SHARMISTHA MOHANTY

Face

She said to her friend:

When a man kissed me, it was my other face that he kissed. That face was free to do what it wanted. A man walked me home every day, looked and looked at that face, that other one. In another country a man held my other face in his hands. My own face, the one that I saw every day and lived with was inexorably ordinary, always less beautiful than the faces of other women. This is the face I acknowledged, the way I truthfully recognized my talents, my frailties. When a man looked at me I never returned the gaze or smiled, or opened my eyes wider. I turned away, as one turns away from a mistake. After so many years the other face has grown feral, it licks my own face with its thick, rough animal tongue, leaving tiny bleeding wounds. It accuses me of wasting its best years. It shoves me down into the shadows. It refuses the weight of grief, the agitation of uncertainty, the anxiety of what is to come. I try to look it in the eyes, but it has the eyes of a wild animal, without a centre. Nevertheless, it has drawn blood from my thought, my intellect, my understanding, my knowledge of some things deep and vast. My own face is withering and sombre. The other one is youthful, the bronze skin smooth and soft to the touch, responsive and radiant when gazed at. There is nothing I can ask of it that it won’t deny me.

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise, and a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her most recent work is Extinctions, a book of prose poems that appeared in August, 2022. She is the founder-editor of Almost Island.