Pincushion

If I ever wear anything that shows it, people often ask about my scar. They usually ask how I got it, or if it was done on purpose. I can’t really blame them, most people would be curious how i got a perfect square on my abdomen. Unless they have one too of course.

It was just an ordinary autumn day, I just started my second year of college a few weeks prior. I had a few close friends, focused on saving up for rainy days, and I was getting decent grades, usually getting C+s or Bs. It sucked being broke all the time, but college was still pretty fun. A few hours after classes ended that day, some of my friends dragged me to a bar a few blocks away from the campus. I didn’t hate going out, and I still don’t, but I had a test in a few days and wanted to study.

The bar was pretty fun, clean seats and tables, great food, and cheap drinks. I only a had a few drinks, just enough to get a little drunk, because I had to walk back to my dorm and didn’t want the cops on my ass for public intoxication.

Around midnight, we finally decided to start heading home. Well some of my friends kept drinking, but Alex, Ruth, and I wanted to get home. I walked with them to their apartment, and then started to head back to my dorm. I thought about taking the shortcut through a few alleys, but I wasn’t in much of a rush, and there’s usually someone offering or receiving something for five bucks; herpes.

As I walking home, there was a slight wind blowing around the scarlet, gold, and umber leaves. The moths were ganging up on the gently flickering streetlights. I noticed that the last alley shortcut was empty, so I chose to just walk through it. A few steps through the alley, I began to hear what sounded like whimpering.

I carefully approached the sound, until I saw a strange looking girl curled up behind a dumpster. The girl had short dirty blonde hair, with two long locks beside her bangs. She was wearing a long sleeved black shirt with a Peter Pan collar, frilly white socks, black Mary Janes with gold buttons, a lilac pleated skirt, and a small apron tied around her waist. Very large safety pins were her earrings. When I got closer I noticed her body had variously colored and sized patches on it. I just thought they were tattoos, but then I saw five giant sewing pins sticking out of her scalp. There was also a huge sewing needle in her head with a lock of hair threaded through. I asked her if she was alright, but she didn’t respond. I slowly reached for one of the massive pins in her head, but she shot up and tackled me to the ground.

She slowly pulled one of the pins out and stabbed it through my wrist. I screamed in agony but no one heard me. Then she drove three more into my other wrist and ankles. I felt like a frog ready to be dissected. “What the fuck are you doing?!” I yelled at her.

She tilted her head slowly and told me “I need another patch.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, cringing from the pain shooting through my body. She raised my shirt so that my stomach was exposed, and traced up and down my stomach. That was when I noticed that one the patches on her neck had a tiny amount of a tattoo on the corner; they were skin. Reaching into her apron pocket, she pulled out a large pair of scissors. I felt a sharp stinging pain in my stomach and cried more tears with every snip and cut she made. The feeling of my flesh being torn off was the worst pain I could ever imagine. She took out a normal sized needle from her apron, and tore a long strand of her hair. I saw that she had a small gash on her thigh. She began to sew my skin on to her leg as if she were repairing an old pair of jeans.

When she finished she quickly ripped out the pins from my body, giggled at me, and ran off. I was still on the ground bleeding and shaking in agony. Knowing I had to get to the hospital as soon as possible, I slowly rolled over. Pain shot up my arm from my wrists when I dragged myself towards the street. My stomach dragging against the rocky pathway was how I imagine cheese feels when it’s grated. Eventually, I managed to get to the street crawling with my elbows instead, and I was found by a worker just leaving the convenience store at the end of the alley. “Can you hear me? What happened to you? I’ll call an ambulance,” was what I managed to hear him ask me. I passed out from the blood loss just as I saw blue and red lights flashing.

I was discharged about a week later, with a patch of someone else’s skin sewn onto my abdomen. I sometimes wonder why she did that to those people and I. Maybe someone did the same thing to her somehow, or maybe she’s just fucking nuts; probably the latter. My ankles and wrists didn’t heal well, and so I still have pain in them from time to time. Luckily, I didn’t miss too much school, and my professors omitted me from the tests I missed while I was recovering. I still hear her giggling when I’m trying to sleep at night. I wish I never went down that damn alley.