Honorable Mention – Flash 405, June 2024: “Persona”
Fiction
Someone was bound to decipher my deceptively decorative paper skin. Of course it was Sal, the queer general surgeon of tomorrow. I was convinced he would interrogate my origami physiology on our first date. Instead, he got one look at my papier-mâchéd body, the overwhelming collage of depressing journal entries I had written months ago, and said, “Well, aren’t you hard to read?” I laughed as I told him that a few weeks prior, I was unimportant uncoated newspaper, headlines about cities all over the San Gabriel Valley including the one and only El Monte. But left unsaid was the cure for anguish that I discovered in a rather self-loathing, intense depressive episode. So I basked in his sweetness and laughed even harder when he called me “Mr. Lorem Ipsum” after I kissed him. I wouldn’t have guessed we’d lie on my bed two months later even though sex was off the table–too much friction, too much sogginess, too many paper cuts. Regardless, both of us were bare-chested and entranced by each other when Sal started reading aloud a sheet from my chest: “I saw the world slowly turn gray, color muted by my sorrows.” My paper heart fluttered; Sal’s eyebrows furrowed. I never told anyone about this cure, not a friend let alone a lover. I trudged into the kitchen to prepare my single meal of the day. I was peeling carrots when I accidentally peeled off paper from my forearm. Fury. I snapped the carrot in two and chucked it elsewhere as if it would soothe the pain. And when it didn’t, I believed myself stupid. How did I become so self-hating? In a moment I felt coming for months, despite my resistance, I peeled off my newspaper skin, swipe after swipe, tore past my parchment muscle and tissue paper tissue until I hit my cardboard bone. Tears cleansed my torment; a triplet of “fucks” sang my indignation. For once, however, the anguish that depleted all the world’s chroma had eased. This was the calming relief I sought. This was the shameful relief I dreaded.
Before I could tell Sal that I felt better by writing, that I healed myself by papier-mâchéing the pages of suffering over my wounds, he made us stand. We stripped together. And as he orbited around me, I wondered where on my body might I rubber-cement this memory before I let him read every inch of me.
Judge’s Comments:
I was immediately sucked in by the extended metaphor of the physical body as a body of writing. The playful tone evolves into an examination of suffering, and the relief we might gain from allowing someone else to “read” us.
Andrew Avalos is an emerging Mexican American writer from Southern California. He earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from USC and is currently an English Ph.D. student at UCLA. Los Angeles is now his home.
Photo by David Underland / Reagan Freeman