Amy stood before the bathroom mirror as she toweled herself off. She examined herself, as she always did checking for unsightly lumps of fat that needed to be worked on, turning to make sure her posture was as even as it had been the last day of modeling school. She let the towel drop to her feet as she noticed for the first time, the blue-green veins that circled her breasts and crawled along her abdomen. Was her skin supposed to be so pale, so translucent, as to see all the delicate spider webbing? They seem too vulnerable, so easy to slice, exposed as they were. At school, in the cold mornings before the teachers opened their doors, her fingertips turned green, as if she had dipped then into ink. She had wondered what they were until she realized that they were veins, and she had rubbed frantically at them, hoping that they would disappear to where they were supposed to be. Amy turned her back to the full-length image and peered over her shoulder. She could see the veins in the back of her legs too. She hoped she didn’t get varicose veins like her grandmother. Amy remembered the paleness of her grandmother’s knee when she sat down, the white stretch between floral polyester and rolled down nylon. Amy turned around. The veins were still visible. She imagined could feel her life pump through them, warming her. She imagined them hideously distorted, sticking up through her flesh like the veins in her grandmother’s legs. She imagined some lover tracing then with an ice cube, a tongue. Amy put on her clothes, which, like a second layer of skin, rendered them invisible.

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