Scarface 1–5 – by Kylie Mirmohamadi
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
A woman has a scar that will fade, with time.
1. She takes a selfie in the bathroom mirror. The scar down the right side of her face looks fainter, less raised, than in real life.
2. She sends it to some people. They say she looks good, beautiful, strong. They tell her they love her.
3. Her husband says that with a scar she is sexier.
4. His friend’s girlfriend, in Mexico, says there is a dried rattlesnake remedy for healing skin.
5. On a walk she listens to ‘Perfect Skin’, and David Bowie sings to her that everything will be all right, tonight.
6. Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in a letter that a woman’s last love affair is with a doctor or a priest.
7. She reads an Italian folktale in which a crone dies because she insists that a carpenter plane her old face into youth again.
8. A woman smiles kindly. A man on the street seems apologetic, for having looked before he saw it.
9. If this had been the end, motherhood, and writing, and (like Carver’s late fragment) being loved, and loving, would have been enough.
10. In the café, on that first day, she cries when she speaks and they bring an offering, a green cake with a white swirl of icing, a red raspberry. The best day of your life, the waiter says.
11. Her tears fall on her changed face but they do not hurt it.
12. It’s like she’s dropped MDMA, she says. Everything looks beautiful.
13. A friend walks with her on the first walk, because she is frightened of the looking.
14. She looks back, after a while.
Scarface 2
1. She looks back after a while, but she grows tired of being looked at, all the time she is outside her house, by everyone.
2. She walks through the shopping centre and she thinks it’s like when you’re young and men look at you, all the time you are outside your house. But different too. These ones look away. Mostly.
3. She sees a pizza place called ‘Scarface’ and takes a photo with her phone. She sends it to her friend and to her husband saying that she might get a sponsorship deal.
4. It’s difficult to say ‘I’m sad’ when you’ve been given your life back.
5. She has heard that, after a certain age, a woman must choose between face and figure.
6. I don’t have ‘a look’ anymore, she says, just a scar.
7. There is defiance and there is fear. They are not the same thing.
8. She realises that she would be described as the woman with the scar on her face.
9. This isn’t a tragedy, but it’s not what she expected to be.
10. She dreams that she is travelling on a bus with the surgeon and he is holding her hand. Not as a lover would, but as if she is a child to be protected. In the dream his skin is warm and dry.
11. There is a creeping nerve-ending sensation in the scar sometimes, which is creepy and unnerving.
12. One week, two weeks, and it feels like a ridge.
13. She says that the scar is getting used to her. As if it was always there, and she grew around it.
14. Here it is, she says to the friend she meets unexpectedly on her morning walk, near the train station.
Scarface 3
1. One morning she looks out the big window and thinks I’m fucking alive.
2. She makes plans with friends, eventually.
3. She jokes that spending time with the most beautiful woman in their suburb is a good plan at this time when she is feeling insecure about her appearance.
4. On the third week she can touch it more confidently, as if it belongs to her.
5. It is closing to her, to the world.
6. It’s a time of change, her friend’s message tells her.
7. You come back, different.
8. I can see you looking at it, she says. I love it, he answers.
9. She wears a baseball cap indoors. I see now why teenage boys do it, she says.
10. (But not old white men.)
11. She gets to choose the eye contact. A shard of control.
12. Control through words too. Her notebook. This.
13. The photos on her phone, in sequence. They tell only one story.
14. This is not so tiny, her friend says. A turn of phrase.
Scarface 4
1. On the night the third week ended, the scar is in her dream.
2. Does it hurt, a man asks in the dream. This is someone else’s memory. From a book.
3. From surface to underworld. The place of story. Jung’s place.
4. It carries gold coins back with it.
5. Look, she says in the dream, like she does in real life. As if she needs to say it.
6. People recommend remedies, creams, lasers. But it’s healing, she thinks.
7. Her body goes deep at night. The deep sleep it needs to heal. The body knows, she says.
8. The mind too. It brings a dream. Gold coins from the underworld. She does not need them, this time.
9. She is writing something, something else, and the words enter it: sun, scar, skin, skein.
10. Look at my scar. This is the whole project of writing, she thinks.
11. Her friend tells her to keep writing about it.
12. A television image, seen as a child. A woman with a burned face. Always veiled.
13. The woman who will never say ‘look’.
14. It was so close to her eye. So close.
Scarface 5
1. She looks out. She looks at art.
2. Eyes, faces, with flowing things – paint, tears, blood, shadows – look like her own.
3. She looks out. She reads studies.
4. ‘Eye-tracking studies demonstrate that the eyes and perioral region are the most viewed structures, followed by the cheeks.’
5. Scars are not born, but rather become.
6. They bring with them the need for a story.
7. Asymmetrical but alive, she says. The tipping point.
8. On the screen, a book about feminist art. Bodies. A slash, a blur, down the face.
9. Lighting helps, she says. Making up.
10. She feels it still. Layers, the structure.
11. The word ‘Strataderm’.
12. She takes it to the gallery. Her gallery. She looks at Ste Sébastienne.
13. They look at her looking at art.
14. She buys a cap from the giftshop. ▼
Image: David Underland
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