Helena Hickey
Short story
She keeps the faces on a rack in her bathroom. They hang listless, lifeless. She should probably find something else to call them besides faces—they aren’t a face until she puts them on. The faces need her far more than she needs them.
She rises onto her toes and pointedly does not look at the face rack in the mirror behind her. She only has eyes for the line of stitches, hidden beneath the ridge of her jaw. She’d done good work this time—the stitches are clean, and her skin meets itself without protest. Sometimes, she’ll peek beneath her jaw and find the skin between each stitch red, swollen, weeping with pus.
With one hand, she pries apart her skin: a finger on the face, and a finger on her neck. She pulls taut, ignoring the sting, the stretch. In her other hand, she holds a knife. With her level of practice, she could remove her face with her eyes closed. The blade would slide cleanly. There wouldn’t be a single drop of her blood to stain the counter top.
She doesn’t risk it. She keeps her gaze on the stitches as she splits them in half—each V, severed, severed, severed. Her blade is small and sharp, but the handle is thick. It’s likely better suited to opening packages. Instead, it opens her face.
She slides the blade up to her ear. The curves are always pesky, but she manages. Her hairline is next, then down the other temple, around the other ear.
The face falls onto her countertop, skin-side down. Framed by white marble, the inside of the face is rippled, random red peaks separated by crimson valleys. Gravity will bring it back to itself.
There are the white lines, of course—the tools that make each face act like it should. She reaches out to pluck one. They resemble guitar strings, and often, she can’t resist them. They don’t make a sound, but the cord is flimsy in her grasp. Against her fingers, it’s clear that the white pieces have begun to yellow where they stride against the cheeks. The redness remains true, like a ripe strawberry.
Ripe, yes. The inside of each face she dons is always ripe, ready for the taking.
She slides the face down the countertop. Skin skids against the marble. Somehow, she doesn’t gag. She doesn’t know when she stopped gagging. At one point, this was the most disgusting thing she could possibly be doing—she’d hated the rubbery feel of each face, the squishiness of the tissue, the wrongness in the way they’d hung, the oddly-plastic scent they brought with them. But she’d gotten over it. She’d had to. What was the other option? Go out in her true face?
She catches the briefest hint of herself, faceless, skinless. The raw red of her real muscle, stretched across high cheekbones. It almost seems odd to see a full cheekbone, after staring at the hollowness of the face on the counter. She can’t think about it for too long. The stark blue of her eyes catches her attention, the jolting way it appears in the sea of red. Ice and fire.
Beneath her hairline, if she lets her eyes linger, she’ll see a sliver of her real skin.
She doesn’t linger.
She spins away from the mirror to her face rack. Five faces hang from binder clips, stretched long by gravity. She keeps them at a diagonal, so the mouths look perpetually shocked, and the eyes always seem tired. Perhaps she’s personifying them too much. The mouths and the eyes are gaping holes of blackness, nothingness. Her peeling bathroom wallpaper peeks out. A line of blue flowers, disappearing and reappearing again.
The appearance of the faces themselves doesn’t matter. She knows what each face is meant to convey. Her dutiful daughter face, for example, is worn for lunch dates with her mother. She keeps that one at the end of the rack. Looking at it is enough to send shivers down her spine. She knows it has pink lips and rosy cheeks, with too-thick skin. The needle never wants to go through, and so her stitches are always messier than they need to be. She always pulls them too tight, till the skin bunches up.
Her hand skims each face. Maybe it will be like tarot cards—the powdery skin of the right face will feel warm beneath her hand.
It doesn’t. Each face is somehow temperature-less. Neither hot, nor cold. The small hairs that grow—pseudo peach fuzz—tickle her fingertips. She doesn’t shiver, but maybe she should. The air in her bathroom is cold, and the tiles are chilled beneath her bare feet. The air conditioner is on, and each time a gust of air meets her faceless face, she winces.
She doesn’t look in the mirror. It’s a conscious choice, one she makes again and again. If she wants to continue this charade—which she does, which she must—she cannot see what lurks beneath the surface.
