[Second place winner in the Synapse Storytelling Contest's fiction category.]
There was once a small Martian called K who was born with a green pimple in the middle of his forehead. He was from Bufalluna, a small town at the edge of what used to be the Tramuntor Sea, at least that’s what the Elders of the town told him. It’s difficult to be certain about these sorts of things: nobody in Mars keeps records anymore. They used to…
Bufalluna had been cleaner once. That is what everyone said. K believed it, but he wondered why all that dust kept coming from the East… one of those things nobody wanted to talk about.
K’s parents were space cowboys. They herded water molecules from comets, a very precious material for life on Mars. Their planet ran out of ice rocks seven generations ago, so that opened the space cowboy profession to the middle class. K never thought that it was cool, both his parents would constantly go on these months-long astronautic missions.
So, K took care of himself, which he did approximately. And yes: on his forehead, a green pimple. These things happen. Nobody made a big deal about it when he was born, and if they did, they made it in the corridor, quietly.
K was not one for mirrors. He washed his face and that was that. And it never occurred to him to wonder whether the others had pimples too.
The others noticed, though. They did. K didn’t see it when he was small, but they thought it every day: how strange. At school, K heard the jokes, he even laughed at some of them, because everyone laughed, and at that age you would rather laugh at anything than be the thing. The grown-ups thought it too, and grown-ups should have better manners: such a pity, with such a nice family. And the worst were the jokes, the same old, boring, unoriginal jokes.
Long before K, in the Quiet Years (the Elders do not like to say much about that) there had been lists of the green-pimpled, kept in a big sunny building downtown, for their own good. And then one spring the lists had been useful. That is all anyone would say about it. Apparently that same building is a school now, but it has a new wall. Nobody asks about why they replaced that one wall.
Then one day it finally happened… in front of a shop window. K was walking along with everything he had ever heard about people with green pimples repeating itself in his head, and the glass caught him at an angle, and he stopped. He realized, for the first time, that he, himself, had a green pimple! Or something that looked exactly, one hundred percent, like a green pimple. He leaned in to check… Yep, it was one.
He kept thinking about it all afternoon. He was engaging with that idea: I have a green pimple. It was not that scary. Then a quieter thought appeared: nobody had ever told him. Who would have?
One more thought came: so that was all it was? A pimple? People cared this much about a pimple? Corrected, excluded, humiliated, for having a green pimple?
K is thirty-eight now. He knows how to protect himself better. Or maybe he simply doesn’t care anymore. There are so many more people with pimples around than before. Even some young aliens born with pimples don’t even get bullied at school.
Some still look at K strangely when he says he is off to see some very lovely friends with green pimples on their foreheads, like his. Well, almost green. One of them has a pimple K would swear is blue. The others inform him that that’s not okay to say, very seriously, that in pimple matters turquoise counts as green, not blue, and that this was settled ages ago. What a mess. Talking about pimples with people who have them turns out to feel like family, and K laughs more than he has laughed ever before. It turns out nothing happens if you have a green pimple.
But.
He still feels watched when someone’s eyes settle on his forehead and stay there, even kindly, even without a word.
Tonight he was feeling particularly vulnerable about that.
As he gets in bed, K thinks that he would love it if nobody cared this much about his green pimple.
…
He tells himself good night.
…
…
It’s been an hour. His eyes, wide open, like the two halves of an orange.
No. That is not quite it either. He doesn’t want his pimple unseen. He likes it. He wants for the others, the smooth-foreheaded he has spent his whole life learning to live with, to be proud of it. Proud of the green pimple.
And it bothers him enormously, lying there in the dark, it bothers him when people speak badly of the red-pimpled, the yellow, the purple, the orange, the green, the pink. The pink above all. Poor pink ones: a pimple so faint you can barely see it, but it is there as well. K believes he has a small pink one himself, near the hairline. Some days it feels comfortable and some days it doesn’t, and maybe if it is that pale and that small it is technically a fleck and not a pimple.
Maybe, drifting off, the problem was never pimples. Maybe the problem is the others of the others of the others, all of them certain that pimples are a bad thing, and some of them carrying enormous ones themselves (enormous!), while everyone around pretends to see nothing at all.
So many people. So many colors… That is enough for tonight, good, he thinks. That is good.
K feels a bit relieved. He snores immediately.
Outside it is an ordinary night in Bufalluna. In the morning there will be dust on the doorsteps again, and everyone will sweep it. Far overhead, the comets go wherever they please.
