River Hawkins

Cassandra tilted her head, eyes narrowing as the bartender reached for a glass, the motion pulling his shirt just high enough to expose his sleeve of odd markings. Rows of small, circular scars burned deep into his forearm, forming a constellation of not raised but sunken skin that wrapped around the muscle like scales and this was the first time I realized it looked like chainmail.

“What’s that on your arm?” she asked, pointing her glass toward the marks.

The bartender didn’t look down. He finished drying the glass in his hand.

“Just a few scars,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, not letting it go. “I see that. But why? Did someone do that to you?”

He paused. For a moment, he was somewhere else entirely. I imagined somewhere hot. Somewhere that stank of iron and smoke. The searing pop of skin splitting under fire. The burnt-hair scent of nerve endings dying before the pain could even finish landing. I mean that’s what I imagined, but for all I knew he was jacking off while he was getting burned. Neither would surprise me.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s hard to perform a ritual like that by yourself.”

He was definitely jacking off for this.

Cassandra blinked. “It looks like it hurt.”

The bartender finally looked up, meeting her eyes with the kind of calm that makes a person nervous.

“Yes,” he said. “It was a beautiful pain."

Told you.

She laughed once, a confused bark. “Beautiful? What the hell is beautiful about pain?”

He leaned forward, just slightly. The air between them went still.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “People always ask me about the scars. They say I’m insane. That I’m a masochist.” He shot me a glance and I couldn’t help but worry that he had actually heard my thoughts.

“And maybe I am,” he went on, “though only for lack of a better word. I don’t enjoy pain. But I honor it. I respect it. Because I know what it gives me.”

He turned his forearm slowly, letting her see the full scarring. There was something almost holy in the way he presented it, like a relic from a long, hard pilgrimage.

“After hours of this … of flesh screaming and nerves frying … the rest of life is cream cheese. I walk out of that fire and suddenly traffic doesn’t bother me. A bad day at work is a breeze. A broken heart is just weather.” He paused briefly as if remembering. “That kind of pain—pure, unforgiving — it humbles you. And when you survive it, you realize: Nothing else can really touch me. Not if I don’t let it.”

I was piqued and absorbed now too. The room had gone still.

“They can take my money. My name. My dignity. My future. But they can’t own me. Because I’ve kept good company with my pain. I didn’t hide from it. I hosted it. I let it in like an old friend.”

He shrugged, pouring himself a slow amber shot.

“Most people spend their whole lives chasing pleasure and avoiding suffering. But what’s the point of that? If you only take half of life, you’re missing the best parts. You don’t overcome pain by numbing it. You overcome it by walking through it. By keeping company with it. That’s how you learn what kind of soul you’ve got.”

He downed the shot. No wince.

“So when people say, ‘You’re crazy,’ I just smile. Because if I can suffer and still laugh, if I can bleed and still be grateful, then what can the world do to me?”

His voice dropped to a near-whisper, not dramatic, just honest. His eyes met hers and then mine.

“I offer you my head. Cut it off.”

A long silence fell.

The woman opened her mouth. Closed it. Something stuck in her throat. A question, maybe. Something she just couldn’t verbalize. She turned her eyes away and said nothing for the first time in a while.

Then he broke the silence with, "Or I'm just a masochist. Hard to say really. I don't really know myself that well. I mean I talk to myself a lot, but I wouldn’t say we’re close." He had another wry grin on his face. The way he pulled the conversation in and out depth was like a magician’s trick.

I let out a puff of a laugh. The kind you give with a closed mouth.

Then, half to myself, I said, “Maybe I could use a few scars like that.”

Cassandra looked over at me. Her face softened just a little.

The bartender raised an eyebrow.

“Not that I want to go burn myself on purpose,” I said, shrugging, “but … I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d rather have a few burns on my skin than all the stuff I keep carrying around up here.” I tapped my temple. “At least with scars, you know where the pain came from. And when it’s over.”

The bartender gave a slow nod, still polishing a glass.

“Some folks would rather break their bones than break their hearts,” he said. “The body heals cleaner.”

“Yeah,” she muttered, “mine never really did.”

Silence again, but this one was warmer — shared. For the first time, the woman and I weren’t two broken people sitting beside each other. We were two broken people beginning to see each other.

The bartender set the glass down.

“Mental pain’s a funny thing,” he said. “Most people think it’s weakness. But it’s really just pain that stayed too long without company.”

He poured a small shot for each of us.

“So. Let’s keep it company tonight.”

The woman stared into her glass like it had something to say.

“I got some scars too,” she said finally, voice low. “I’m not gonna show them to you though.”

I glanced at her, uncertain, but didn’t speak.

The bartender didn’t stop what he was doing. His hands were still busy with the slow rhythm of wiping down the counter. His head tilted, just slightly, like he’d heard the note beneath the words.

Cassandra didn’t meet our eyes. She sipped her drink, winced a little at the burn.

“Some things … they don't heal right. You think you’re over it, you build your life up around it, and then someone says something, or a song comes on, or the wind blows just wrong, and it’s like you’re seventeen again and the world’s ending in the back of some fucking Honda Civic.”

The room went still. Even the old speakers seemed to quiet themselves.

I looked down at my hands knowing exactly what she was saying. Then the bartender finally spoke, voice soft but certain.

“Scars aren’t ugly,” he said. “They’re souvenirs of survival. Proof you lived through something that tried to end you.”