The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

The Birthmark

There’s a birthmark on my face. It is light brown and sits below my left eye where a soft space of white skin should have been between my nose and my left ear. I was born with it. I’ve had little choice but to tolerate it. I wanted plastic surgery, but I haven’t been able to afford it. Removing the birthmark would take a lot of money, and I just don’t have that kind of cash. My mother spends all of her disability checks on vodka, and my father took off when I was an infant, because he knew that a son with such a birthmark would be so challenged in life that he thought my mother and me would be a colossal waste of time if he stayed and did his due duty as a parent. I am left with my mother who refuses to stay sober and a pet cat that I picked up from the street and does nothing but bite and scratch when I try to touch him. I cook my mother’s meals from whatever food stamps she gets and buying cat food is just too expensive for us. The cat simply pretends that he is still a stray, and he eats whatever we give him. Not to change the subject, but my cat is too thin, scraggly, and generally maladjusted for our humble home. I have no idea what to do with him.I go to the local high school where my birthmark is seen as my most promising feature. I say this, because the students see nothing but my birthmark, and I am bullied for having such a stain on my face. The girls laugh when they pass me – usually the pretty girls – and the ugly ones pretend I don’t even exist. It’s hard to live on the lower rungs of the world, but most of the teachers I talk to always say that it is on account of my birthmark. They then ridicule me when I don’t do my homework, or I screw things up when they call on me in class. Yet I still have to attend the high school, as it is the only school in our rural area, and my mother and I are stuck in this worthless excuse of a town. Getting government money here is seen as treason. ‘Sucking from the government tit,’ they would say, even though I avoid such remarks as best as I can.

I do remember, though, when there was just a scant but fading ray of hope that appeared on the horizon. It came from one of the women in my History class. She was the daughter of one of my English teachers at the High School. On one hot afternoon, she pulled me to the side of the locker room hallway so that she couldn’t be seen with me. She had a pair of jeans on, and she rolled up her jeans at the leg to show me that she too had a birthmark. Hers was bright pink, and she had learned to hide it all of these years. I was amazed that someone had the same problem I had, although hers was a tame birthmark, considering that she cleverly hid it by wearing long pants to school every day of the week. Her father, the English teacher, had bankrolled enough money to pay for the removal of that fat, bright pink birthmark, and she said in the jolt of hot whispers that perhaps her father could have mine removed too.

At first, I didn’t believe her. I thought she was just guilty of not suffering the same fate as mine. But when she invited me over to her house that night around nine, I knew then that she did have some compassion for a young man like me with a birthmark, and that we should definitely team up to fight the horrendous disease that both of us had.

She insisted that I come over to her place in a very nice, landscaped part of town. When I rang her doorbell, she quickly pulled me in.

“Did anyone see you?” she asked worriedly.

“No. There’s no one out here but me.”

“We have to keep this a secret,” she said, “but there are several people in the school with birthmarks like us. Like me, they’re able to hide it. But you – you have no choice but to have it where everyone and their mothers can see it.”

“So you feel sorry for me? Is that it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said plainly, “but I want to help.”

I followed her into the kitchen of their spacious and well-appointed home. Her father sat at a round kitchen table and drank a light beer.

“So this is the young man, finally,” he said with a face as serious as stone.

“Yes, Dad. This is he.”

“Good.”

They fed me some of their leftovers and watched me as I ate.

“That is one dismal location for a birthmark,” he said. “How you’ve survived so far amazes me, but I find myself in a position to help you. We have a small clandestine club of students with birthmarks. All of their marks are hidden by their clothes, but you definitely need plastic surgery to remove yours. We meet in private on the weekends. Would you like to join our group?”

“I guess. Why not? It’s not like I can remove the damned thing on my own.”

“Well,” said the English teacher, “we’ve been taking collections at our meetings. These are just small donations, and while I’m intent on spending it for plastic surgery on my daughter, my daughter has since refused. She wants to help people like you instead. You should be the first one to go, since you are in the most danger. From what I hear too, they’re about to send you to a special school, just to protect you from the other students and teachers. We want you to try the surgery first. You are in incredible danger – not only from the students, but also the police who would rather see you in jail for having the birthmark. Do you get where I’m coming from with this?”

“I think so.”

