Jon Athan - Am I Beautiful?

“Am I beautiful?” Miki asked.

Alexa stopped and looked up at her, then she glanced over her shoulder before she brought her gaze back to Miki. Her actions said: Are you talking to me?

“What?” she asked.

“Am I beautiful?” Miki repeated in a chillingly normal tone.

“What are you talking about?” Alexa asked, brow creased in confusion.

“You’re a very pretty girl, sweetie. What do you think about me? Am I beautiful?”

“Can I… go now?”

Stepping forward and pausing between each word, Miki said, “Am… I… beautiful?”

Walking backwards, Alexa said, “You… You’re weird.” Miki snickered as she closed in on her. Alexa said, “I wanna go. I’m gonna scream if you don’t let me go.”

“You can go. I’m only here to use the bathroom, sweetie.”

Alexa kept stepping back, inadvertently cornering herself. Then she hugged the wall to her left and slunk forward to squeeze past Miki. Miki pushed a stall door open, but she didn’t step inside. Alexa wanted to run, but her body’s fight-or-flight response told her to freeze. They looked at each other. They could hear a faint police siren and the whizzing tires of a speeding bicycle.

Miki said, “You should have screamed when you had the chance.”

Tears in her eyes, Alexa said, “I just wanna—”

Miki grabbed a fistful of Alexa’s hair and pulled her away from the wall. Alexa screamed and stumbled. She lost her footing on the moist floor and fell into the stall. Her forehead collided with the toilet bowl’s rim, knocking her unconscious, then she collapsed next to the toilet, her head resting on her right arm. Her mask fell from her face.

She awoke about ten seconds later, groggy and disoriented. She heard the stall door close, followed by the sliding lock.

She looked up and, although she saw double, she could see Miki standing over her. She couldn’t hear the emergency sirens or the bike anymore. The restroom was close to a baseball field and a trailer park, but there was no one out there. She rolled onto her back and reached for her cell phone. The blow to the head weakened her, so she had trouble finding her pockets.

Miki crouched in front of the toilet. She tilted her head from side to side as she examined the child squirming at her feet.

She caressed Alexa’s swollen, rosy forehead and, in a soft voice, she said, “I’m going to ask you one more time. Am I beautiful?”

Alexa was breathing so fast that she couldn’t speak. She slid her clammy hands into her pockets. Her cell phone fell out and hit the tile floor with a thud . The screen flickered on, revealing the cracks at the bottom and a picture of herself hugging her mother as her wallpaper.

Miki said, “I’ll take that as a no.”

She pulled her shears out of her coat pocket and thrust them at Alexa’s left arm. Alexa’s eyes bulged as Miki closed the shears over her thin wrist. She cried and jerked her arm back, unintentionally smashing her elbow on the floor, which sent a tingly feeling down to her fingertips. The blades cut both sides of her wrist horizontally, but the cut across her inner wrist was the deepest.

“Ow!” the girl screamed. “Ah– Ow! ”

Alexa tried to sit up, but Miki slapped her left hand over the girl’s mouth and pushed her back down to the floor. The back of Alexa’s head bounced off the dirty tiles. Miki closed the shears over her wrist again, squeezing the handles with all of her might. She could hear the blades scraping her fragile bones. She wondered if she could amputate her hand with the shears.

Alexa pulled her arm away from her, widening the wounds on her wrist. The blades—buried in her flesh—pushed her skin up to the base of her hand, causing it to wrinkle. She was degloving herself by fighting back, but it was her body’s natural reaction to the pain. Her fight-or-flight response was now telling her to run.

The girl’s legs hit the stall door and walls as she spasmed. She even hit her head on the toilet. Her tears shined on her cheeks as well as on Miki’s black leather gloves. Yet, she kept screaming—screaming and screaming and screaming until her lungs burned. Her strangled voice barely reached the baseball field outside.

Miki closed the blades over her wrist again, then she turned the handles from side to side. Blood sprayed out from her inner wrist and landed on Miki’s sleeve. The girl’s wrist was mangled, bones and veins exposed to the bathroom’s dirty air. Dark blood drenched her arm. It reached the short sleeve of her blue shirt.

Alexa stopped screaming. The light started to fade from her rolling eyes. She breathed deeply through her nose, yellowish mucus leaked out of her nostrils, and foamy saliva oozed from under Miki’s glove.

“Wow,” Miki said as she ran her eyes over the wounds. “You know, I tried to do something like this to myself before. I used a box cutter instead of these shears, though. I just felt like… like the box cutter would get the job done. I think I saw it in a movie or a show once. But I didn’t realize I was supposed to cut myself up and down, not side to side. Vertically, you know? That’s how you really make sure you die.”

She paused, as if waiting for Alexa to respond. Alexa mewled and shivered, cries distorted by Miki’s hand.

Miki said, “You want to know something else? I used to think it was easier for a person to hurt themselves than to hurt others. I was wrong— very wrong. This was much easier.”

Alexa whimpered. She cried for her parents, but her words were unintelligible. The loss of blood and the hot pain left her pallid and weak. She was listless— almost lifeless .

Realizing she had stopped fighting back, Miki took her hand off her mouth and said, “Shh, everything’s going to be okay. It’s almost over, sweetie.”

“Ma–ma–ma–mommy,” Alexa stammered, her voice so soft that it couldn’t be heard in the neighboring stall.

Miki opened the shears. She pressed one of the blades into the crook of Alexa’s elbow. A bead of blood seeped out as the blade punctured her flesh. Then she dragged the blade down to her wrist—a long, vertical slit. It was as easy as cutting through paper. Arms trembling, Alexa grimaced and whined. She didn’t have the energy to scream.

Miki stabbed the crook of her elbow again, then she slowly slid the blade down to her wrist, following the curves of a vein. She stopped at her wrist again. She cut her a third time, cutting an artery at the edge of her elbow and tracing it to her wrist. Blood shot out of that wound, spraying onto the tile floor and Miki’s boots.

The cuts on her right arm were lethal. They were grisly, but they weren’t as gruesome as the wide, horizontal wounds on her other arm. Both of her arms looked like they were dipped in barrels of blood, but the vertical wounds bled more. The dark blood flowed in the grooves between the tiles around her.

The door hinges squealed.

Miki turned her head slowly to face the stall wall to her left. Alexa could only see the base of the toilet from her position.

“Help,” she said feebly.

A teenage girl walked into the room, music blaring from her Bluetooth headphones. She entered the neighboring stall.

Miki smiled mischievously. She thrust the closed shears at Alexa’s neck diagonally just as the girl started to cry for help. The blades severed her jugular, punctured her esophagus, and sliced her trachea. A geyser of blood shot out of her throat as the shears came out. Alexa squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. She reached for her neck, but she could hardly lift her mutilated arms.

She gargled her own blood while wriggling on the floor. The sound of her blood splashing wasn’t as loud as the splashing of urine in the neighboring stall. They were singing a duet of bodily fluids.