and a half hours of searching, plastic bag holding the lip balm folded and tucked neatly in her bag.
Then she takes out the shoebox from under her bed containing the DollyWink False Lash mascara, the Dr. Q Magic BB cream, the Waterful Concealer, and she drops the unwrapped lip balm amongst the other barely-touched makeup products, another secret twin to the neatly mixed and matched set in the next room, (the prettier room), and watches it roll around in the box, the sound like the marbles that she and Xiang Ting used to play with had made on the ceramic tiles of their old house back in Hougang.
Sometimes she applies the makeup, clumsy hands making big, ugly marks on her face, like how she’s trampled through society, completely missing her sister’s dainty tread. Sometimes she steals the blue dress with the black cardigan from the washing machine and tries it on too, her arms and legs bulging and vulgar under the soft material. Sometimes she stands and stares and wonders and wonders and wonders-…
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?” their mother snaps across the kitchen, high strung from rushed preparations for CNY reunion dinners and the fact that Xiang Le has once again snapped another gold chain necklace in her clumsiness. Their father conveniently disappears back into the living room, well aware of the storm about to break and the possible repercussions, and Xiang Le stares at the broken chain, splayed across the ngoh hiang on the discoloured green chopping board she’d been told to cut up. But then-...
“Ma,” and it’s Xiang Ting, walking over from the rice cooker, hands behind her neck, under her long, straight black hair. Xiang Le watches coldly as her sister unclasps her own necklace, before looping it gently around her neck, in place of the broken one.
“I think Lele’s fine as she is.”
a/n: /hipsters in with my original story
/waddles out embarrassed
original story
wc: 700~
prompt: the prospect of beauty
Kong Xiang Ting is twenty-one, with pretty hair and pretty eyes and a wardrobe of floral dresses and soft cardigans. Kong Xiang Ting does a double degree at NUS and works as a freelance stylist on weekends and fights actively for animal rights in her spare time.
Kong Xiang Le is seventeen, with average hair and average eyes and a wardrobe of darks and pale brown potato-sack uniforms. Kong Xiang Le is trying not to fail her promotional exams and has to beg her parents for pocket money and mooches around on social networking sites when she isn’t doing anything else.
Xiang Le’s friends think she hates her sister. Xiang Ting’s friends don’t know her sister exists. Xiang Le runs from her problems. Xiang Ting doesn’t have problems. Xiang Le slams doors and throws books and can go for days in that wretched household without saying a word.
Xiang Ting opens the door and picks up the books and asks her what’s wrong.
Xiang Ting is beautiful. Xiang Le is not.
Xiang Le wonders sometimes if dichotomy between siblings is irony or nature. Xiang Le would write poetry about all the things she hates about Xiang Ting if she had the patience. Xiang Le wishes she could rip pages out of time and correction tape out history and rewrite it so she was the one that came four years earlier and stole all the good genes before Xiang Ting could.
Xiang Le wonders many things.
But Xiang Le also comes home and scrounges for leftover coins from this week’s $25 allowance, and puts them in the teddy-shaped piggy bank from her childhood labelled the “Beauty Fund” as usual. She counts them out sometimes, and marks days down on the grotty AIA Life calender that’d come with her parents’ bank subscription on her bedside till she has enough again.
On the day marked with an “X” in purple Clean Colour pens, she goes out with the coins to Guardian and searches. The lady asks her what she wants- she shows her a picture of the Maybelline Baby Lips® Very Berry Spring Ltd. Edition lip balm, hastily snapped on her phone in semi-darkness, and is told that that’s long run out of stock. Xiang Le refuses when the lady offers her the Rose Rush flavour instead, and leaves.
Xiang Le goes to Watsons. She goes to Sasa and Tangs and combs the entire of Orchard Road, until she comes back home after four and a half hours of searching, plastic bag holding the lip balm folded and tucked neatly in her bag.
Then she takes out the shoebox from under her bed containing the DollyWink False Lash mascara, the Dr. Q Magic BB cream, the Waterful Concealer, and she drops the unwrapped lip balm amongst the other barely-touched makeup products, another secret twin to the neatly mixed and matched set in the next room, (the prettier room), and watches it roll around in the box, the sound like the marbles that she and Xiang Ting used to play with had made on the ceramic tiles of their old house back in Hougang.
Sometimes she applies the makeup, clumsy hands making big, ugly marks on her face, like how she’s trampled through society, completely missing her sister’s dainty tread. Sometimes she steals the blue dress with the black cardigan from the washing machine and tries it on too, her arms and legs bulging and vulgar under the soft material. Sometimes she stands and stares and wonders and wonders and wonders-…
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?” their mother snaps across the kitchen, high strung from rushed preparations for CNY reunion dinners and the fact that Xiang Le has once again snapped another gold chain necklace in her clumsiness. Their father conveniently disappears back into the living room, well aware of the storm about to break and the possible repercussions, and Xiang Le stares at the broken chain, splayed across the ngoh hiang on the discoloured green chopping board she’d been told to cut up. But then-...
“Ma,” and it’s Xiang Ting, walking over from the rice cooker, hands behind her neck, under her long, straight black hair. Xiang Le watches coldly as her sister unclasps her own necklace, before looping it gently around her neck, in place of the broken one.
“I think Lele’s fine as she is.”
a/n: /hipsters in with my original story
/waddles out embarrassed