I went to the department store during my lunch break and asked one of the sales associates where I could find the brightest, most garish red dress they had in stock. I was whisked away to the rear of the store by a short old woman who smelled of jasmine and pipe tobacco.

And there it was.

As decadently red as a severed artery in full bloom.

The old woman escorted me to the fitting room, and I slipped the dress on as if it were a second layer of skin. I couldn’t imagine taking it off. It felt so irresistibly perfect, as if it were the tightening embrace of a long lost loved one – someone I had met in a former life and was reunited with after centuries spent pining for their homecoming.

“Would you like to wear it out of the store?” the saleswoman asked me.

I caught my reflection in the paneled mirror at the end of the dressing room’s corridor, and I do a double take because the girl I see standing there cannot possibly be me. She’s smiling. She doesn’t hide her lips behind trembling fingers as if her mouth were an untreated wound.

So, I passed my credit card to the saleswoman and she handed me a paper bag containing a neatly folded pile of my old clothes – the snakeskin I had molted and shed so effortlessly. And to think I could have done it this whole time. I cursed myself for being so contended, being so comfortable to remain as I once was – an insect burdened with a shell far too big for the smallness of their size.

But, before I left the store, I circled the makeup counter and peered through the collection of lipstick arranged in the case as if they were fine Parisian delicacies. I finally found the color I was looking for – “Red Velvet.” I asked the saleswoman for the last tube of lipstick and she passed the small capsule to me. Angling the mirror on the counter toward me, I twisted the lipstick until it sprouted open and then smeared it across my lips until they were the dark color of a beetroot.

I returned to work and that’s when I noticed that when you change, the people around you start to change as well. The arched eyebrows. The voices thinning to mere whispers. The spines straightening, faces blanching, as if I were brandishing a small weapon when I passed them. I suppose I was – the redness sprawling from every inch of my body as if I were blanketed with a rare tropical flower, a carnivorous plant with a decidedly avid appetite.

It wasn’t long before one of the other secretaries – a woman I absolutely loathe with a short blonde pixie haircut – approached me at my desk and explained how my superior wanted to see me in her office at once.