Best Face Forward

This face is all wrong, and Althea has barely set it flat before she begins the agony of cutting it right back off.

The scalpel snags as Althea peels and tugs this skin away from her neck. Fuck. This should be practiced motion, clean and smooth, like fileting a fish before it even knows it’s dead, but her mind has been wandering, is still wandering, is snagging itself on the wedding invitation before her on the vanity table, in the perfect loops of Dara’s own pen. I’d love to have you celebrate this day with me…  

With me. Those two words were enough. Of course Althea needs to go. It’s Dara. There are already too many broken promises between them for one more to be broken now. The real question is what face Althea will wear. What face Dara should see.

There are only a few hours before the wedding. Althea saws away at her face. It is jagged, rough, made with none of the experience she cultivated over years of practice. She is a fumbling teenager again, unable to decide on the right expression, the right approach, the right way to live and blend in. She’ll need to patch this face later, but she’ll have to harvest more skin to replace the patches, which means stalking the streets and looking for people to copy and imitate, and why oh why can Dara reduce her to this still?

What had they last talked about? When? It had been a nothing email, maybe eight or ten years ago, Dara asking how college was, and Althea meaning to reply to it but never finding the right words. It wasn’t that there was much to say. A fine, and you? would have sufficed. But she has never sent it.

It would have been meaningless, but there are so many meaningless things that she misses between them, whispered nothings spoken in the dead of the night in parking lots and behind closed doors. She used to spend hours counting all the little nothings left unsaid.

She finishes removing this face, sighs. Althea likes this face. It isn’t perfect for every occasion—never a face that was—but people treated her better when she adhered to a certain look. The Look, as she has started to call it in her mind. Althea tosses the Look onto her chair, a small pile of skins beginning to build up. She knows she should sort through and clean them but has been putting it off for the better part of a week. Her flesh burns, exposed to the air, raw and bleeding, and she applies more ointment to protect it. She’s running low. She should know better than to let it run low.

She should be too old to be bothered by any of this still. 

Althea can’t wear the Look. It isn’t what Dara would want. The Look is too composed, too confident, too alien to the person Althea was a decade ago. Does it even matter what Dara would want to see? It’s her wedding, for Christ’s sake, and more to the point, it’s Dara’s wedding to a man, to some boy from school. God, school. There will be other people from high school there. Does she care about their opinions? No, but that won’t stop the itch of their stares.

Althea resists the urge to bury her face in her hands, for fear of smearing the ointment.

She can’t be too far off from what everyone remembers. That would raise too many questions, and anyway, she doesn’t want to be a stranger to Dara. But Althea doesn’t even have her old face anymore; she disposed of it almost as soon as she left her hometown. Not that she would put it back on. She can do better. She knows how to be better.

Althea stares at the mirror, all meat and blood and bone. She does not feel better.

She toys, briefly, with the idea of showing up like this. Wouldn’t that be a statement? An honest one, even. Look at her; look at her; look at bleeding, monstrous her. But no. The time for big gestures has passed.

She tried once. Parked in front of Althea’s house, in the dead of night. They’d been studying, but studying became talking, and talking became dreaming out loud, imagining what their futures would look like. The dreaming continued while Dara drove Althea back to her place. And then she finally did it.  She showed Dara the real her. Dara had been polite, supportive even, but Althea saw a flash of fear beneath the kindness that still makes her ache. Althea had hoped for so much more, and those gentle thank yous stung as much as they soothed. 

Althea knows that support was real as much as the fear was real.

She’s not the Althea who can be that honest—that vulnerable, that weak—anymore, hasn’t been for years. She can picture that Althea, misses her, but she isn’t her. And though she hasn’t seen her in forever, she suspects Dara is no longer that Dara either.

So not the old face, nor this raw flesh, but something close. Something that would suggest she grew into her features, into herself. She takes skins off the chair and begins cutting at them with a pair of scissors, fashioning them into a new face.  

She can bring in a bit of the Look; there is confidence there she could use at the wedding. Pull in a touch of the vulnerability from highschool, not enough to raise Dara’s concerns but enough to pull at some heartstrings. Althea will not mind that. There is even some of Dara in this new face, someone who can say those types of platitudes and almost mean them. And something else. A resignation stolen from no one. A weariness she can imagine setting into her bones, if she lets herself wear it for too long. But the face doesn’t need to be forever. Just for the day.

Althea completes the face, holds it up against the light, then begins to place it on. It only takes a moment to set—easier to put on a new face than to remove one. She considers herself in the mirror, turning her head left and right, then up and down, catching the light. There is no eureka, no moment where it clicks, where it feels right. But it will be enough. She can be this person today. Althea practices smiling in the mirror, finds something there between happiness and bitterness and hope.

Yes, this will be her. This is the Look of someone who can say thank you, and then move on.

© 2025 Nigel Faustino

About the Author

Nigel Faustino is a Filipino-American writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He’s been published in Baffling Magazine and Lightspeed and placed third in Dream Foundry’s 2024 Emerging Writers contest. You can find him on Bluesky at nigelfaustino.bsky.social.