Am I Beautiful?

by Jon Athan

It wasn’t love at first sight. It was more like arousal at first glance.

“Adam Mi… Miller,” Adam replied, starting out enthusiastic with his first name and ending up reluctant with his last name.

He wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough to communicate in English. Adam’s sentence sounded like a riddle—a verbal puzzle. It didn’t make any sense to him.

Adam sighed. He put his hand over his mouth, then he slid it down to his chin, and then it fell off his face.

He had opened Pandora’s Box through his act of adultery, and he couldn’t close it without self-destructing.

Tokyo never slept.

He was tired of taking his problems out on everyone else.

Miki understood English, but her mind worked in mysterious ways. In her head, ‘leave me alone’ translated to ‘please follow me,’ ‘no’ meant ‘try again later,’ and ‘I hate you’ translated to ‘I love you.’

Words weren’t working, so violent thoughts invaded Adam’s mind.

He didn’t want to harm her, but he felt like his back was against the wall. Emotional and intoxicated, violence seemed like his best and final option.

whimpered. She sighed shakily, then she said, “You took a shower that night. I... I went through your pockets. I found your wallet and–and your passport. Then I searched you online. Facebook, Twitter... Instagram, LinkedIn... Yahoo, Google... I found everything. I even found your friend. Dallas. Dallas Reynolds. I could see where you were going, where you were staying... because you posted it online. That’s how I knew about your business meetings. That’s how I found your hotel. That’s the truth.”

Joe Goldberg core

Like a drug abuser addicted to a placebo, she was addicted to a love that didn’t exist.

Living paycheck to paycheck... No... Dick to dick, right?

The whiskey stung her eyes, turning them bloodshot and blinding her for a moment. She felt like her eyes were being cooked on a stove while they were still in their sockets.

breaking her jaw and cutting her chin open down the middle vertically—a homemade cleft chin.

then he sawed into her right cheek with the broken bottle.

Brutal

The glass scraped her teeth as he cut her. It sounded like a fork being dragged across a ceramic plate.

Adam forced one of the blades into her oral vestibule—the gap between her teeth and cheek. Then he squeezed the handles and cut into her face. It was as easy as cutting paper.

Like Jesus Christ on the cross, she lay there with her arms outstretched.

She felt like she was dying because of the pain. Yet, at the same time, she felt like she was just starting to live. In many ways, the pain of death was similar to the pain of birth. Adam had taken everything from her. But he also gave her a purpose.

“Adam, I don’t mean to sound like an ex-girlfriend or a disappointed parent, but I don’t like your tone.

It was a strange sensation—to be haunted by a living person.

A jagged atrophic scar stretched across her left cheek, and another atrophic scar curved across her right cheek. The skin around the scars was red. The scars on the bridge of her nose and forehead were light but noticeable.

The world rejected her, turning her into an outcast. Instead of accepting her disfigurements, society asked her to consider plastic surgery to reconstruct her past beauty.

Instead of comforting her after the traumatizing attack, society blamed her for welcoming a violent man into her home. She was sick and tired of society.

Tears spilled down her scarred cheeks. She cried, but she didn’t make a sound. The quietest cries were often the most pained.

Due to its status as one of the safest countries in the world, it wasn’t uncommon to see children waiting by themselves after school in Japan. Statistics often lulled people into a false sense of security.

At a certain age, children learned to lie to protect themselves. But until then, they were known for being brutally honest.

The sharp blades cut her throat open from ear to ear with a single snip.

Mei saw the bloody shears moving away from her before the pain even registered. It felt like a pinch at first, then it stung. The wound got hotter and hotter—and hotter.

Mei squirmed like a turtle on its back.

She was a six-year-old girl. She had seen people punch each other in her favorite anime shows, but cartoon violence couldn’t prepare her for reality.

Her vision blurred because of her tears and her traumatic loss of blood,

“Monsters are real. They’re not like the monsters you read about in your books or see in the movies. They’re like you and me—man and woman, adult and child, flesh and bone. I knew a monster once. I met him when I was a… princess… back when I was the most beautiful girl in the world.”

It was funny how things worked sometimes. One person’s pain could bring another person unimaginable happiness.

He was hopeless and helpless, pushed into the void between life and death.

She had planned on only targeting young girls, but she took what she could get. Patterns led to capture anyway.

She even spotted a peculiar woman in a homemade hazmat suit—face shielded by a cut plastic milk container, body covered in black garbage bags, yellow rubber gloves on her hands.

Her ego died with her beauty.

Miki knitted her eyebrows at him

You should know something about me. You see, if you did try that on me—fuck me and then leave me—I’m the type of girl that would keep coming for you. And if you did anything to hurt me, I’m the type of girl that would chase you across the world to get even. I guess you could call me an asshole or a bitch.”

An expression of shell-shock—pure fear and awe and devastation—was written on his face, as if he believed the fresh sausage on his plate were made from the human flesh of his loved ones.

Amber had already managed to calm her by whispering candied words into her ears and bouncing her gently in her arms.

The truth often sent criminals to prison, but it also set people free from their physical and mental shackles.

‘Am I beautiful?’ He saw those words every time he closed his eyes, as if they were tattooed to his inner eyelids—scarred on his retinas.

Adam frowned as he watched his wife. He could see he was harming his family with his erratic, obsessive behavior. He was becoming their bogeyman.

A mother’s wrath was not to be underestimated.

She couldn’t fight Miki while restrained to the chair. She had to find the intruder’s sympathy.

Her blood was a shade darker than her natural red hair.

Miki said, “Oh, look. We have some toys for Riley.” She picked up the amputated finger and ear from the floor, then she grabbed the eyebrows from Amber’s lap. She put the human pieces on Riley’s tray.

LOL