This week I'm experimenting.  I created a short-story.  Only my second.  Let me know what you think.  And once again let me say how much I appreciate your faithfulness.  Humble thanks, gentle readers.

He knows crestfallen. He doesn't need a mirror to know that life is different now.  He is no longer one of the beloved whose pores secrete irresistibility.  Now he can’t look at someone and let the color of his eyes do all the work.  He is no longer enchanting—no longer pursued.  And he is not old.

At fourteen, the neighbor girl said one day, “Cam, this time next year, we won’t be together. I’m not pretty enough.”

“What?” he’d sputtered.  “Get out.”  But inside he knew.  He already knew that he was one of the lucky ones.  He could toss his head and the hair appeared to ripple and fall in place.  His teeth reflected orthodontic good fortune, and the empathic gods had spared his face—no acne constellations.  He possessed scarlet lips. 

Cameron no longer made eye contact with the neighbor girl, the prophetess.  She’d vanished.  And she knew to avoid him. She knew her place.

At twenty-two he is lean, sporting well-defined biceps that can be described as practically magnificent.  And sometimes in photos, if he’s in profile, you can’t tell, can’t see that one side of his face is destroyed, ugly with raised pink welts. Seared.

She’d heard about the accident—that awful car crash when he’d been drinking, the summer after graduation.  It seemed a miracle he didn’t have more injuries, that he hadn't been killed. He'd been in the hospital for weeks.  Everyone said he'd gone into seclusion.  He didn't go to college.  He didn't work  She hadn't seen him since that day at Baskin Robbins where she'd been scooping ice cream.  He'd winked at her when she handed him a cone of Rocky Road, a tanned, curvy cheerleader hanging all over him.

She’d known, even at seven, when they were inseperable, she wasn’t like him.  Whenever they played at the park, strangers would pat Cameron's head and murmur, “What a cutie you are.”  No one said things like that to her.  She’d tolerated being invisible.  He told her one day when they sat atop a tree they’d climbed as ten-year-olds, “Madeline, don’t tell my mom we climbed up here today. She’d be mad.  I’m not supposed to go this far.”

“I won’t.”  They'd high-fived. She remembered the sting on her palm and the sound of the leaves.

And now she’d be seeing him.  She’d agreed after all this time.  He’s suggested they meet in the park they played in as kids.  He lives with his parents now in the same neighborhood.  She lives across town, still single, still indiscernible.  “I really need to talk to you,” he’d explained.  “It’s important.”  She’d once imagined that voice telling her he loved her—that he’d come to his senses—that she’d been the best girlfriend he’d ever had, the most loyal.  For a year, that year before the prophetic utterance, they’d held hands and even kissed a few times.  Before the acknowledgment—before he admitted his beauty.

He sees her first, waiting on a rustic bench—head down, knees drawn to her chest, barefoot. He strides toward her, twigs breaking underfoot in the silent, empty park.

“Madeline?”

She raises her head and lifts her hand to wave, the oval face revealing no emotion.  She doesn’t stand.

“Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I’m curious.  I want to hear what you need to say to me.”  She brushes the hair from her face, her hair that is neither brown , nor blonde.  Not red.  The hair that Cameron once told her felt like silk, when he fingered the strands those years ago.  When she loved him.

“I don’t really know exactly what I want to say. I had a dream about you in the hospital—a dream I can’t shake, even after so long. You came to me and placed your forehead against mine and said, ‘I forgive you.’”

She takes him in now, the hair a darker gold, the good eye blue as cobalt, a lop-sided-smile, the scars cresting over one cheek like angry waves.  “How’d you know it was me?  In the dream.”

“I recognized your voice—and your smell.  You always had this really good smell.  I remember that from when we climbed that tree.  We sat on the same branch and I remember thinking how nice you smelled—kind of like I imagine light would smell.  It wasn’t perfume.  It was you.”  He moves his face toward her and breathes in.  She could touch the fleshy seams.  She wonders how they’d feel.

“What do you think it means, Cameron?  This dream.”

“I used to think the dream was like a punishment.  Maybe punishment from God.  This face I have because of what I did to you.  Of how I treated you.  Ignored you.  And then I thought that maybe it was a mercy  Maybe God's mercy. Thinking maybe you really did forgive me.”  He cries with no sound, tears leaking, rivulets zig-zagging down the caverns in his face, spilling onto folded hands.

Madeline leans her head against his, the perfect side, the untouched cheek.  He feels her breath.  Smells her.  Closes his eyes. “Maybe, Cameron, the dream is simply paradox.  You know, two opposite explanations that somehow co-exist.  Chagrin and consolation.  Sorrow and comfort."

“That year things changed,” she says, “I’d listen to Judy Garland sing Over The Rainbow.  Remember how my mom had all those old albums?  We still had a stereo, and I'd put the needle down on that particular song and listen over and over.  Sometimes the record would skip and Judy sang, skies are blue, blue, blue, blue, blue...until I'd lift up the needle.  I'd fantasize that someday we might find a way to be together." She pulls away from him.  “I was dumb and naïve.  And that song entirely melodramatic.”

“Not really, Madeline. I loved you too.  I did.  I just didn’t know what to do.”

“I know.  Sometimes beauty backfires.”

“It does,” he says, and swipes away tears from his smooth cheek.

“Are you finished, Cameron?  Did you say what you needed to say?”

“I guess so.”

She rises from the bench and points to a tree in the distance.  "That's the tree we climbed over there.  Did your mother ever find out?"  

"I think your mother told her.  I knew you wouldn't tell.  Funny how I thought I'd gotten away with it."

"I better go."  She leans down and kisses the bad cheek, the charred cheek.  She feels the healed ridges--indentations from that wounded beauty on her lips.