1Her tongue lay heavy in her mouth, laboring to form the words that might turn his eyes away from her. Fully clothed, she felt naked beneath his gaze that raked with reckless abandon against her skin. One careless glance might disembowel her and all her secrets, her fears and trepidation would fill that file with her name printed neatly on the tab. One sidelong, narrowed gaze would rend the flesh from her bones and expose the husk of a heart encased within her rib cage. Her hands fluttered aimlessly in an attempt to shield her exposed flesh. It was impossible to decide which to cover first: the daily ridicule at work, the name calling when they thought she couldn't hear, or the disapproval in her father's eyes. Each scar bore a significance akin to tattoos. The man behind the desk did not seem to share her opinion and only scratched at length across his notepad, sealing her fate at the psychiatric hospital. She could have survived the interrogation if it weren't for his eyes roving the nooks and crannies of her anatomy, as if to choose the choicest cut of meat.
Her only solace was in knowing there were also scars that they would never find, only because they were focused on the areas of her anatomy that boasted easy access to a blood vessel and promised the most damage. These scars, though, were her favorite.
The bottoms of her heels, skinned and soaked in alcohol to prevent infection.
The folds of her body that would never see the sun and escaped the eyes of her less attentive lovers.
The palms of her hands: the scars mimicking new life lines while dissecting others.
Burns along her stomach from matches that resembled only birthmarks when completely healed.
The least favorite among these was her Crown of Thorns, several dozen superficial cuts along her scalp hidden beneath her hair. She imagined if her head was shaved it would look like a pale, silvery spider web embossed against her skin.
The slack jawed, dim witted man in the sweater vest continued his incessant drawl about the hospital and its promise to cure her ailments but the words only sailed haphazardly past her ears. His eyes held her captive and it caused frigid fingertips to trail listlessly along her spine until every fine hair at the nape of her neck stood on end. Her mind roamed back to the night she crowned herself. A similar chair cradled a slightly more petite version of herself: she had starved herself for days just to be able to fit into the skin-tight little black dress but she might as well have been wearing nothing at all. All the eyes in the room seemed to watch her fidget, lapping at the gap of naked skin left uncovered at the small of her back where her dress remained open. Her breasts screamed in agony in a bra fastened too tight in order to force their cleavage to swell against the low neckline. Both arms and legs were sun kissed and dusted with a fair amount of freckles, the few scars she had at the time meticulously covered with tattoo concealer. It was obvious this was her first real date in a nice restaurant, in nice clothes, and with a nice man, who was 45 minutes late. It was obvious to everyone save her that she had been stood up.
The waiter returned for the umpteenth time to refill her water, though regrettably not enough to drown her. The steak knife to her left promised a very dramatic exit while the fork and spoon conspired a slower, more painful death that would be on every news channel in the morning. There were tears in her eyes by the time she worked up the courage to stand and begin the agonizing walk through the restaurant. If a gawking pair of eyes could pierce flesh she would have been riddled with holes by the time she made it three steps. The chandelier twinkled and gave her a conspiratorial wink as she passed beneath its grandeur, though it failed to end her walk of shame. Again, the eyes. All eyes were on her now and she felt as if she were being flayed alive.
By the time she made it home, a high-heel in each hand, her tears had completely washed her make up away. She collapsed against her bathroom floor and picked apart the plastic of her razor, once an innocent tool of vanity, and pried the thin blade loose. She had hoped to be rocking gently in someone's arms tonight and give her neighbors something else to gossip about. To wake up a few hours later and take pleasure in kicking him out of her bed. Instead she spent the next several hours slicing into her scalp, creating hash marks beneath her hair until blood turned her curls into knots that dried and stuck to the tiles beneath her. There was no pain, which made it that much worse. This was all for nothing. Her own form of punishment for being the superficial, desperate female stereotype. Pain, like pleasure, was a release that she purposefully denied herself now, until she grew so exhausted that she fell into the deepest sleep.