Scarred For Life

“Trying to kill invisible flies with your razor again, Neo?”

“Very funny,” I say. “But I have no time for this, mom. I’m off to school, tattered legs and all.”

I sling my backpack over one shoulder so that it swings from me like a monkey, and head out wishing the universe hadn’t chosen this morning to maim my legs. Never a worse time to have banished every pair of jeans I own to the portal of water and bubbles known as the washer.

Every morning . . .

Every morning I will wake up with a new scar, a scar that wasn’t there before. But they aren’t my scars, no. They belong to someone else. I only discovered all of this yesterday, when I was struck dead by a car.

#

School is in the ground. My teachers are skeletons and my grades are how many mystic scars I can obtain. The more branded scars, the less decay. I am dead, but I live so, in some twisted sense, I guess I’m lucky.

I walk out the door of my illusionary home housing my illusionary mother and am greeted by reality. Crusty brown cliffs squeeze me on all sides, worms use my path as their promenade and I’m the one who has to avoid them. Never know whose pet you might step on down here.

“Neo, new scar?”

“Lex. Yeah, and it’s a long one,” I inform my newest confidant, indicating the vertical laceration running from the back of my knee to my ankle. It’s like someone attempted to chop my calf in half. Thank God I don’t have to feel the pain as well as suffer the mark.

“Wow!” Lex admires my cut, bending down to run a finger over it. A gust of sulfur gushes from the nearest wall, almost drowning out her words and suffocating me with the stink of rotten egg. “Wish mine was as impressive,” Lex says, straightening up. “I’ve only got a scrapped knee, must have belonged to a toddler.”

Lex is the only other girl I know here and although I can tell by her body that she can’t have been here much longer than I have, she is well adjusted to her new way of life. She’s my soul mate and polar opposite. It even shows in her looks because if I am the poster child of death, then she is the hallmark of life. Her skin is brown earth just like the land we’re in, but her hair is sunshine, something I can only see from the windows of my illusionary home. Her appearance, sound, and smell are all home, my real home, a place I can never return to, thus she keeps me grounded.

School is a lesson in etiquette: no scrabbles with our fragile forms, no disrespect of others gravesites—which translates to stay out of other’s yards to me—no forgetting our mission. As if we could.

Walking home should have been an unceremonious occasion, just another day’s end, back home to live out my temporary but hopefully soon-to-be-permanent fake existence. I’m not sure how illusion mother looks so much, no exactly, like the mother I remember. Perhaps because someone here probed my mind and death is nothing more than an upgraded science fiction convention. If only.

“What is that?” Lex cuts into my thoughts.

A rock stands in our path, perfectly round and clover green against the earthen soil. Without a hitch, it takes to the air.

Lex screams, and at first, I can’t figure out why. Everything is happening so fast. Then I see it.

The stone is burrowing into Lex’s chest cavity, planting itself there like a maggot in carrion until only its head remains. Lex’s new jewel begins to glow and with the stone’s brilliance, the light leaves Lex’s eyes. A second or two later Lex is on the ground, dead.

Others walk past, other lost souls, but I don’t see them, and they don’t see me.

This is what happens.

This is what will happen to me if I don’t wind up Frankenstein’s monster, a patchwork of various wounds, a clipboard for people’s unwanted possessions . . . I’ll die all over again.

I tread on to my front door.

Inside I go, silently praying that I will wake with another memento of someone else’s pain, that my scars will show I live.

This is my life in purgatory.