"Losing Face" Chapter 11: The End

I woke up full of vertigo. I hated when they drugged me. It always took forever to remember how to move, how my arms and legs worked. What was real, and what wasn’t. Being here, now, in a truck leaning against Eric and drooling on him, that wasn’t real.

         “Eric?” He glanced down at me, and then quickly back up.

         “Hi, Gail.” I pushed myself upright and looked around. It was dark, but that never bothered me. House with peeling paint, dogs barking. Eric, beside me, failing at looking calm and failing at not staring.

         “Where are we?” He looked at me. Unease crossed his face, and he looked away again.

         “Uh. My house. I can’t—we can’t stay here, but I don’t know where to go. I couldn’t leave you there. I couldn’t leave you with them.” I frowned, but something wrong popped in my jaw. Eric had the windows down, and I felt the air—cold, the way water can feel if it’s hot enough—on my skin. I looked down at my arms and saw more of my skin exposed than I’d ever seen before. It looked some someone had intentionally torn away the fleshy shell, like they wanted to break me open. I traced the exposed section of jaw and the hairline crack up my face. Beside me, I felt Eric tense, to help me if I freaked out, or because he was freaking out. Maybe both.

         “Where are the boys?” I asked. It took him a moment to respond. He was staring at my mouth.

         “They’re—their friend’s house. They’re fine. You’re going to be fine,” he said.

         “I don’t think I’m going to be fine.” Specks of black dotted my legs when I spoke. I fumbled for the door handle and dropped out of the truck.

         “Gail!” Eric hurried around to me. “Gail, we can’t stay here. We need go. They’re going to come; the cops are going to come. They can’t see you. They can’t take you back. They can’t see what’s wrong—why can’t they see what’s wrong?” He held me steady. I could tell he was trying to avoid my skin, but my arms were entirely exposed, broken open—he couldn’t help but touch the oozing skin. I felt nothing on my broken shell, but his touch on my real flesh felt right.

         “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m exactly like I’m supposed to be. Give or take a couple of decades.” He didn’t understand. I tapped my shadowy flesh.

         “This is me,” I said. “This is what I am. They can’t see it—who can blame them?”

         “What are you?” His whisper made me smile, until the other half of my jaw sloughed off onto my chest.

         “I’m a cuckoo bird. I’m a baby. I’m—a butterfly.” I clawed the chunk of human shell off my chest and held it out to Eric. He drew back. “This is my cocoon.”

         “That’s your skin!” I had him cornered against the truck.

         “No. It was. It could have been, could have kept me safe and human, given me a human life. But it broke. Now I’m too gone to be human and too human to want to go.” He shook his head, as if that would make me go away. I spoke quickly, urgently. “Eric, please. Please, listen to me. There are lions, sharks, things that eat other things, even people, sometimes. Things eat meat and water. Everything eats something. I eat fear.” His fear was a sour buffet. Eric couldn’t fear me. I couldn’t let him fear me.

         “So, so we spend years, decades, growing up, blending in. Spreading stories, providing the fodder for fear. Twisting people, and we don’t even realize it. People like us; people want us to like them. We need them to like us, and to listen to us. Because only those who know about us can see us, really see us, and we feast on those who know. Even if they don’t understand. We can grow our crops, spread the tales and, and urban myths, and then, after we live a full, human life—we grow up.” I hadn’t lived a full life. This body wasn’t even thirty and it was falling apart. I couldn’t save it. “I’m growing up. That’s all, Eric.”

         “And nobody can see this,” he said. I shrugged. He stared at the way my shoulders moved. Undulated, was the word.

         “People can’t. Would you, if you didn’t have to? You can paint their faces with my blood and they wouldn’t even blink. I know. People can’t have black blood.”

         “I can see it.”

         “You can. People,” I said, “can’t.” I held out a hand to him, but he pulled away, against the truck. Black stains covered my hand. “We’re monsters. But we can be monsters together. I can keep it together, for you. I’ll stay as human as I can as long as I can, as long as you stay human, or your kids.”

         “Matt and Joe. What did you—” He was going to punch me, shatter me. If he did that, I couldn’t finish this conversation.

         “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I didn’t have to. They have full lives ahead of them, if accident or malice doesn’t get them, if their shells don’t break like this.” Eric’s eyes were black, now, gleaming in the dark. I saw his disgust, saw him imagining his sons like me, as me. “I’m telling you. I can keep it together. We can be one big, macabre family. All the monsters.” He wouldn’t take my hand.

         “Angela is coming,” Eric said. “I can’t. She gave me my boys.”

         “She left you,” I said. If I still had teeth, they’d be gritted. “You and the boys left, and she was able to think and reason without you. She realized that she needed to go, get out, and she ran away as far as she could without getting a passport. You don’t need her. You needed her when you made the boys, to explain, suddenly, a man with kids. You didn’t even know you did it, made them, and your own human nature, fake human nature, needed an explanation. So, you found her.” I waited for him to say something, but he had no words.

         “I bet you never met her parents. Matt and Joe don’t have grandparents, and they don’t think to question it.” I stepped in close, and Eric flattened himself back against the truck rather than touch me. “I bet her family looked for her, after you took her. But why would she ever look for herself as a missing person? Angela wasn’t missing. Not when she was with you.” Eric was shaking his head, again. I made myself pull back. “But you don’t need to live like that, with me. You don’t need to lie and twist everything up—and you do. We can’t help it. Be with me. Be with me now, and then—later.” He was trembling.

         “I need Angela,” he said. His devotion to his own illusion. She was never coming back, and I couldn’t stay human. The only reason to try was saying no. We could have loved, before we lost the idea of love behind our hunger. My inhumanity was fueling his, weakening his shell, as his presence weakened my skin over the months. Without me, without accidents that crushed him and exposed the monster, Eric could live, maybe, a good sixty years. Lived a happy, human life, and then come to me. Now, his face was cracking open, the crevices closing and opening with his heavy breaths.

           He was beautiful. I stepped closer, against him, and pressed what had been my face to his lips. When I pulled back, dark fluid coated his face.

         “Please, Eric.” His fingers caught in my hair. His shark eyes didn’t see me.

         “Angela,” he said. I dug my fraying fingers into the cracks in his face, and slammed his head against the truck.

          This wasn’t my best work. I know. I was in a hurry. But I could count on you to lose yourself in it, to miss that Eric’s handwriting wasn’t Eric’s, that it’s mine. We could have loved. We could have been happy. Not one couple in a century gets that, and monsters never do. So, I think that not one person will suffer as greatly as you.

           Angela’s nose was full of sweet decay like rotted inkberries. She dropped the papers. Someone laughed; something stood in the corner. It was hard to see, but Angela felt its hatred on her. The creature that once might have been a person had no face, but Angela knew it smiled. It lifted one long, long arm, and pointed. Angela turned.

           Reunited lovers devour each other with their eyes. It had been thirteen years; Eric made do without eyes.

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