On my grandmother’s tukador there was an Avon blush-on compact, a jar of Pond’s Vanishing Cream, a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder, an Ever Bilena lipstick in a gold tube, a saucer of hairpins, and a rosary whose beads…
The story started with a friend’s memory. When he was a boy, he loved watching his grandmother get ready for Mass, and one Sunday, while she was out of the room, he tried her makeup on himself. He never got caught. But I kept wondering what would have happened if he had. The easy answer was that she would have, most likely, scolded him. Then I thought: What if she hadn’t? That question became (the premise of) the whole story.
I wasn’t writing it from a distance. I grew up with a grandmother a lot like the one in the story, in a church community a lot like hers—the same pews and committees, the same women who notice everything, the same feeling that being seen is already halfway to being judged. So the danger in the story wasn’t invented; I knew what a small town could do with a face that did not fit or would not conform.
Two writers were in my head while I worked on the story. Mavis Gallant, for the way she lets memory misbehave on the page with a narrator who isn’t entirely sure of his own story, who revises and corrects himself as he tells it. And Toni Morrison, who in “Recitatif” refuses to tell the reader which of the two central characters is Black and which is white, and who creates a more powerful story because of that refusal. Both gave me permission to leave certain things unnamed.
The boy in the story doesn’t yet have the word for what he is. He “did not yet have a purpose,” only “attention.” And the grandmother never explains why she does what she does. I wanted her love to be something you read in her hands, not something she says aloud. Everything else followed from that. She had to feel powerful in that town, so when she uses that power for the boy, it costs her something. The turning point isn’t really when the boy is seen with the makeup, but the moment when he waits to be punished and receives, instead, a lesson. The grandmother simply pulls him into her ritual, the way she does everything else. She already knows the world is going to judge his face. What she teaches him is how to stand inside that gaze.
I didn’t want the easier version of the story, where being accepted suddenly makes the boy brave. It doesn’t. He still wants to hide on the walk to church. What the grandmother gives him is smaller than confidence, but perhaps more durable: he learns that he can be seen and afraid at the same time.
Afterward, the town keeps changing the story, and the narrator half-admits that he can’t entirely trust his own version either. That is what memory does, especially with memories like these. You rehearse them until you can no longer tell the event from the story you have made of it. And by then, maybe it no longer matters which one it was.
ALFRED LUARCA is a Filipino writer and art director based in Denmark, where he lives with his husband. His fiction has appeared in Rooted Literary Magazine, AC|DC Journal, and Broad Ripple Review, with work forthcoming elsewhere. He received an Honorable Mention in Booth’s inaugural Susan Neville Prize in Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2026 Edinburgh Writing Awards. He studies creative writing at the International Writer’s Collective in Amsterdam and is working on a short story collection. Find him on Instagram @johnluarca.
