[Graphic violence]
The first thing that registers when you regain consciousness is the taste of the knife in your mouth. It is cold and metallic and dangerous and it is wrapped in the coppery taste of blood. Your stomach heaves and you wonder how much of the vile red stuff you have managed to swallow in the minutes or hours or years that you have been laying on the kitchen floor with a steak knife in your mouth. You could ask him, but he is too busy squeezing your larynx shut with one hand and digging the blade deeper in with the other. You feel your soft palate being sliced open and something dark and clotted spills out of the wound and threatens to choke you, if only someone else was not already doing the job. Then the point of the knife digs in under one of your molars and finally you find your voice and you manage a strangled, gurgling scream. Your hands scrabble to find purchase on the slick, bloody tiles and when that fails you try to wrench his arm away, but he is far too strong for you. You are only a boy of sixteen, a pathetic weakling, and he is big and drunk and angry and he hates you, has always hated you with a fiery passion that he usually reserves for banging whores in your dead mother’s bed.
The worst part is that he does not even say anything while he cuts you. In the blackness of the house you can only make out the parts of his face that are illuminated by the glow of the flickering streetlamps outside, and it is enough to make you wish that you were blind. His eyes are empty sockets, black pools of something poisonous and corrosive and reflecting only a quiet rage that is far more terrifying than if he had screamed at you.
The knife catches against the corner of your mouth and it twists, and you are certain that he has just removed half of your face. The pain is white-hot and blinding and you cannot breathe for all the blood, and you can feel your mouth wrenched open into a grotesque grin, something horrifying and permanent and then oh god he’s ripped his knife through the other cheek and now you are pretty and symmetrical and you know that no one will ever be able to look upon your face without retching.
Hours later, you rearrange the butchered slices of your skin into something that vaguely resembles your old face and you fasten them together with some horribly smelly glue that you found in a box in the cupboard and the pain is so real and raw and terrible that you scream and scream and scream until a blood vessel bursts in your eye. Then you examine your work in the mirror, hands shaking until they are only a blur, and some awful laugh bubbles up in your chest and bursts from your patchwork mouth until you are bleeding all over again.