hatchet face
blood, aromatherapy, and a quick word on the family.
I have a dream that my sibling comes back and we get into a fight like we’re little kids again and I win. It will happen naturally— in a nostalgic mood, I’ll say do you remember how we used to go at it? and they’ll laugh and say yeah, I remember, I remember all the black eyes and nosebleeds. It’ll be funny. We’ll be joking. Could you ever fully clean the corner where I made you cry blood? they’ll say, and I’ll say no because I haven’t, I never did, it’s still there, my blood is still stuck under the floorboards of the room we once shared. There is nothing I can do about it except rip up the flooring. My blood will outlast me in this house.
Still reminiscing, we’ll bring up all the other injuries we dealt each other. Our parents won’t be in the room, so it’ll be okay. They’ll never know the extent of it and they don’t need to. Remember when you tackled me in that motel parking lot and I had to go to school picture day the next week with a big, scabbing bruise on my cheek? Remember when you bit me so hard that it scarred? Remember when you were in your occult phase and you would carve protection symbols into my ribs with my pocket knife and I let you do it? We’re having fun. We’re laughing. We’re placing bets on who would win if we fought again— they’ll say I’m weak because I am, and they always used to win because they were older and bigger, but I’ve caught up in recent years and I lost what little self preservation I had. They’re taller by just over an inch and stronger, but I’m a massive cunt. It’ll be anyone’s game.
They won’t be going anywhere or doing anything, in the city for no particular reason except to see me and maybe our parents. We’ll have nothing to do. We’ll be bored. They’ll say, well, let’s try it out, why don’t we? and I’ll say you crazy sonnabitch, let’s do it. We will move to the patch of grass in the backyard, because our room isn’t decorated the way it used to be and we are trying to avoid any accidental damage. It’ll be cold out. It’ll probably be dark, too. And at first, it’ll still be funny— the blows we’ll trade will be light. Maybe we’ll each get a couple good hits in, something to the stomach and maybe someone’s hair gets pulled and maybe there’s a bit of blood, nothing major.
Then it won’t be funny anymore. It really, really won’t be funny. We’ll get closer, grappling range, starting to play dirtier. Clothes are getting torn at. Someone will get kneed in the groin. We’ll fall to the ground and they’ll try to use their bulk to pin me, the same way they always did when we were teenagers, but I’ll know better— I’ll stay compact and I’ll kick and I’m flexible, flexible enough to bite their face or arms if they try holding me down. I hate the way they smell these days. Every single product they use is scented, body washes and lotions and makeup and vapes, and it makes them reek like a tween girl’s bedroom. When I get out of their hold I’ll flip us over and rub them into the wet dirt so they stop smelling like a nice person and start smelling like themself again. They’ll laugh at that, mostly because they’re not used to losing and they won’t like the position I’ve put them in, and they’ll try to flip us again. I’ll put their hands on my throat, though, so they can’t unless they want their airway cut off. It’s fair play and they know it. When I was nine, they choked me so hard during a fight that I passed out, so I get to do it to them now. We’re rolling and snapping teeth at each other. All their nice clothes will get fucked up and I’ll laugh, too. That’s what you get. We’ll have gotten dangerously near to the concrete of the patio by then.
That’s when I’ll grab them by the hair, lift up their head, and smash their face into the stone. If they don’t yield from that, then I’ll do it again. Is that cruel? I don’t care. You should’ve believed me when I told you I’m a massive cunt. I’m just balancing out the scales— this is for that time our parents left us at alone for days and you broke my nose and we had to set it into place by ourselves and we never told anybody, not even in present times where we won’t get in trouble, not even when we’re joking about how much we used to fight. I am my own karma. And I’ll win. At the end of it, we’ll both be muddy and disgusting and covered in grass stains, but only one of us will win and it’s going to be me. It has to be.
I don’t know why I bother thinking about it. I don’t know why it plays out behind my eyelids when I’m asleep. Nothing will come of it— it solves nothing, not that there’s anything needing to be solved. It’ll probably make things worse, actually. And we love each other. Aside from the fighting and the damage and the blood, we were always perfectly nice and respectful to each other. The purpose of cruelty was always just to start a fight, and after that, we were a united force once again.
But here I am, still thinking about it. Still wanting to win.
My mother left on Monday. She’ll be back because she always comes back, no matter how much time I spent kneeling beneath the window as a child, wishing on every single star I could that something would happen and she would be gone forever. Not dead, just gone, vanishing into the night with all of her things. I didn’t love her, I didn’t like her, and I couldn’t muster up enough strong emotion to make myself hate her, so I was left with a festering ambivalance. Irritation, maybe. Life is just less painful when she isn’t here. In her current absence, my father and I spend our spare time beating back the tides of her debris— her shoes go back to wherever they crawled out from, her empty glasses get put in the dishwasher, her laundry is placed inside her closet, her paper trails and documents and unanswered mail collected into a stack and moved out of the way. Her influence fades. My skin begins to clear up and my joint pain goes down two full levels. My father has the energy to leave the house again. Things are good.
