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John cuts a jigsaw piece from each person who fails their trap.
He never did for her.
Her skin is scarred in other ways, but she doesn’t bear the mark of the work they do. She’d won, she’d escaped her trap because she had the will, and she had been born anew. Clean, free, and with purpose.
She has a small cardboard puzzle piece jammed into the space between the brick and the electrical socket in her bedroom at the plant. She’d found it one day, rooting through junk in one of the rooms, and hadn’t been able to let go of it. She’d turned it over in her hands, thumbed the soft corners, and then squirrelled it away in her pocket. If John had noticed then or since, he hasn’t said anything.
She stares at it late at night, when the hum of the hospital machines and the noise of her thoughts keep her up. She fixates on it, stares at the milky white cardboard against old brickwork like it’s the moon, the fucking sun. She ponders about rebirth and willpower, the will to live, feels her lips curl into a sneer thinking about those who hadn’t been worthy, who had failed their games because they were weak-willed. They failed because they didn’t understand.
She does.
(Sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she has the dreadful feeling that a part of her died in that room that day. Sometimes doubt begins to creep in through the edges, and sometimes John’s ideology makes no sense at all to her. Sometimes she thinks of clear plastic and the snap of a nose, a neck, Gabi and Adam, and wonders what the hell it’s all for.)
She has a keychain, too, that she’d picked up at some shitty gas station for a buck. A silly little cheap thing, plain steel in the same shape. She’d worn it the day in Mexico when her faith had begun to falter for the first time. Fitting, she supposes.
Still, she clings tighter than ever to ideology and iconography. She imagines she can be saved by staring at a stupid piece of cardboard until her eyes blur, by working metal until her fingers bleed and her spine aches. She devotes herself to steel and flesh and him.
Sometimes, the doubt is too much to bear. Some nights all she can taste is blood in her teeth and rust on her tongue, and she feels afraid of the dark. Scared little girl, scared then, scared now too. Twelve years old in a dark closet, eighteen in a dark club bathroom, twenty one in a dark prison cell, present day, still in the dark. Before, she would have run towards a needle. Now she runs towards a different set of tools, but it’s all the same. It’s all the same, and no one fucking changes.
She’d survived her trap, and so John had never cut the puzzle piece from her flesh. She feels lacking, somehow. Lacking the true rebirth she’s supposedly gone through. Lacking the puzzle piece that would symbolise her failure. Stuck in limbo.
She can’t get the puzzle piece cut out right. Wonders if it’s easier when the person is fully dead, if the skin just peels right off like nothing, like a sticker on a fruit. She digs deeper, until the lines of the puzzle piece are inflamed and jagged, barely identifiable. Blood runs warm down her thigh onto the bedsheets and cakes under her nails and she still can’t get the puzzle piece right .
In the morning, she wakes up stuck to the blankets and feels like a failure. She unsticks herself, patches herself up, and brings John oatmeal and tea. She hasn’t changed, and the evidence is scabbed over sanguine on her haunch, hidden from him under thin pyjama pants.
She hasn’t changed. No one fucking changes.
A whole life later, after her god dies and her faith crumbles, after her whole existence fucking implodes, it’s dark again. It’s dark, and Lynn is mouthing at her thigh at three am, lazy and slow and not trying to go anywhere fast. She pauses, at some point, trails fingertips over one raised white edge. “Did he do this one? Did he do this to you?”
She tenses, because she always does, because Lynn knows better by now than to ask about him or then. She tenses, but stays put, resists the urge to roll away and go silent. “No,” she answers. “I did.”
They don’t talk about these either. She doesn’t hide them, but they don’t talk about it. “It’s different from the others,” Lynn says anyway, and crinkles her brow prettily. Amanda can barely see her in the dark like this, but she knows it’s pretty from the slant of shadow over her face. She slides her fingers gently over the sharp of Lynn’s brow bone, her cheekbone, reads her like braille and knows her expression is pretty and kind.
“No one changes,” she whispers, as if it explains everything. It does, really. She hopes Lynn understands.
Lynn hums. Her mouth goes back to lazy kisses along her skin, a nip to the inside of her knee that makes her jump and exhale pleasantly. “I think you’ve changed,” Lynn murmurs against her as if it’s nothing, and begins to move upwards.
Amanda can think of a hundred immediate arguments, just on principle, just for the sake of arguing. But Lynn begins to move upwards again, hungrier, and her spite dies on her tongue. She thought that a part of her died in that room, but right now, today, she’s never felt more alive.