A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c4 - poetry collection centered around a specific character
Faces of the Witch
2. Sayu
She remembers.
She isn't old enough to forget.
Old enough to ignore.
She's aware enough as they rip her face right off
and give her a new one.
She's aware enough when they scrape out every bit of skin that doesn't quite look right and rearrange the organs underneath and they can do anything: make her into a kitten without claws or a bat with deep neck-crunching fangs to gore or a stain on the wall all over again or maybe they can even erase the stain that's her existence…
After all, they've already erased her identity.
It doesn't take her long to think of herself as a girl. It takes a lot longer, when she learns and recalls, to think of herself as a boy again. She remembers the fall: the way the wind whistled her funeral song and she remembers the pain that burns and burdens her afterwards. She remembers how she fell apart like a broken doll and was put back together: imperfect and weak, but slowly living, slowly growing stronger, slowly growing more whole –
Except she's not whole, no not whole at all but a broken doll that's been patched together and not so very well. She's broken furniture, a broken display piece that was too ugly for words even before she broke and was tucked away into a corner and covered with the heavily folded table cloth
And now the curtain's pulled back
and no amount of prodding at her skin will fix
the image in the mirror behind.