In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

ouncy fake breasts sudsed her hair. After the spray gun rinse, he
wrapped a towel around her head and scooted her over to the ionic
infrared hair drying dome. Penny fried there for thirty seconds in the
floral tinged ammonia fumes until Marlene's red talons curled under the
dome and pulled it up and escorted her to one of the lavender chairs.
Madame d'Oc came over to scrutinized her with her tiny gray
eyes and launched in with a pair of scissors that moved over her head
faster than the speed of light. Ammonia and brimstone rose up from
the coloring inferno below. Lucky for Alessandro that he was in the
lounge doing oxygen.
"Ah! Zuh ears, mademoiselle, have a fine shape, you should
sink of earrings, eet eez a seemple solution for appearing more
femeeneen."
The arthritic hands were large with veins bulging and
overlapping like Banyan roots over the waxy hairless skin, flat wide
nails were filed into long tapered shapes lacquered to match her
nacreous lipstick. Penny looked down at the slim stockinged ankles
peeking from under the starched lavender smock. Arthritis might have
made those bones so knobby, or—Madame d'Oc was one of the very
earliest of her kind, what Alessandro's brother had become.
The ears were a dead giveaway. Although partially hidden by
her crown of permed ice blue curls, they were outlandishly large, each
wrinkly lobe studded with a pink pearl button.
It might work for looking feminine, under the right conditions,
like the rarefied conditions she found herself in now. But what about
pirates? Well, pirates on long sea voyages probably did a little crossdressing
after a few bottles of rum anyway, so the earring thing might
come in handy.
Marlene Dietrich stood by, laconically gathering the red clouds
into a steel surgical tray.
"Wiss zeess hair you can grow natural corkscrew curls, do you
know how many women would keell for ziss hair?"
Madame picked up a handful.
"And you should wear zee hair long. Wiss zat face you would
look like a fairy preencesse, but non, you want to be an androgyne!
Bien, I leave a little curl here, you know, like a baby fringe, to remind
you that you are a wooman."
She pulled and tugged at the one clump that was left in front.
"You have seen your friend Miss Nova in her new, euh, coiffure?
Hmmff! What do you sink of zatt?"
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