FLAMING FUCHSIA

by Jean-Luke Swanepoel

I was wearing nothing, and Ollie was in a dress. I lay in the bathtub, admiring myself in the water, and Ollie stood in front of the mirror, admiring himself in the glass. The flowered dress hung inertly from his shoulders, since he lacked both the breasts and the hips to support it. Beneath the dress he wore fuchsia stockings, and by his feet were two high-heeled shoes—also in a shade of pink. I was eighteen, he not quite; high school was behind us. We were kings instead of princes for one week that summer, because my parents were on vacation in Oʻahu, Hawaii.

“Can I borrow one of your mother’s scarves?” he asked. He stood fingering the neckline of the dress as if attempting to seduce himself in the bathroom mirror. Having dragged his fingers across his chest, which he kept smoothly shaved, he traced his jawline to his stubbled chin and began to apply a glob of shaving cream. “This neckline is a little plunging, don’t you think? Even for me.” Where I would have laughed after making such a statement, Ollie did not flinch.

“I don’t think it’s the neckline that’s the problem,” I said, completely submerging my unshaven torso in the warm water. On a towel beside the bathtub lay J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. To a book Ollie simply refused to come second, and while he was around I didn’t dare open one.

“What do you mean?” he asked. For a moment I wondered if he was joking—he wasn’t.

“I mean that it’s more the lack of tits underneath,” I clarified. “Or haven’t you noticed that there’s something missing? Remind me why you’re dressed up in the middle of the day?”

“Delilah wants to take pictures before the party tonight,” he said. He contorted his face as he dragged a razor down his cheek. “Up at the bridge. I don’t know why you don’t just come along. Not to the party—hell hasn’t frozen over, as far as I know—but with us this afternoon.”

I was the one who had first taken Ollie beyond the chain-linked fence to where the empty bridge spanned the freeway and the train tracks. With the bridge at our backs, we sat wrapped in a blanket—he between my legs, my hand exploring his underwear—and watched the setting of the sun. He missed the moment and scolded me before insisting I finish what I’d started in his jeans. We visited the bridge countless times after that, always just the two of us, and each visit became a part of the last one. Going up there with Delilah would have spoiled all of that forever.

“Delilah’s never liked me,” I said. He’d finished shaving; it was an improvement. He ducked into the hallway and returned a moment later with a thin scarf belonging to my mother and a bottle of neon pink nail polish. He tied the scarf over his Adam’s apple and turned to me.

“What do you think? Don’t answer that, actually.” He removed the scarf and hammered the bottle of nail polish against the palm of his hand, taking a seat on the ledge around the bathtub. “I really wish you’d stop thinking that Delilah doesn’t like you. She just doesn’t know you, and you don’t make it easy, with your nose always shoved in some stupid book. She only knows you as a forehead, really—at least raise your eyebrows and acknowledge her existence.”

“As if she needs any validation from me. But that’s not the point. I’ve seen the way she looks at you, and touches you, and I’ve heard the way she talks to you and laughs when you’re not even being funny. She’s obsessed with you—in love with you. Not that she can help it, obviously.” She also ran her fingers through Ollie’s hair at every opportunity, but I didn’t mention that to him then. Perhaps it wasn’t something he minded. I had always longed for a friendship like theirs.

“It’s not my fault either,” objected Ollie. “I can’t help it if I’m handsome. Even if the whole fucking world were in love with me, I’d never admit to believing it.” He laughed. He was joking, but only half-joking. I wasn’t the only one who thought him handsome and he knew it.

“Always so modest,” I said. “And who needs the world when you have a mirror?—even if it’s spattered with toothpaste. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the handsomest of them all?”

Ollie smacked my cheek with the back of his hand and with a snarl I pretended to snap at it. He reached for my towel, displacing my book, and insisted that I dry my fingers. He then placed my right hand on his stockinged leg and told me not to look so nervous. I squeezed his thigh.

“Hold still,” he said, “I have to practice.” He untwisted the bright bottle’s long black cap and carefully applied the first pink stroke down the middle of my pinky nail. “The color is called Flaming Fuchsia. Pretty, don’t you think? God, I sometimes wish I had your nails. Hold still.”

“You could if you’d just stop biting yours. How much painting practice do you need, Picasso?”

“Do you have somewhere you need to be? Or are you worried I’ll paint all of them? Fine—look.” He blew lightly on the glistening fingernail, unconcerned whether I approved or not. “You aren’t ever allowed to take it off and must promise that you’ll always think of me. What’s so funny?”

Nothing, nothing.

“So, do you promise?” he asked childishly. I hesitated. With Ollie, no promise lacked gravity, as I’d learned more than once during our several months of dating. Even so, I’d have promised him the moon had he asked me to, and only later contemplated how to follow through with it.

“Promise what?” I asked.

“I want you to promise never to remove the polish and that you’ll always think of me.”

“Alright,” I said, “I promise. But there’s nothing I can do if it chips or comes off. You can’t get mad at me for that. You know I always think of you already, and not just when I’m horny.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He crossed his legs and arranged his own hand on his thigh, again removing the brush from the small glass bottle, and we were silent after that. I abandoned any hope of reading in the bathtub and washed myself one-handedly while he painted his nails.

Makeup and an auburn wig, along with the shoes and scarf, completed his transformation. Delilah arrived dressed as a Charlie Chaplinesque man—not to be mistaken for Adolf Hitler—and together they left for the bridge to nowhere. I watched them go and noted again how even Delilah’s lightest touch lingered longer than was necessary. But there were few in the world who would not have fallen in love with Ollie after just a few moments in his company.

I stared stupidly at the single fuchsia fingernail once they left and wondered for how long I would have to walk around like that. My father, I knew, would lecture me—so let him. Carrying my book into the yard, I read the last of Salinger’s stories while the wind rustled the leaves.

Time would wear away the fuchsia polish on my fingernail, but Delilah’s pictures will have lasted much longer—assuming that before the fall she took some decent shots. I never asked to see the pictures, and Delilah never offered; we haven’t spoken to each other in decades. According to her, it was Ollie’s idea to climb onto the parapet—something about the wind and the flow of the dress. From there he plummeted to the freeway below and brought traffic to a standstill for hours. Had he survived he might have gotten a kick out of that—traffic can be such a drag sometimes.

Delilah may still dream of running her hand through Ollie’s hair, or brushing her hand against his thigh, but my own dreams of Ollie have long since been superseded by dreams of other men. And yet, even now, I long for someone to look at me the way she used to look at him.

I still have Nine Stories on a shelf somewhere, but I haven’t touched it since that summer. Ollie’s nails were presumably stripped by an indifferent undertaker in the days before the funeral.

About the Author

Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and he currently lives in California with his husband. His work has most recently appeared in New Limestone Review, Redivider, and Electric Literature’s The Commuter. His sophomore novel, The Book of David, was published in January 2025. Find him on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/jlswanepoel.