A Timeless Beauty: a story in 60 seconds

By Michael Serrur

The woman stared at her reflection in the bedroom mirror. She gently pulled at the skin above her cheekbones. “See,” she whispered to herself, stretching the wrinkled flesh taut, “just like that—fifteen years younger…”

Then she remembered something. She pulled open the drawer below her vanity and grabbed an unmarked bottle of ointment.

“Supposedly, it has the power to reverse aging,” the woman’s friend had told her over lunch a few months ago. “But I’m too scared to try it. The man who gave it to me called it Lion’s Blood…”

The woman sat at the edge of her bed and looked at the bottle. She unscrewed the cap and slowly lifted it to her nose. A pungent, medical stink puckered her nostrils. She cast another glance toward the mirror, sighed, and began to spread the ointment across her face, slowly at first but then in large globs over her forehead, brows, cheeks, jaw, and chin.

She waited twenty minutes, but nothing happened, so she flicked off her bedside lamp and went to sleep.

That following morning, when the woman looked in the mirror, she was shocked to see a young lady forty years her junior gazing back at her. She gently caressed her face in disbelief; the skin felt smooth and full and bursting with life. She spent the rest of the day excitedly hobbling around her tiny condominium, trying on outfits and posing in front of her floor-length mirror. Then, an idea dawned on her: She would go to a nightclub and try out her new look.

Sure enough, shortly after sitting down at the bar, a handsome young man approached her.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

“Why not?” she cooly, “One drink can’t hurt.”

But one drink turned into four, and before she knew it, the lights flickered on, and the bartender announced, ‘Last call.’

“So, how about a nightcap at my place?” the man asked.

“Just let me wash up first,” she said coquettishly.

He smiled.

They were back at his place in ten minutes. She sat on his couch, and he brought her a cognac, but it didn’t take long for him to make his move, and before she knew it, he was removing her dress. He slipped the straps off her shoulders and peeled the fabric down below her chest.

Suddenly, he stopped. Then he started to laugh.

The woman was sick with embarrassment.

“Stop,” she shouted, covering her winkled body as best she could. “Stop laughing at me!”

But the man couldn’t stop. He got up from the couch and began unbuttoning his shirt.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He let his shirt fall to the ground, revealing a flabby chest, tanned and wrinkled like a football and covered in a thick pelt of silvery hair. “I can’t believe this,” the man said, still grinning. “Lion’s Blood?”

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By age two, Michael had already begun his literary journey, flipping through pages of picture books and pretending to read them. Thirty years later, he is still making up words and stories. Michael publishes 60-second stories on Substack, and his short story collection: “No Right on Red: Short Stories Inspired by the Weirdness of New York,” is available on Amazon.