“Good,” he said. “My daughter is such a wonderful and giving person that she wants you to go first. And because of her wonderfulness and her simple, innocent nature, I have become a better man because of it. It is our intention to save birth-marked people – one at a time. And we want you to be the first, just to see if plastic surgery helps.”

“I think it would,” I said excitedly.

After finishing the leftovers, I was filled with rapture, because there was hope for my birthmark. I wanted it removed, and they must have witnessed how pitiful I was with the birthmark on me.

His young daughter drove me into the city a couple of days later. It was a two-hour drive, and even though she was as sweet as a virgin lamb, I knew that deep-down she couldn’t stand looking at me for very long. She kept her eyes on the road and wouldn’t look at me straight in the face. I did not blame her. My face is too disgusting for anyone, let alone a young woman, to look at. So we remained quiet in the car, both of us hoping that a plastic surgeon in the city could take care of my disfigurement.

“God, that thing is ugly,” said the surgeon when we arrived in his office.

The waiting room was full of similarly disfigured people, but from what the young daughter understood, the surgeon was well known for conducting back-alley abortions, delivering babies of illegal immigrants who couldn’t afford to be seen in the hospitals, and also for taking care of stray pets just like my own cat. He was willing to help, and so that last ray of hope on the horizon still beamed. I was instantly uplifted by his willingness, and so we waited there, all of us ashamed by the birthmark that sat so prominently on my face. Some of his patients in the waiting room refused to sit near me. Some of them even left, but this did not hinder the surgeon. After two hours of waiting, he let us in.

He injected some anesthetic where the birthmark was and then used a scalpel to cut it from my face. Blood spilled from my face in puddles, but he hung onto the scalpel bravely and cut away as much as he could. After he finished, he patched up my face with gauze and nylon surgical tape.

On the way back home, the young daughter told me to stay out of sight for a few days until the ghastly thing healed. Her father would cover for me, telling my teachers that I had gone home sick. Not that it really mattered to my teachers anyway, but I had never been so happy before. The sunny days were brighter, and the people in this small country town looked more vibrant. The stores that I used to avoid were more welcoming, and my mother even stayed sober for one whole day when she saw that I had dealt with the curse on my face. She even smiled a few times. I turned a corner. No longer would I be bullied or harassed by students and townsfolk alike. I wanted to fit in, and there was a unique possibility that this would happen, now that I had been cured of the disease.

I waited for a few days before removing the bandages. I went over to the young daughter’s house so that she could behold my new face first. We went into the bathroom upstairs in her house, and carefully she peeled off the tape and removed the bandages. She took one look at the result of the surgery, and she immediately ran from the bathroom weeping. I looked at myself in her bathroom window. While most of the flagrant coloring of the birthmark had been lightened, most of it still sat on my ugly face as though nothing had been removed at all. The plastic surgery attempt had failed. I would still be bullied at school, and my father would still be missing, and my mother would still suck down her many bottles of vodka. I still looked like a disgrace. And yet I still had to go to school the next day. So, I went reluctantly.

When I first walked into the school hallway from the large entrance, I was immediately surrounded by a group of boys who all seemed to be saying the same thing, “once a birthmark, always a birthmark.” They threw me to the ground and kicked my face in a few times. They landed blows to my skinny body and then went running off before a teacher could stop them. But even the teacher grabbed me off the floor by my collar and threw me into my first period class. When he pushed me into the classroom, my face starting to swell. With the birthmark prominently displayed, I was laughed at all over again by the boys and girls alike. I was even thrown out of class for not having my homework.

I then sought out the English teacher who had promised to protect me, but he simply said that my daughter was too good for me now, seeing that the operation had been a failure and with it his good money thrown down the tubes for a worthless ingrate.

I ran from the place with the school’s security in hot pursuit, but I made it to the train station much faster than they did. I walked along the tracks and found a few freight trains that slowly rolled further west, towards the prairie lands and the abundant corn fields. I rode the empty freight trains as far as I could, even though I was famished and dehydrated along the way. I actually thought that I could run away from my birthmark. The opposite was true. As soon as the freight train stopped to pick up cargo, two police officers found me.

They arrested me immediately and had me return to the same town, with my same teachers, to my same drunk mother who threw an empty bottle of vodka at my head. She sent me to my room, and I immediately kept myself in there. I could do nothing but lay on my bed and cry myself softly to sleep.

The First Incel