A terribly beautiful woman hangs in my room.

Her head is encircled with rich, heavy fabric, as if she’s an Arabian princess, or the Virgin Mary. The cloth is a color that can’t be found on purpose. It’s the color of dying suns, the color of pure gold melted and mixed with dust. The cloth has the texture of storms and seas. It curls around her cheeks and falls in waves. It crinkles and twists and explodes in foamy crests.

But the edges of the fabric are blackened and burnt. Perhaps someone held it over a fire, watching with an evil grin as the tendrils of flame ate away the golden cloth. The burns give her the look of a relic. Something that was once valuable and perfect. Something that was found, like a miracle, beneath the ashy rubble of a disaster.

A jewel twinkles on the woman’s forehead. The jewel is a perfect green stone, and the light shatters and dances inside it. The stone sits atop a flowery gold lattice, an elaborate disc overshadowed by the drop of color it cradles.

As the golden fabric churns and the fiery jewel glitters, the woman’s face is unmoved. It is still. Expressionless. Her face is Venetian porcelain, and it feels glassy beneath my fingers. Her skin is the color of firelight on walls. Pale and gold and shimmery.

Every line of her face is flawless. Her nose is like a sculpture’s or a doll’s nose, and her chin is pointed and delicate. The bones beneath her silken skin seem to be made of fragile glass, but really, they must be made of iron. Her cheekbones and her jaw have a strange steely quality, like the face of a beautiful, heartless queen. Proud and cruel.

Everything is perfect, but the woman’s mouth is wrong. There is color on her lips, a dark, forbidden red-pink. Someone has painted them full and curved, with a secretive smile at the corners. But the color is smudged and smeared, and her secret smile is betrayed. Beneath the pink-red pigment, her mouth is thin and straight. It’s not a smile or a grimace, but something in between. It doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s blank.

Her eyes are worse. The eyebrows above them are as thin and black as spiders’ legs. They arch viciously, cutting across her forehead. The eyelashes beneath them are jagged and knifelike. They streak around her eyes.

Her terrible, horrible eyes wake me at night. They terrify me. They have no color, no shine. They don’t sparkle with laughter like beautiful eyes do. They are slanted, like cats’ eyes, but they are not green and glowing. They are the reason her face is still. The woman’s eyes aren’t windows; they are holes. Two identical, gaping holes on a porcelain face. Someone has taken a blade and cut them out. There is nothing behind the eyes. No queen, no Arabian princess, no mother of God. The eyes are worse than blank. They are empty.

The woman frightens me with her empty, cut-out eyes and her smeared, blank mouth. She doesn’t make any sense. She is shimmery and golden and beautiful, but she isn’t actually there. She isn’t even a woman. She’s only paint and paper-mâché. Her mouth will never speak, and her eyes will never see. Her face will always be beautiful, but it will never change. She’s a mask that no one will ever wear.

She isn’t a woman. She’s a porcelain face.