Late at night, I ruminate over the question of the future, imagining myself as Thomas touching the wounds of Christ. I stick my fingers into Death. If she was in a car accident or if something happened to her plane, how long would my father and I be able to last? Her income is what keeps us afloat. This city is not a cheap place to live. We took out life insurance on her a year or so ago— although not particularly funny, it’s become a running joke between us that one of us will kill her for the insurance money. What’s easier, pillows or poisoning? All of her things would need to be dealt with, the clothes and shoes and butter dishes and neverending piles of bullshit she refuses to get rid of. We’d still be getting packages from her online shopping sprees for months after she passed. There would have to be some sort of funeral or memorial service where I would need to say a few words, too, and something would need to be done with the body. Death is never a tidy business for the living.
It’s fine, though. It doesn’t matter. I only start writing her eulogy when she’s here, but she’s not, so I don’t even think about it. I scrub out her coffee machine— it’s her coffee machine, nobody else but her uses it, nobody else leaves a trail of scattered coffee grounds and paper towels around the kitchen to collect mold— so I can think about it even less. She doesn’t take care of it when she’s here, so it’s not like it’s unusual for me to be doing that, but right now I can pretend I’m packing the machine away for good. It rots when she’s home and it rots when she leaves. There is no reprieve from the rot.
You know, there is no smell on this planet that I hate more than stale coffee. It makes me nauseous. I don’t know if hating the smell of stale coffee or my mother smelling like stale coffee came first, but it doesn’t matter. When I was little and we were always in the car, driving up and down the coast, I said I think the smell is making me sick and she told me well, you can’t always get what you want. You have to take other people into consideration. The statement was true but it wasn’t kind, and it certainly didn’t stop me from throwing up or her from pouring a little coffee into the footwell of my seat because you just need to get used to it and toughen up. I learned the word “entitled” very quickly as a child because I was told I wasn’t entitled to feeling comfortable. And for what it’s worth, I did suck it up. I slept in all the rotting motels and I didn’t complain when she stopped letting me eat and I don’t fight back when I ask a question and she starts yelling.
Tonight, I’ll make brownies. I’ll eat a dinner that has carbohydrates and grains and oxalates and a bit of sugar and calories in it and nobody will stop me, and then I’ll go downstairs in the middle of the night and make brownies and eat as many of them as I like. I cleaned everything up, I scrubbed the house the day after she left, so the stale coffee will be hidden by chocolate and sugar and the potato chips my father bought for us.
Slowly, the house will become inhabitable again. All of her things are stored away in closets and cabinets so we won’t have to be reminded of her until she gets back.
Touching my face in the mirror, touching my nose and eyes and mouth, pushing my fingers into the flesh of my cheekbones, pressing my fingers over the hairs of my eyebrows, smoothing a palm up from my chin to where my jaw and my ear connect. I would touch my brain if I could reach it. When I was little and the features of my face hadn’t solidified yet, people said I looked like my mother, who gave her coloring and long neck and even proportions to me. Nobody’s said that in a long time. I am touching the shape of my face in the mirror, the shape of my face which is separate from all the other features on my face because it comes from somewhere else.
The older I get, the more I look like my father. I didn’t think I looked this much like him until I started taking form. It was you have your father’s eye shape until it was you have your father’s eye shape and nose, then you have his eyebrows and you have his jaw and you have his cheekbones and you have his mouth, too. Everything but the shape of my face is his, but I’m not even sure of that— they had to pull him out of his mother with forceps and the shape of his head got forcibly elongated. Maybe he would’ve had my face if there were no complications with his birth. Appraising myself, I turn my head side to side. I haven’t fully grown into my features yet. I’ll be handsome when I grow up. There’s still some baby fat clinging to me, softening the harshness under the surface. My grandmother used to call me hatchet face. She must have seen it coming, even with all my blondness and plumpness in the way. The baby fat will go eventually— both my parents have strong cheekbones, especially my father, so it’s only a matter of time until I’m left with my father’s face in the mirror. One day the rest of my childhood will slough off me and only he will remain.
Touching my face in the mirror, I am thinking that this could be a horror film. There is an undeniable element of terror to knowing that one day, without being able to stop it or slow it, you will slowly transform into a person who was there before you. It’s not like I wasn’t already expecting it. We all saw it coming. We think the same and we move the same and we talk the same and we feel the same about all of it. It’s always been like this.
When I was little, I used to wish I had his dark hair and eyes so I’d look less like hers and more like his. I’m older now and I see things differently. Maybe that’s because I’m looking through his eyes. There are no other eyes for me to look through. There are parts of me he’ll never be able to touch, tiny intangible pieces of selfhood that I hold and he doesn’t and he hates it, but it doesn’t matter much. I don’t need dark features to be one of his.
I am touching his hatchet face in the mirror. It’s just my cross to bear, I guess. We all saw it coming.