fin // diabola // district five

Ugly.

You've always been ugly, haven't you? That's why when the olive-skinned midwife heaved you out of your shrieking mother, a transluscent sack of skin like a shell-less egg, slippery with blood and phlegmatic fluids, your eyes dark orbs barely haloed by their eggshell whites, your jutting mouth heaving air in accordion-like wheezes, she pronounced you La Diabola. It wasn't hard for your uneducated parents to guess what it meant, and as later in life you surpassed the intelligence of everyone around you - including your mother and father - despite all your hindrances, you came to fully understand the significance of the curse that name placed on you. Did your mother, a passive woman who regularly didn't believe in bad luck or spirits, never give you a different name because she simply didn't love you, or because she believed it was true, too?

And as you grew, you certainly molded to fit that proclamation more and more. Your white hair forced its way out of your domed, white scalp like chick-feathers and malted away just as suddenly, patchily and unpredictable, and your teeth - the few that managed to escape the desperate clinging of your pale gums - were angular, slanted and too weak to bite. You quickly grew emaciated in infanthood, too tired and frail to even ask for help (which you were too stubborn to do anyway) and even when you had grown the shadow of that early starvation remained visible in your crooked, bone-visible body. Even now, you could be mistaken for just a skeleton - and you carry the shame of your body in even being too afraid and full of hate to look at your own reflection. Your hooked nose and flaring nostrils used to remind other children of the wicked witches and creatures from their storybooks, and now teenagers liken you to every political and familial villain they can imagine. They stay away, and even though you are still definitely lonely, you never choose to show it. Instead you remain cold to them - and to everyone, don't you? Let them, you think, let them see me as a monster. It seems almost a generous favour to provide them with someone to project their insecurities onto, but you bear the favour with bitterness.

You prefer the dark. Your sensitive eyes ache through days of bright lights, thick smog and television screens, so that coming to your room at the end of a day and closing your shutters tight is a blessing. For much the same reason, silence is utterly blissful to you. Through your adolescence your hearing became increasingly muffled, until the clenching shrieks of machinery were nothing more than a mournful whine, nevertheless one that strained your ears to the point of pain. At first you were simply frustrated; quick to enrage and destructive in your anger. You screamed even though all you could feel was the vibration of it in your chest and the burning fury in your throat. However, soon enough you taught yourself that no one else would, or could, help you save a miracle, and so you began to survive. Unlike your careless parents, you endeavoured to adapt your lifestyle to your desires. Sign language came easily to your quick mind and thin, spindly fingers. You loved the precision of each symbol and letter, especially that for your own name - index and ring fingers standing straight up like lightning poles, the other fingers and thumb furled into a fist. It was a sign of power. The idea that your own name could so easily gouge someone's eyes out delighted you inexplicably.

That your own parents never learnt to dance their hands the same way you could upset you deeply. Some evenings they would simply stand in front of you, screaming questions louder and louder at you as you stood, emotionless and forcing the tears of embarrassment and loneliness to stay behind the petal-thin dams of your eyelids, and as soon as you were alone afterwards those tears would erupt in silent, heaving sobs which made your sore lungs groan. Your parents were the only people you ever wished, if only for a moment, you could actually connect to, weren't they? However, you could see the advantage of the wall of silence and conversations lost-in-translation between you and them. For one, you were never made to work, as another child your age might have been. Working-class was all you had ever known, and both your parents, too. Your father. a factory technician, would never have considered taking you to work with him unless you had been born a boy. Your mother does laundry and darns fabric for other families, often mumbling resentfully about how she never has time to wash her own clothes the same way. Her eyes are the same sad blue of the fatty soap that stains her hands, the same blue of the bruises your sensitive skin so easily acquire. Your father's are green, like his earthy uniform, underneath the oil stains and the patches that his wife lovingly applies for him. The affection between them is tangible, and you have always wished that you could love and be loved like that, too. But that, and the black colour of your eyes, just makes one of the many resemblances that you failed to acquire from your parents. You're nothing like them in body or soul.

You're simply ugly.

The one thing that an invisible existence lends itself to, however, is knowledge. You are sure that inside that bulbous skull is a brain as, or more, beautiful than anyone else's. Although you fear your own imagination - your life is filled with the horrors of isolation and deformity, so you never dare to think what your nightmares could conjure up - you are still enamoured with facts. There's no shortage of books on engineering and design in the singular library in the District, and in your own home are a range of books on other subjects which you fascinate yourself with. Often it seems, paper has been cheaper than food, hasn't it? It was through reading that you learnt how to speak with your hands, and how to fall from great heights without breaking, and how to make a telescope out of fragments of glass (which helped at least with your eyesight, but cut your hands terribly in the process). You absorbed words like other people absorbed sunlight, through your very skin and entirely. And you never wanted to use your knowledge to show off - who would listen to you, anyway? - you just wanted to have it. Finally, it was something that you felt that you deserved. Words never judged you on your beauty or you popularity. Words didn't even mind if you were invisible. All they wanted was to be read, and all you wanted was to grant them their wish wholeheartedly.

However, there was one thing that you never found, and which you are continuing to search for, and that is why you are the way you are. Not Why you, and not someone else? but Why this, and what causes it? You know that the answer is somewhere, lounging on a bed of crisp, fragrant parchment, waiting for your eyes to beckon it from its rest and invite it to dance with your mind. You've learnt about how many ribs are in the human body, why a fish doesn't have lungs, and how people before the Dark Days used to believe that whipping themselves would cure any disease; but none of their diseases seemed to match yours. And you're sure that harming yourself any more than you're already hurting won't improve it. You yearn to know why you've always carried exhaustion like a corpse across your back, but why when it comes to sleep you're kept awake by the sound of your own heart beating hotly in your ears, and the impossible heat rising off your small, naked body. You want to know why illness so frequently strikes you like a gong, sending pain, nausea and death-wishes ringing through you for weeks at a time.

None of these wants, however, compare to your most central frustration. Your lack of humour, your dissention from etiquette, your general distaste for company - they all come from the acidic sourness bubbling inside you, the internal grotesqueness which can only stem from the external. They all see your ugliness, and so ugly you have become. And if you can find even a chance to cure yourself of that, to stop being La Diabola and stop feeling the pain of it, you think you will. Who's to say if you really want to, though? Have you grown so accustomed to being the monster, the nightmare, that a change would only break your heart? Could you even ask that of yourself? Perhaps your ugliness is sweeter thank the normalcy you would have otherwise. For now, however, and perhaps forever, you cannot change who you are. You look at it with regret, but maybe victory as well.

Ugly is your identity, and it seems, your eternity.