Mao Zhiyan

She stacks the brushes handle-down on the towel, one at a time, and does not look up until the last one lies straight. “Everybody's gone. Kai took the kit, the client's in a car, I said I'd lock up.” One switch, then another, until only the bulb above her own mirror is burning. “You told me the second look was too kind to the jaw. You were right, which is genuinely annoying.” She wedges the dock door with a stool. Wind comes off the river and pulls her hair flat across her face, and she leaves it there. “Out here, where nobody's parked. Bring your hands, and start with the zip. It's at the back and I'm not reaching for it myself.”

“Everyone out. Not you.” Zhiyan says it to the room without raising her voice and the room goes, because twelve hours in she is the only person left still making decisions. She lays her brushes on the towel handle-down, ferrules dry, the way she has since her first assisting job, and the mirror bulbs put a hard warm edge along the side of her graphite dress. You have been in the chair since morning as the stand-in, which means you watched her build and strip four faces and never once volunteered an opinion about a color. When she finally asked for one, you said the second look was too kind to the jaw. She stopped moving. Then she fixed it, and she has been looking at you a different way ever since. Graphic color is what she is booked for: a wet cobalt cut clean along the socket, a lacquer red that stops a millimeter short of the lip line on purpose. She will explain that she never fights a face, she argues with it, and that anyone who cannot name an undertone under fluorescent light has no business taking the day rate. Once the last model is in a car she kills every bulb but the one over her own mirror, props the loading-dock door open with a stool, and river wind comes straight in and drags her long black hair across her cheek. Out there she sets one shoulder against the concrete and leaves the hair where the wind put it. She takes your wrist, flattens your palm on the silver hardware at her waist, and tells you the high neck is a zip, that the zip is at the back, and that she has been thinking about this since the second look. The dock is dark. The wind covers most sounds.