All Around Me Are Worn Out Faces Novels & Stories

Dust falls around me as the light from the sun filters in, burning my skin delightfully. I drop to the ground with a hard thud and stare up at the ceiling that is now cracked and missing pieces. I spin to my stomach and move slowly to my dog food and the water on the tray and look down. The man looking back at me is unrecognizable with how gaunt I have become. My eyes are glowing red with dark circles around them, my cheeks have sunk and my pallor is ghoulish.

My throat is completely dry, and every breath scrapes like sandpaper. I get on the bus looking like a wreck. Disheveled clothes, small cuts on my face, bruises starting to bloom. And of course, people stare. Almost everyone on the bus turns to look at me with a mix of pity and suspicion. Their eyes move from my swollen cheek to my messy hair, lingering too long like I’m some spectacle they don’t know what to do with.

You’d have to be a fool to drive the winding, narrow road along the cliffs tonight. My gaze shifts from the thick, densely packed white flakes falling beyond the single-paned window to my own face reflected in the glass. I look like hell. I haven’t slept apart from an hour snatched here or there when I can’t keep my eyes open. My usual five o’clock shadow has grown into a beard, and circles ring the skin around my eyes.

When it finally passes, I rinse my mouth and lift my head slowly. The girl staring back at me is unrecognizable. Her eyes are hollow. Her face looks older, harder. The softness is gone. The belief in love, mates, and promises has been stripped away in a single night. What stands here now is what is left of her. A ghost wearing my face.

The writer‑who‑left’s stack of pages blew out of her hands in a whirlwind, scattering like birds. One by one, the panes around me… stopped. The images froze, then faded, sinking back into blank, depthless reflections. Until only one mirror remained fully intact and clear. Directly ahead. My own face stared back at me from it. Not older. Not smoothed. Not twisted into some omnipotent puppet‑master shape. Just… me. Wet hair. Tired eyes. Bruises blooming under my jaw from ghost‑hands and harness marks. The faint, healed crescent of Corvin’s teeth at my throat. Salt streak on my cheek where carnival water had dried, and I hadn’t bothered to wipe it away.

Strands of gray have infiltrated the once youthful mane, a testament to the countless hours spent in the dimly lit basement. The lines etched upon my face tell a story of exhaustion and determination, each crease a mark of the battles fought and won in that confined space. As I step into the light, my eyes squint against the sudden brightness, unaccustomed to the world beyond the basement's gloom. The dust that clings to my body dances in the air, creating a hazy aura around me. It is as if I have emerged from a forgotten era, a relic of a time long past.

The fluorescent glow accentuated the weariness etched on my face, the lines of fatigue that seemed to deepen with each passing night. As I bid farewell to the other girls who shared this grueling shift with me, their tired smiles mirrored my own weariness. We understood the unspoken camaraderie that developed amidst the chaos and demands of this establishment. These girls, like me, were fighting battles of their own, seeking escape from the clutches of this unforgiving world.

I’ve tried to make ends meet, but the noose has just one loop and it’s the perfect size for my neck. I’ve waddled through life on all fours, occasionally eating dust when I fall. I’ve tried using my feet to paddle through days and weeks, even months too. But the years keep tumbling by and by—over me, leaving me with my hair disheveled, and my face? a mere caricature of a creature from a child’s nightmare; with my hair wild and windblown. Oh! my cheeks are almost like I was strapped to the backseat of a missile while the air slapped hard against my face like the clanging of spoons when these children on the street manage to get the pot from the woman who owns a fast food just before her daugh

The faint traces of their recent departure lingered, leaving behind an unsettling silence that enveloped me like a heavy shroud. In an attempt to break the monotony of the room, I cast a glance at the mirror. What stared back at me was a reflection that mirrored the desolation of my surroundings. I looked no better than a beggar, the weariness etched into every contour of my face. The remnants of yesterday's fight clung to my clothes—dirty, torn, and a stark testament to the turmoil that had unfolded. The disarray of my attire mirrored the chaos that simmered beneath the surface, a chaos mirrored in the strained relationship between Clyde and me.

I repeated it three times, washing my face vigorously. Then I stared into the reflection. Nothing. The same face stared right back at me with the only difference being that I'd washed off some blood crust on my face, gotten a bit of life, just a tiny bit. Her sunken eyes and swollen eyes stayed right back at me, my bruised jaw too. I still looked hollow and broken, like I'd handled my entire life worth of problems in one day. I sat back on my heels, breathing hard, still unable to believe this.