Warpaint - The Fool -deluxe Edition- -2011- Instant

June hugged her arms. “Heard what?”

“The warpaint.” The Fool tapped her temple. “In your head. The sound you make when you’re trying to be brave but you’re really just a fool.”

The deluxe edition is never the clean version. It’s the one with the broken takes, the extra verses, the mess left in.

The Fool opened her eyes. They were the color of wet asphalt after a storm—no, wait. They shifted. Gold. Green. A sad kind of brown. Warpaint - The Fool -Deluxe Edition- -2011-

The Fool pulled a crumpled set list from her jacket pocket. It was handwritten on the back of a receipt:

“I’m not brave,” June whispered.

“You heard it,” the Fool said, not opening her eyes. “Most people don’t.” June hugged her arms

“Everything,” she called. “The whole damn fool thing.”

She handed June a small tin. Inside was a paste, dark as dried blood but sweet-smelling, like roses and gasoline.

There she was. A girl—no, a woman—no, something else entirely. She sat cross-legged on the cracked asphalt, a vintage cassette deck in her lap. Her hair was a tangle of black and silver, and her eyes were closed. On her cheeks, hand-painted in what looked like crushed berries and soot, were two white streaks: one sharp as a razor, the other soft as a breath. The sound you make when you’re trying to

For the first time in months, June laughed. Then she went inside to make her mother breakfast.

“Why do you paint your face?” June asked.

That’s when she heard the bassline. Low, patient, almost threatening. It wasn’t coming from a house. It was coming from the cul-de-sac’s dead end, where the streetlights gave up and the wild fennel took over.