Freckles
By Ellie Goodwin
‘Forty-seven. Yes, definitely forty-seven’.
He finished his count with a flourish; an artist giving his final stroke to an oil painting. Why had he been counting in the first place? And this woman in the waiting room, sat with one leg crossed over the other, deigning a mixture of weariness and boredom that was a requirement of such a place. Who was she? Instinctively, he knew that they had seen one another before.
A crossing of paths, paradoxically fleeting yet inexplicably poignant.
A newspaper materialised, thrown into existence and already open at a page for the woman’s perusal. All in the space of a second.
‘Forty-eight’. The woman did not lift her gaze, merely wetted her finger and lazily turned the page. ‘The new one should be on your left wrist. Just below your watch strap’.
The woman was right. What had once been a patch of soft, unblemished skin now played host to a faint freckle: a dot on a clean canvas. ‘You’ll notice that this one is lighter than some of the others’.
The man wondered if such a comment was supposed to carry some meaning for him. He handled it with the same uncertainty as one would with foreign currency. ‘Yes’. He did not know what else to say. This freckle was indeed fainter than the others.
Dazed, he stood, trying to remember how he had come to this place. The waiting room was empty, save for himself and the woman. The five metal chairs were the only furniture, evenly spaced between one another and all unoccupied. The walls were chalk white without decoration or the hint of having once borne any. Accompanied with the artificial lighting, the effect of the room was a clinical one; a daily purge of all that was sentient through meticulous cleaning. The absence of life brought the man to his senses like a pinching on the arm.
‘Where am I?’
The woman sighed wearily. Boredom dripped from her. It was a pendulum question and one that she heard too often. Like a mother with a newborn, her ears were attuned to it, and she knew the moment when it would be asked. Worn down by its frequency, she gave a robotic answer. This was the forty-eighth time Geoffrey Reynard had asked her, not that he recalled having done so. ‘Heaven’.
‘Heaven?’ Geoffrey Reynard repeated with stunned disbelief. He had not been an intelligent man in this life, though this was not the reason why his forty-eighth freckle was fainter. Other factors came into play and, in some cases, intelligence had little to do with it. ‘But… but it can’t be. Heaven doesn’t look like this’.
The woman rolled her eyes, wetted her finger again, and turned the page of her newspaper. She knew what was coming next. Others would be faster on the realisation, though she suspected that the same could not be said of Geoffrey Reynard, whose mouth had been gaping for several stagnant seconds now. ‘Your concept of heaven is nothing more than fiction. A paradise where the dead go if you’ve lived a moral life? It’s nothing more than a way for you to find some comfort with the uncomfortable thought of death’. The woman’s eyes lazily lifted from her newspaper and widened by a fraction, prompting Geoffrey Reynard to reach the conclusion that he was so slow in meeting. Like dry-swallowing a pill, it was uncomfortable for both parties.
Geoffrey Reynard struggled blindly through the thick fog that had settled in his mind. Why had he been counting the freckles on his body? And why did heaven resemble the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery? This last thought snagged like caught bait on a fishing line.
Mouth dry, he asked, ‘I’m dead?’ It was a disembodied voice.
‘Yes’.
Winded, Geoffrey Reynard sank onto one of the chairs. The woman paid him no attention, too engrossed in the article she was reading. It was another regurgitated scenario that she had grown numb to. No sympathy came, for it was not needed.
‘But I can’t be – how can I be dead? I’m talking to you’. Geoffrey Reynard’s stammer, riddled with anxiety, did nothing to stir the sentiments of the woman. It was nothing that she hadn’t heard before.
‘Epileptic seizure in the shower. Painless death. There are far worse ways to go’.
Geoffrey Reynard gripped the arms of his chair. Bile rose and came to rest at the back of his throat. His bloodless face and greyish colouring had caught the woman’s attention.
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I’ve already had to clean up after someone else today, and I’m not doing it again’. She gave an irritable tut. ‘The woman who came in here before you was crying about dying at ninety-five! As if she had anything to be complaining about – she had a long life, far longer than some other people who have seen me and none of them made a hysterical racket. Well I can tell you one person that won’t be bawling their eyes out – the old lady’s son. Always nagging and criticizing him, not a word of thanks and a financial burden to top it all. It’s hardly a surprise the old lady’s freckle was fainter. Here you go, drink something’. Just as the newspaper had materialised, so did a glass of ice-cold water, which she shoved into Geoffrey Reynard’s hand none too gently. The water sloshed in the cup, resembling Geoffrey Reynard’s stomach.
Geoffrey Reynard gulped the water. Latching onto the only word discernible to him, he said, ‘freckle’. He had counted forty-seven. The woman had amended his count to forty-eight.
Satisfied that Geoffrey Reynard was not going to empty his stomach onto the carpeted floor, the woman returned to her seat and resumed her reading.
‘It’s your tally and our way of keeping a record. You’ve just finished your forty-eighth life. Each time you die another freckle is added to your skin. How faint the freckle indicates how much of a positive impact you had on the life you just expired from. The fainter the freckle the lesser the impact. Your forty-eighth freckle is darker than your forty-seventh but fainter than your nineteenth, which still stands as the life where you had the most positive impact’. It was with monotony that the woman recited this information without pause for breath.
The life, the forty-eighth life, that the woman referred to had escaped Geoffrey Reynard’s memory. Like the tail end of a dream, he only caught snatches with his fingertips.
