He hadn't meant to scare the child but the scars had a tendency to do that. He was almost used to it.
Shannon couldn't even bear to look at him. At first, he tried to console himself with the idea that it was because it evoked memories of that night, but eventually he had to face the fact that she simply could not bear to look at his disfigurement.
He wasn't sure what hurt the most - the phantom pain in the socket missing the eye, the fact that she had moved everything of hers out while he was off applying for unemployment benefits, or the reaction of people on the street who cringed away in horror. He never considered himself an egotistical man, but the strangers pulling away, his mother bursting into hysterics when she finally saw him without the bandages, the odd and awkward hug that his brother gave him - proud, but with a sense of loss far greater than the single eye and the puckered flesh of the scars that sliced the barren socket. Those damned that scars slashed across the skin of his cheek and left him looking more like Frankenstein's monster than the art restorer with the keen eye and steady hand.
Unemployment benefits would run out soon, and still the flesh was too hot and tender for the straps of the eye patch. Not much call for a fine artist with no depth perception. At this point, he'd take scraping cement walls and painting them, but it seemed there was a glut of unskilled teenagers to do those sorts of grunt work jobs.
He could not face the empty rooms tonight, so he had gone to the theater, attempting to stare down the demons, to face the lingering terror gnawing relentlessly in his bowels. He could hardly have recalled the details of the show he had watched, some dry drama about the rationing during WWII with a cast of no-name actors who were likely destined to stay that way. The door had creaked terribly as he pushed out the back, the same way they had gone out, into the orangey glow of the overhead lights creating dimly-etched circles on the parking lot. He supposed that he must look terrifying in the half-light, but he wanted to tell the kid that he wasn't the one to be afraid of, that he was supposed to be the hero, even if he hadn't worn a cape since the Halloween he turned eleven and insisted on being Superman.
They had come out from a late show, only a skeleton crew manning the popcorn and sweeping the aisles. They two had lingered through the credits, content and laughing, hoping for a short clip afterward, and only mildly disappointed when it did not come. They had not even gotten half of the way to their car when they had been jumped, bodies surrounding them, a hot slice as his cheek was slashed. It got his attention, and the hot rage spread from his cheek down through him as he jumped out at them swinging. No trained fighter, but feral instinct took over and the last thing he could recall was her screaming and banging on the theater door, but it was locked from the inside. He screamed when the knife took him in the eye, but that was all he could recall.
When he came to in the hospital, the officer had asked him for identifying characteristics, and he was rattled and ashamed when he could come up with nothing more than the concrete solidity of the jaw he had clocked and the dark forms among the shadows.
Shannon's screams had eventually brought a teenager's curiosity and he got the manager who quickly called the police. He himself had been blankly oblivious to it, and through the surgery to remove the ruptured eye, the stitches to pull the shreds of his face together. A blur of painkiller-hazed days, his mother's violent explosion of tears... that was all he could recall.
He stood in the halo of lamplight. The blood had now been cleaned from the pavement. There were no screams. The frightened children were scurried away by anxious mothers, shuttered out the door of the adjoining cartoon showing and into respective minivans and SUVs, all memory of danger faded like a nightmare into the light of morning.
His breath snagged in his chest as he stood silhouetted, alone.