She already knows what face she’ll don tonight. All she’s engaging in now is the illusion of choice, wherein she pretends like the other faces are equal contenders, but really, the one at the center demands her attention.
It’s her stiffest face when worn, and so, it’s only natural that when her fingers skim its skin, it somehow seems to already be boned, rigid, a corset. She always uses this face for these dinners.
She yanks it free of the clip. The red, raw side makes a squelching sound when it leaves the plastic, but it’s fleeting. Within seconds, she’s flinging it onto her marble countertop, red-side up, skin-side down. Her needle and thread wait at the ready.
Threading the needle used to be more difficult for her, but after years of wearing a face or two or three a day, she’s learned to find the eye of the needle instinctually. The thread slips in, and she uses her pinky to tie the knot.
The stitches always start beneath her jaw line. This junction allows her to be at her messiest. Already, the edge of her own skin is rigid and ruffled. It doesn’t prompt pain when she touches it so much as heat, for the nerves are too shot to experience much of anything else. She picks the face up off the counter, and tilts her head back.
The dinner will be fine, she decides. As long as she can wear a face, she can conquer anything.
Keeping the face balanced atop her own faceless face is always the worst part. Red on red is a revolting combination. Fresh from the rack, the face is the wrong temperature, the wrong texture. It itches—she imagines small bugs, crawling between the layers of not-quite skin. Ants or spiders, something leggy, sandwiched by her blood.
She stabs the needle through her skin, harder than she should. It’s a fitting punishment for thinking too much.
It’s easy enough to send the needle through the fake face. She pulls until she feels the thread go taut. Then, she simply has to finish the job. There’s no reason for her breath to bounce around in her chest, or for her hands to shake. But it does, but they do. When she’s secured enough stitches to glance in the mirror, she finds the line of them gone jagged, bouncing up and down with no discernible pattern.
She swears. First, under her breath. Then, aloud. Then, a scream. She kicks out at the cabinets at her legs, but that releases none of her pressure. She wants to grasp the stitches in her hands and yank. She wants the thread to run through her skin. She wants it to burn.
But time is of the essence. Even if there’s a stitch on her chin, it doesn’t matter. She cannot be late for dinner.
The rest of the stitches are unremarkable. She secures the face in record time. The hole for her lips is somehow too small. She tries to smile, and finds herself imprisoned. If not for the nasal holes, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
It doesn’t matter. It can’t. This face will work. It always does.
She finds the table at the restaurant already full, save for her seat. They’d been sat at a circular table, so when she slides into her chair, conversation ripples around her. At first, no one speaks to her. This is fine. She takes the momentary lapse in attention to raise the back of her hand to her cheek. The face is in place.
“You’ve been so busy!” Tom exclaims. He’s seated across from her. She turns her thighs so that her body and Tom’s form a ninety degree angle. Kristina is next to her.
She says, “Kristina!”
But Tom, oblivious, continues, “What have you been up to?”
Kristina had spun away from Amy, to join in on the conversation.
Her hand is still against her cheek. The back of her palm, not the front, as if she’s checking a child’s temperature. The skin seems to melt around her hand, drooping and drippy. She’s imagining it. She knows she’s imagining it. She digs her hand into her cheek bone—her solid cheekbone, covered by solid skin—then lets her palm fall to her lap. She flicks phantom drops of wax off her skin.
“Oh, the usual. What about you?”
She smiles. Is it kind? She isn’t sure. For it to be a kind smile, her lips would have to cooperate, and her lips are not her own. They are stuck, pursed.
“No, no, tell us,” Tom insists. A drop of sweat falls down her temple. Except—it can’t be sweat. This isn’t a face. This isn’t her face. This thing she’s become does not sweat. “You’ve missed how many dinners now? Three, four? There has to be a good reason for that.”
Tom’s smile is not kind. Tom looks like a shark, circling. Perhaps the dripping thing on her temple is blood, and he smells it in the water.
She can feel Kristina’s gaze on her. It is a heavy thing, weighed down by her concern. “Maybe she doesn’t like being pestered, Tom.”
