The Real Scar
Feil
There are two scars on my forehead, but you can only see one. The one you can see is the ovoid mass of scar tissue that stretches from my right brow all the way up to the top left side of my face, maybe six centimeters above the temple. An ugly mottled cicatrice in white and pink and brown against the dark honey color of my skin, it quirks my right eyebrow into a permanent carat of shock. I always brush my hair over the twisted bald spot it creates. Always right to left. Never left to right.
It's that one, the second scar, that makes me what I am. Single. Unmarriageable. Though I had been engaged. Looks, skills, strength, family name, connections—these were their own dowry. I had been pretty enough. I am still pretty enough, from the nose down. Good skin, no diseases. Womanly shape. But nobody can see that over work clothes or the Tenday dress. And the wound that made the scar took my strength for a long time. The situations stole my good name.
The second scar made me childless. It takes two salaries to support a child, one child at a time. Twins would make everyone hungry, all the time.
I blame the second scar for making me alone. Because people always look at it. Or they try not to look at it, which is worse. I used to get angry when people would look at my breasts. Now I would be happy if they looked at anything other than the scar.
But I could have gotten to know them anyway. They would forget the scar after a while. It messed with my eyebrows, but my smile still came easily. My family's women always had good teeth. It's not the second scar that makes me avoid them. Turn away when looked at. Walk with my hood up and my face down.
No. Not the burn scar. Not the second scar.
I thought they liked me back then. Pretty man, pretty smile. I was a silly girl. Seventeen. Engaged. But that didn't mean anything. Marriage was economic. For making babies and joining houses. Have sex with whoever you want, just be honest about it. I didn't have anything to hide.
They did.
'Come on, Veri, it'll be fun,' the other one said. So I tried it, and it was. Then, 'If you liked that,' (a wink, and I winked back) 'you have to try this with us.'
I can't wink any more. There were more of them, that they took me to visit once for the Feast of the Ascension. We did such strange and exciting things. I was scared, nervous, but they soothed me. They were my friends. I thought. Pretty man, pretty girl, pretty smiles. And it felt so good. I was just a girl.
They made me promise not to tell. I agreed. I was a little ashamed. Sex was one thing. This was different. I felt out of control. Didn't know where it was going. Where it would stop. If it would stop. I was scared. But they were my friends. They were older than me. They had done it all before, and they were happy, together, in love. Pretty men, pretty girls, pretty smiles.
Once, while he was on top, I touched his face. His forehead. He was wearing makeup. There was a thin, silvery scar under there, like something made with a scalpel and left just wide enough to permanently scar. Just the little I saw of it put me out of the mood. It was stupid, I thought. I had seen scars before. We finished anyway.
Then, on the last day of the feasting, they told me about something else. Something special. I asked him what, but he wouldn't say. I was scared, but he told me it was all right. I didn't believe his pretty smile. He said, 'Well, do you like what we do, or don't you?' and I said, 'You know I like you.' I was scared, and ashamed, but excited anyway.
But then when the something special happened, they held me down and they took a straight blade razor and they chanted something I didn't understand but that made me want to scream and writhe and run and moan and choke and shiver and gag and orgasm all at the same time, and then they cut the mark, the mark, that mark, into my forehead so deep blood poured down my face and I could feel the knife grating on the bone, and they all put a finger in the blood and tasted it, and I could see them twitching with ecstasy at my screams, and then I passed out.
So they took me home and told me to wear a bandage over my forehead and say I fell until it healed enough to hide the cut with makeup, and don't tell anyone or we'll kill you, but we don't want to do that, we love you, we love you so much. But on the train the gendarmes came and said they were looking for people that looked like them, and he pulled a pistol from his coat and shot at an officer, and one of them shot him in the head, blowing his pretty smile out the back of his pretty hair, and she tried to run but they gunned her down and she shivered and moaned in absolute bliss as her lifeblood pooled on the metal floor and she died.
Nobody thought to check me, sitting on the other side of the train by myself looking out the window the whole train ride except when the gunfire started and everybody looked. I just shivered and shook and shook and wanted to cry but no tears would come, and the shame came all at once in a huge wave, oh Emperor, what had they done. What had I done. What had I done. What had I done.
And so the first chance I got I took a plasma torch and I cranked it up to maximum and I ripped off the bandage and burned my face and screamed, and screamed, and fell unconscious. They took me home and said it was attempted suicide, and the engagement was canceled and when I got better I went back to work. When I was eighteen I moved out on my own.
People gave me strange glances, and I was scared stiff for a whole year. But eventually I discovered that I wasn't special. There was nothing out of ordinary about me. It was just the scar. The second scar.
But when they look at it, there are two scars that they're looking at. Two scars on my forehead. The one you can see isn't the one that I see, whenever I see my reflection. The one everyone sees isn't the one I'm afraid they see. Not the one they might find when I'm dead, scored on the bone, etched on my skull. Not the one I feel them looking at, not the one I feel burning above my eyes.
That's the first scar.
The deep scar.
The real scar.
The Real Scar [40k vignette]
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