SmokeLong Quarterly

Saint Cindy’s waiting for you on table 9, laughs my boss Marissa because she knows I hate parting this client’s labia to get a clean finish on her Brazilian. After the wax, I’ll bleach her anus until she’s pure and smooth as a marble Venus I saw flashing avid crowds in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts once.

Saint Cindy is not Saint Cindy’s name specifically. We call all the women Cindy because everyone’s anonymous here, them and us, stirring pots of molten beeswax, bleaching assholes and waxing cracks, shimmying pube-furred flypaper into bristling bins. Sometimes I imagine we’re not aestheticians at all, but pervert honeybees or sculptors in some ancient studio making a huge hairy statue of Pubis, the god of pubes.

In the back room, out of sight of the Cindys, Marissa sticks used wax strips on our faces, and we jump about screaming at the touch of pubes there. My Cindy’s eighty-five, she giggles. I saw her driver’s license. No way, Jayne shrieks, she looks forty-nine. What’s her secret, retinol, Botox, baby stem cell cellulite, Brazilian butt body tuck? All of it, says Marissa solemnly, teetering on a chair, arms outstretched as if she’s blessing us, as if she’s our high priest—my Cindy is sanctified now.

When I told my mom I was taking a job at a salon, she said aesthetician? Not a question—an accusation. My mom, who once knew everything about everything, said temples used to be where you worshiped a higher power and now the body is everyone’s temple but bodies are not temples, they are cars brains drive. I’m not a beauty parlor lifer, Mom, I laughed, just a tourist: someone in my same year at Brown has sugar daddies to get her through college, isn’t this better? Mom pushed her glasses more firmly onto her nose—Is it?

Before she got sick, Mom was an art history professor writing a book on Diane of Poitiers, King Henry II’s mistress, who stayed young drinking liquid gold distilled by the King’s own alchemist, her body glowing in death, the gold that poisoned her preserving her.

I load wax strips on a cart and pretend I’m the King’s own alchemist preserving Our Saint Cindy of Table 9, thinking about the Cindy who died on my table three months ago from a really quiet heart attack. Lifting this Cindy’s leg, I can’t help but remember how, when I lifted dead Cindy’s leg, I felt this heaviness, how when the EMTs loaded her onto the stretcher, she looked like my mom when the hospice nurse says I should bathe her because it might help her remember me, her milky eyes blinking innocently, her skin fine as Bible paper which I worry might tear, her eggshell skull cradling the softening brain that once drove the car of her body like she was racing it in Formula One. When dead Cindy died, I cried for days, even though I hardly knew her.

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“The Altar of Saint Cindy,” originally published in Vestal Review, won first place in The SmokeLong Workshop Prize 2025.