show them we are better

[Cicada]

Sewing her face back up was one of the harder things she’d ever had to accomplish in her life.

((Kelly Nguyen continued from Signal Flare))

The omnipresent sting of alcohol could never distract her enough from the pains that ran deeper. The gnawing hunger, like fire set right up against the meatier bits of her innards, where flesh demanded fullness and it just melted away. Around her charred fingers, scraped together jagged bits of her open-the-wrong-way cheek. Almost cut straight into her jaw. All that aside, the sense that she’d been wronged was the most chilling portent, a miasma onto her soul where all the other wounds were just agonizingly skin-deep.

She’d watched the sun set, and rise. Now it was setting again. She’d gotten far enough down the road that petty enemies were a distant memory, much as their stupid words stuck down the sides of her brain like the melt of candle wax. One house past a pile of timber and coal that must have burnt down- who knew who had been involved, who cared? It had nothing to do with her, she’d ignored it. However many blogs of the omniscient online narrative of talking heads had emphasized that the world was better when it was smaller and simpler, and she’d felt it simple enough to absorb that basic truth. To make it her own, as she was wont.

The next house over was empty. Nobody present to annoy her but herself, and Kelly wasn’t an annoying person so far as she understood things to be.

Understanding only carried you so far, she’d learned so recently, so particularly in how she’d suffered for her naivety. Pity her, she guessed. Poor Kelly, for having assumed that her classmates were fair, that they were grown, reasonable creatures like she had long cultivated herself to be. An endlessly swept and tidied zen garden, stones arranged just so, as to be placid, unturned.

She was still herself. They hadn’t broken her. She could recognize herself, that barely detailed blob of a reflection in the half broken window being molested by tendrils of vines. Still her eyes, the beautiful centerpiece. Observant, weary. Sculpted a bit, the tiredness bleeding almost through to the bone, so gaunt she’d worn herself thin. It was still her. Kelly lived on, despite the best efforts of names she would now cast away from herself with unspoken ritual, ghosts to be purified by the thundering beat of her heart.

They had threatened her with shotguns, and wickedly spiked poles, and knives, and absurdly large dicks, and she’d lived past all of their wickedness. Their presumptiveness meant now. She was still evolving, still growing the mortal wealth of her knowledge.

Spiraling, spindling, coiling onto itself like the world’s fattest snake: a shit list as long as any sewer could have slithered under her clammy skin.

The moon was left skinny in the sky, bleating down placidly onto the musty crown of her head with an inescapable weight of simple heat, pure and clingy and impossible to ignore. She tried to ignore it, mobilizing her self-control. In response it got all the more persistent in its hijacking her world, stealing from her the things that belonged to her, her dignity, her decency, spreading all over the pits of her tight shirt as adrenaline wrung the sweat out of her dingy little body.

Unfair. She hated the sensation as it encroached on her. What had given it the right?

Kelly continued to pick at the spots of skin, taut from fear, poised in a radial pattern around the skin she had to fix. She only had one hand for the job anyways, the other was already taped over with gauze, her dominant hand with it’s cute little vienna sausage fingers still as the dead because if they moved they hurt and she hated the pain, she wanted to ward it off, to never feel it again. She didn’t deserve it, not this and not here and not now. That hand that was part of her much as she ignored it lingered unwanted at her one side. Crippled, forever more.

Her one good hand, the one she claimed ownership of, loyalty of, she slowly became more intimate with. It wandered closer and closer to her jagged quiltwork’s worth of cheek flesh. Closer then further. Then further still, then a bit closer, then somewhere in the vicinity of wherever her mind’s eye visualized the entire thing done with, all the tremble of anxiety in all the odd angles and corners of her joints steadied-

The pain would be gone, it had to be gone

It was so unlike her, that strange sensation, the longer that it stayed.

She dived in. There was no space left between the two rows of her teeth.

Her eyes searched the sky. Intently, so much so it could have hurt more than the agony welling up, so deep it was somewhere burrowed like snippy little rats in her spine, blotting out the stars.

Her subservient hand was doing the job. Wherever the red was turning runny and yellow it was squeezed, cleaned out of all that purulence that flowed and flowed and burned and stung and itched and screamed and cried. Unlike her. She was silent. Stoic. Someone, somewhere, many times over was watching her and she was Kelly Nguyen, and they would see only that girl who had conquered every other obstacle in her way with charming wit and grit and spunk but not the sort that dripped from the tip of Lucas’ penis because she wasn’t a fucking obsessed loser she was-

Ripping. Tearing. All the slowly wasted away bits of her flesh were purified until only the healthy colors remained. Debridement, they called it. She remembered from a Tumblr reblog- gross words that weren’t ever supposed to enter a Google search.

She’d searched anyways, to prove them wrong. Funny how it helped her out now. Her knuckles scraped. Fingernails a bit too long now clogged up with all the gunk. She kept going. Her eyes were wet. Her eyes were moist. Her eyes could have exploded out of her skull with all the pressure, the expectation, the demand that she sit there in ghostly silence, slowly excavating a crater in the side of her face until-

It was done. Only raw pink and swiftly flowing red was left, not much. A clean wound, she guessed. Not so fatal. She had a little bit of a bigger smile now, and over that smile went as many strips and bandaids and sticky things as she could find, to hold the whole thing shut. Over that a singular swathe of chartreuse, the very first thing she’d worn when she’d been feeling cute, when she’d been feeling alive- and all those feelings after waking up in a dark corner dismissing the idea of what it felt like to die.

She’d done a good enough job with the wound, but she just thought it was unsightly. She was making a statement with this bandana, much as it was derivative of the rest of the George Hunter crowd.

But that was the fact of the matter, anyways. She still belonged. She was everyone’s friend.

She did best under pressure. And she’d make it work, next time.

Every time thereafter.

Nobody could tell her otherwise- she herself couldn’t have if she tried. She moved on, precisely picking her fingernails clean with the kit tweezers. Always weary- someone was always watching. Judging, and waiting for her to prove them wrong.

((Kelly Nguyen continued in my face above the water, my feet can't touch the ground))