“Me?” Tom retorts, a hand splayed across his chest. She expects it to be gray, rubbery, but it is just a hand. Tom, of all people, is strong enough to walk around in his own skin. “Me, pestering? Can’t a man be curious about his friends?”
“Can’t a man know when to quit?” Amy chimes in, from her spot on Kristina’s right. “Oh, wait. No! They can’t.”
Amy downs her glass, tipping her head back to do it. Her red wine sloshes, coating her upper lip. A dark red. Ripe.
“And you,” Tom accuses, swinging his own glass in Amy’s direction. Again, the blood—wine—blood sloshes, a storm. “Don’t know when to let her speak up for herself. Let her get her sea legs.”
He turns back to her. She knows faces. She knows every inch of the one she’s wearing. She knows—instantly, intimately—she’s in the wrong face. It’s impossible to ignore, for Tom is looking at her, and his face is wrong, too. Every face at this table is wrong. The conversation beside her—Timmy and Leila. They talk and they talk and they laugh and they crow and none of it is real. None of it, not an inch. Leila’s forehead is too flat. Timmy’s brow is too furrowed. Tom, of course, has put on his savior’s mask. His eyes seem to say, See? Aren’t they silly? His wine glass still swishes, around and around, down a drain no one can see. Kristina’s pity, Amy’s vengeance, and her—
Her face gives nothing. Her face doesn’t know how to give anything. It never has, and it never will.
She stands from the table with such force, her thighs slam into the wood. The glasses rattle, near-toppling, but nothing falls. Nothing shatters, except the mask at her feet.
She means to excuse herself, but when she opens her mouth, words do not materialize. Her purse is still on her shoulder. She never likes to be separated from it, or the treasures it holds, so as she storms through the restaurant, she digs. Her knife is right where it should be, and she gives it a comforting pat. Beside it is her back-up face. It feels pasty, somehow. She grips it in her hand, pulls it from her purse, and thrusts it at the wall.
It lands atop a painting. Beneath the eyes is a reproduction of grapes on a vine. Through the mouth, she sees a sliver of a country house. Around it, there is an endless blue sky, and a willow tree, weeping.
The face slides down the painting, leaving blood and muscle in its wake. It lands atop a woman’s spaghetti, skin-side up. She screams loudly enough to draw the attention of every person in the restaurant, everyone except her. She ducks her head, and finds the bathroom.
The hallways grow narrower as she walks, and the face attached to her skull grows heavy. Gravity will help her, then. For once, the forces outside of her control are on her side, conspiring in her favor.
She opens the bathroom door with her shoulder. Her hand is still in her purse, clutching her knife. Ambient music plays softly over the speakers, something more fit to an elevator than a bathroom, and there’s a woman in one of the stalls, humming along. Her heeled-feet tap-tap-tap in tune.
She focuses on the mirror. This countertop is not marble, but red, a terracotta color. She withdraws her knife, then makes the cut with her eyes closed. She’s supposed to follow the ridge of her jaw as her guide, but somehow, she forgets. She slices down, towards her throat.
The pain is sudden, hot and sharp. Her blood bubbles up onto her hand. She’s surprised to find it warm. A chuckle rises in her throat, but it leaves through that cut, an exit wound.
Another harsh line takes out a semi-circle of her skin. The slab of flesh falls into the sink, surrounded by wine-colored blood. A pool of it, enough to swim in. She giggles, using the knife to stab at it, sliding it closer to the drain. Her flesh, down in the sewers, where it belongs.
She slices up to her ear. She wonders if Van Gogh felt this giddy, when he did it. She leaves her ear on, though. With her blood on her hands, one thing is clear: she doesn’t want to die. She simply wants to be herself.
As the woman in the stall flushes, she cleaves the face from her forehead. In one second, it’s hanging on, obscuring the raw reality of her beneath. In the next, she is revealed. The face still hangs, attached to the skin beside her ear, but it’s shoved to the side like drapery. Or, perhaps, a curtain before a stage.
The stall door swings open. Her heart stops beating. She lines her dripping knife up with her thigh, obscuring it, and scoots down the length of the countertop. The woman appears with a smile.
She says, “Oh! You have such a lovely face.”
