Visage

By Young Han Lester

A spotlight opens on SPEAKER. Their entire face is covered with a mask of bandages, and they wear drab, grey clothes.

I woke up on the day It happened, feeling grimy and frustrated. It was five in the morning on a Monday, and I had a day of office work and mind-numbing drudgery to look forward to. I was up earlier than I wanted to be, and I would be up earlier than I would want to be every morning for the next four days, my own terms and wants shunted aside to fill the expectations of some other being who would assume my identity for the next 13 hours, leaving me dead and lifeless.

As I resigned myself to this knowledge, as I do every Monday morning, I felt a strange sensation overtake me. Something about this morning was different. Something had happened in the night to make this morning terrifying. Something wasn’t right.

Tentatively I tried to reassure myself, downplaying this nervous sensation as the depressing combination of annoyance and an overactive imagination. Instead, I began to feel filthy and claustrophobic, as if I was being suffocated in slime. As seconds passed this feeling accelerated quickly, picking me up in its tailwind and dragging me careening until I crashed into full-on panic.

Quickly I scrambled out of bed, clawing my bed sheets to the side and bruising my leg against the nightstand. The swiftness of my anxiousness quickly outpaced reason as I burst into the bathroom and leapt into the shower, turning the water as hot as it would go and not even bothering to take off my clothes as I scrubbed away at myself, trying to wash off what felt like hundreds of millions of pounds of sludge on every inch of my skin.

I stayed there, washing in vain until my skin was raw and the water ran cold. Howling out in protest to the unpleasant, icy water I turned the shower off and grabbed the scratchiest towel I could find in the room. It too, proved useless as I tried to use it to erode the muck from my flesh. In anguish, I threw it at the mirror in front of me, before I let out a gasp.

The towel had rubbed some fog off of the mirror, and in it I saw what was making me feel so trapped and disgusting. My face was not my own. The individual features were all familiar, and it could have easily been the face of my clone or twin, but its parts did not add up to that which was I. Some je ne sais quoi that I had always unwittingly associated with myself and with my identity was gone, and worst of all it was replaced by that of a stranger.

Hate. I could tell that I hated the stranger, though I had no reason to. They had stolen my face. They had stolen my soul. They had stolen me. I couldn’t let them do that. I had to eradicate their influence and free myself from them.

My hands shaking, I opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror slightly, only enough to let my hand through, as I wanted to look the stranger in the eye to make sure they didn’t run away, only to return later and torment me further. My fingers groped clumsily before finally they found my shaving razor.

It was not long before the stranger was gone from me, and my face was reclaimed. It is a new face that I wear now, one of cloth and scabs, that rustles gently when I turn my head. It is a new face, but I know that it is mine.