By Chloe Lim Conception
One day, Boy and Girl fought. In anger and frustration, girl took a knife and conceived a scar baby on her arm.
Most of the time, babies are conceived out of love. To complete a family, to bring meaning to life. But like unwanted babies born out of wedlock, the scar baby was conceived out of pain.
Boy and Girl made up after that. They hugged and kissed, Girl put a bandage on her arm, and everything went back to normal on the surface.
But the scar baby grew. Boy and Girl made no attempt to get rid of the scar baby, continuing to skirt around the central issues eroding their relationship.
Boy was arrogant. He tried to listen to what Girl had to say, but often ended up dismissing her. He made fun of her dreams and aspirations. He thought her naïve.
Girl was insecure. She needed external validation because she had no faith in her choices. She knew that she could not get that from Boy, so she grew more and more silent with him, fearful of being ridiculed.
Gestation
At night, the scar itched. She could feel the scar baby kicking beneath the red, stretched-out patch of skin.
She imagined that the baby was ugly, made of scar tissue and teeth. She imagined it gnarling on their relationship, sucking the life and passion out of her. And she grew more and more anxious, afraid of everything, afraid of life.
Scar babies can never be born unless the issues that led to their conception are solved. They stay under your skin and kill you slowly like a parasitic stillborn.
Even if the relationship between Boy and Girl ends one day, if they do not bridge the gulf between them, this scar baby will remain, together with the many scar babies beneath her skin.
History Taking I
The first girl Boy ever loved was killed by scar babies. She came into his life at sixteen and left at eighteen. Towards the end, she was totally consumed by her scar babies, gaunt and weak. She was unrecognizable, and then she was gone.
Her death shattered boy. Lost and alone, he started taking in a lot of cats and talking to them.
“Have you seen my baby?”
The cats meowed.
His hair was disheveled, his room a mess. There were rats everywhere, so many that not even the cats bothered to catch them.
One day, Boy looked at the sad state of his life and decided that he simply could not continue that way.
He drew the curtains and let the sunlight in. He rearranged everything in his room and put them back at their right places. He let the memory of his young love, punctuated by screams, cries and scar babies, settle into a deep corner of the core of his being. He was ready to love again.
And love he did, kindly and passionately.
But his experience with his scar-torn lover had changed him forever. He was not aware of it, but he was always seeking to love those who reminded him of her.
Those with a proclivity to scarring.
History Taking II
At eighteen, plump and bare-skinned, Girl fell for a boy straight out of a fairytale.
He was tall, handsome and funny. His laughter rang like bells in the sky of her youth. He planted kisses on her scar-less skin and reaped the bounty of her body.
But one day, he disappeared into a crack so deep and dark that no one could see inside. Girl kneeled by the crack and screamed and screamed, but all she heard was echoes.
Girl was devastated. Horrified. Broken. She thrashed around the perimeter of the forest, listening to the creaks of insects and the flowing stream, looking for clues as to why her perfect boy left her.
But she could not find anything. Hence, she concluded that it was simply because she was not good enough.
This realization made her cry. She wailed and kicked, bruising and scratching her skin on the bare earth and sharp roots.
But life dictated that she could not cry forever. There were chores to be done, people to please. And hence she got up and continued her journey. Slowly, the wounds stopped bleeding, scabbed, scarred.
The scar babies grew and formed a wall around her. With them she grew. With them she thrived.
Etiology
Boy had scar babies too. But while Girl’s scar babies were timid and languid like weeping willows, Boy’s scar babies were passionate and burned like forest fires.
That was why he achieved great things. He lived life with so much zest that everyone who met him could not help but be awed by his charisma. He crossed obstacle after obstacle. Exceeded expectation after expectation.
Leaving those who once looked down on him beneath him. He beat all the odds to get where he was. He had all the rights in the world to be arrogant.
But his arrogance made Girl uncomfortable. He never finished listening to what girl had to say, believing that his views were superior to hers. He never believed in what girl wanted to do.
Intervention
Girl had always wanted to write a novel, but Boy told her that she was a very bad writer, and that she would never make it.
He believed that stories should be graceful and polished, and hers were haphazard and crude.
His words carried a lot of weight, as he used to write once upon a time. About sad dreams, and that dead girl he loved so much. His words were so touching that forest fairies and mountain Gods alike shed tears.
Girl was humiliated. Appalled. Shattered. She cried and cried for many days, shutting herself in her room, unable to look at Boy in the face. But then came indignance.
To prove Boy wrong, Girl decided to write a story about the child they conceived together.
The scar baby, a product of her insecurity and his arrogance.
He always spoke about having a child together. And she was telling him now, that unless they changed their ways, this scar baby was all that they would ever have.
Birth
It was the dead of the night. The moon outside was barely crescent and rats rattled the ceiling as they ran across it. Girl finished writing the story about the scar baby two hours ago. She let Boy read it.
Boy read the story in silence. His expression was solemn, and his eyebrows were furrowed.
After a few minutes, he rearranged the pages and set them down on the wooden floor. He then went to the dusty old mattress, where Girl lie facing the wall, and enveloped her in a tight hug.
No one said anything, and they stayed like that for a long time. Boy soon fell asleep, and Girl could feel the soft breeze of his breath landing on her nape. Like the wings of a butterfly, like fluttered kisses.
Suddenly, she felt a little twitch on her arm where the scar baby was. She ignored it at first, but the twitches grew increasingly frequent and violent, and her skin felt tighter and tighter.
She also noticed that the itch was a little more bearable than usual.
Careful not to rouse Boy, she slipped out of his embrace. She walked towards the window and held up her arm.
The stretched-out patch of skin was no longer a furious red. Instead, it was soft and pink, like a newborn baby’s cheeks.
***
Chloe Lim graduated with a BA in English with Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and was first drawn by prose and poetry to words. Now works as a freelance translator, copywriter and English communication trainer. Debuted with a short story in the 2018 Emerging Malaysian Writers anthology.