Brian held a rather large tub of something.
"What is it?" Maeve asked as she took it from her father's hand, unscrewing the lid. Inside lay a sort of shimmering odorless ointment.
"It's supposed to be a great exfoliant or something," Brian said with a shrug and a smile. "Well--it's the generic brand, anyway. The one all the locals swear by was *ridiculously* expensive. But the guy in the shop I bought this from said it was the same thing, just loads cheaper."
"I'm sure it's great, Daddy," Sinead said, peering over Maeve's shoulder. "Let's go try it, Maeve!"
The sisters ran up into the bathroom and scrubbed their faces clean with water, then patted them dry with towels. Maeve dipped a finger experimentally into the shimmery ointment. "Doesn't feel very exfoliate-y to me," she said.
"Me neither," Sinead agreed, rubbing a bit between her fingers. "It's really smooth. Well, at least maybe it will give us, like, a nice healthy glow," she joked. The two girls laughed companionably, then scooped up more of the ointment and began rubbing it into their faces. It sat like a face mask, not absorbing into their skin, allowing them to cover everything completely so all that looked out at them from the mirror when they were finished were eyes, nostrils, and a slit for a mouth.
"Well? Now we wait, I guess," Maeve said, reading the instructions after she cleaned off her hands, not noticing that a bit of the ointment was left on the underside of one wrist. "Thirty minutes, it says."
Picking up books and magazines, the girls settled into their bedrooms to wait. After fifteen minutes, both started feeling strange. "It itches," one said. "It burns a bit, yeah?" said the other. Still, both figured that meant it was working. They'd tough it out.
Which proved hard to do. By the end of the thirty minutes, both of them thought the feeling was unbearable. "I gotta get this stuff *off*!" exclaimed Maeve, running into the bathroom to get a damp towel, Sinead hot on her heels. When Maeve pulled her face away from her towel, she looked horrified, staring at what was clearly her eyebrows left on the cloth. "Hey! What kind of--is this, like, Nair? Hair removal? Man, no wonder it burned! I hope--" Her words stopped abruptly as she noticed Sinead staring at her, still covered in her own ointment, horror on her face. "What?" Maeve said, panicked. Sinead couldn't find words, just pointed to the mirror.
Slowly, Maeve turned to her reflection. What met her was not her face, but the face of a python. The center of her face was covered in dark scales, changing abruptly to yellow further on her cheeks, then dark again on the borders of her face. Her nose had flattened into her skin, leaving only two small holes, and her mouth had widened excessively--a fact she noted with growing horror as her jaw dropped in shock--and dropped, and dropped some more. Only her eyes and ears remained the same, as they hadn't been touched by the cream.
"What--how--wh--Sinead! What am I?" But Sinead was inspecting her own transformed face, her own scales in a different pattern of black and red that she thought rather fetchingly matched her hair.
"You know," Sinead said, touching her newly-scaled face. "It *is* smooth. Just like exfoliated skin should be." She laughed. "This actually isn't so bad. I think I look pretty cool."
"Are you *kidding* me?" yelled Maeve, noticing the itch at her wrist. With dismay, she saw the splotch of cream and wiped it off, revealing more python scales beneath. Sinead saw, excitement in her eyes, and reached for the ointment.