A woman, frail and elderly with glassy eyes that did not see. Geoffrey Reynard cried silently as she asked who he was for what felt like the hundredth time, still wearing the bruise she had given him from her outburst in their last visit. Smiling weakly, he takes her hand and patiently listens to her as she rambles about a time far in the depths of her crumbling memory, not forgetting to kiss her on the cheek and give her his love before leaving. The friend from university who had appeared on his doorstep with a suitcase filled with clothes and toiletries as well as the baggage of his homophobic parents, who Geoffrey Reynard had, without hesitation, offered his couch, whiskey and undivided attention.
Waiting outside a classroom door on tenterhooks then roaring with triumph as a younger boy, his brother, ran to meet him, hands waving triumphantly with a graded assignment clutched in one.
A dimly lit pub with drunk men huddled around a dank, scratched table, either whistling appreciatively or slapping Geoffrey Reynard on the back. With a Cheshire cat grin, he watched as his mobile was passed, the nude photographs of his ex-girlfriend plastered for all to see. Uneaten food thrown into a bin, the stout plastic bottle containing laxatives under the pillow of a crying teenage girl whose face was a mirror copy of his own. He had made incessant, ill-disguised comments about her weight months before, the tightness of her clothes, her breathlessness whenever she walked up a flight of stairs, the far healthier looking friends in her social circle.
‘You can start your forty-ninth life now, if you wish’.
‘Start?’
‘Like re-spawning on a video game’. It was a crude image but a simple one for Geoffrey Reynard to understand.
‘Ok. I want to start my forty-ninth life’. Staying in this waiting room was not an option. For the first time, he truly observed his surroundings. No doors and no windows.
The woman turned the page of her newspaper again. The printed text was written in a language Geoffrey Reynard did not know, manic scribbles by a person whose sanity had collapsed, but the woman read each page intently, apparently understanding every scratched and jagged line that had pierced the paper. Nerves crept up Geoffrey Reynard’s spine.
‘I assume you want to hear the conditions first’.
‘Conditions?’
The woman folded the newspaper, visibly annoyed. This was her punishment. Repeated conversations, repeated questions, varying in the smallest detail. Her days were indistinguishable from one another, each one the same as before. True, she saw different faces, but what difference did that make when the words that came from their mouths were always the same? It would not be long now. The fragile strings that tethered the woman to sanity would soon be torn, leaving nothing but the stumps of frayed ends. She would join the others who had lost their minds.
‘Two chances and then you’re out. If your freckle at the end of your forty-ninth life is fainter, then that’s one chance gone. If the fiftieth freckle is fainter than your forty-ninth, then that’s two chances gone. And that means you’re out’.
Geoffrey Reynard absorbed this news silently, considering his options as one may do when perusing the shelves of a supermarket, overwhelmed by the selection. His reaction had been the same last time, too. And all the times before that. ‘What if I don’t want to start my forty-ninth life? What if I don’t want to risk it?’
‘Then you stay here. We always have positions available. There are lots of people coming through everyday, after all’. She imagined herself screaming, shaking Geoffrey Reynard, imploring him not to consider staying, to not even contemplate the idea of it. Ceasing to exist would be better than this daily hell that was her life, a constant loop of the same conversations, days and weeks blending into one, none distinguishable. The chance to make darker freckles was ready for the taking. Rejecting it would be madness.
It was precisely for this reason that her contract stipulated that she could not say such thoughts or risk the fury of the Higher, that omnipotent Entity who was, she supposed, responsible for everything, both here and in the world of the living.
And so, she said the same exact words that she always said to those who passed throughout this waiting room. ‘Whatever you decide, you’ll have no recollection of this conversation when you go back’.
‘Wait, so this means I may have had this conversation before? With you?’
‘Yes. We have’.
‘I thought I’d seen you somewhere’. The mumble was more to himself than the woman. Geoffrey Reynard stared at the walls around him, as if one may present an answer for what to do.
‘You said something about two chances and then you’re out’.
‘Yes’.
‘What if both of my new freckles are fainter and I lose my two chances. What happens then?’
‘You go on’.
A predictable confused look. ‘On? On where?’
Geoffrey Reynard had asked the woman this question forty-eight times during meetings that he had no recollection of, as did the others whom she met with. Another punishment, another reminder how she had failed, how she had feared living. Her body had not concocted an anaesthesia for this question, had not found the way to detach itself from the fleeting pain that always came whenever posed to her.
‘I cannot answer. I have not seen it myself’.
‘Why not?’
The idiot. His insensitive questions were fingernails clawing at her insides, scratch after scratch. Replying with dismissal, the woman had learned, was the best way. The only lesson that years of imprisonment had taught her. ‘I stayed here. I did not try at another life, I did not try to live. In my head, I saw the freckle as quantifiable – as a measure of if I succeeded or failed. I feared failure and I did not try for success. I did not live, nor did I die.’
She did not want to discuss that particular subject anymore. ‘Now, what is your decision, Geoffrey Reynard?’
All images via www.openai.com
Featured image by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
The Author
English teacher by trade and keen traveler the rest of the time, Ellie Goodwin has been to 36 different countries, lived in China for over three years, and has lived in Gwangju for eight months. In her free time, she enjoys (you guessed it) traveling, hiking, reading, and the occasional soju. Instagram: @elliee_goodwin