Sandra, 18+ only

December 18th 2278 was supposed to be a just another boring shitty day. Sandra was supposed to go to school, get picked on, maybe have a rock or two thrown at her, then she was supposed to come home and hide herself in her room until the next day and repeat it all over again. Maybe have her older brother Scott kick her around a bit when everyone could see so he could distance himself from her.
Her birth was her problem, there was an accident, her father refused to talk about it but all she knew was most of her deformities were from it and her mother died after. She got nine kinds of shit for the way she looked every day since she started going to public school and her only brother would act like they were not related. Who could blame him? Sandra was ugly and mutated, and she knew it.
Her feet were too large and she had no toes just like her missing right arm. She did not lose those during her birth, she just never had them. What she did lose was part of her face, chest, and shoulder. The trouble that happened left her without her right eye and a misshapen cheekbone where they had to remove the bone to get her eye out. It also left her half a shoulder and missing the top three ribs on her right side, those had to be removed and replaced with metal in order to get her out.
With all their technology she figured they should be able to give her some kind of prosthetic skin that had no scars at least. They did have the technology, but that was considered “beauty surgery” so it would cost a shitload that her parents could not afford. So she was left with long ugly scars crisscrossing her face, chest and shoulder from both the birthing complications and the surgeries to try and save her.
She wanted to die, she wished they just left her dead and saved her mother instead. She was twelve now, old enough to understand that life was a pile of shit and for her it was the dog's testicles of merry fuckament of hell. She could not bring herself to commit suicide because her father would be sad, he was the only one who cared about her, but she wanted to die. She ended up getting her wish.
It started like every other day. She woke up, took a shower and changed, ate breakfast, then fixed her long brown hair over the right side of her face to hide the worst of the scars and her mutilated cheek and eye socket. Even the kids at her bus stop for her last year of elementary school did the same thing as always. Calling her ugly bitch, freaky bitch, and any other stupid thing their little minds could add bitch to the end of.
They thought that cursing made them tougher and older. Sandra just laughed to herself, the cursing showed they were trying too hard and were too stupid to curse the right way. The whole bus ride she endured the insults and the occasional kick to her legs as someone passed her. She did not mind the kicking; her thick jeans took any edge off the pain. She always wore thick jeans because they kicked her and she vividly remembered the day she wore a skirt. A group of boys ripped it off her and burned it with a stolen lighter before locking her in the teacher’s closet. No she did not wear skirts anymore.
It was when she got to school that it got worse. The bus driver could watch on the bus but no one could at the school. She found herself frequently tied up in a janitor’s closet or stuffed inside different lockers. Always when the teacher’s were not looking they would grab her bag or her notes and rip them up. She went through four back packs in the last month.
She noticed something different about some of the kids who seemed dedicated to giving her hell at the back of the bus. They did not even look at her; they just sat in the back whispering to each other. She figured they would be back to what they always did when they got to the school; probably some new celebrity news gossip that was “hot” was circulating in the back. That or one of them got laid again, they were horny little bastards, in fact it was rare to find a virgin older than twelve now. Sandra could remember reading somewhere that back about as little as 50 years ago it wasn’t so bad. The internet was what most people who studied it concluded; they said that porn was everywhere so the kids knew what to do at such a young age.
She was still thinking about it ignoring all the insults the whole bus ride when they reached the school bus dock. The bus dock was a small one so she always got shoved and kicked around when they got off. She steeled herself for what she knew was coming and when it did not she was shocked and just stood there. Something was not right.
It happened while the dock was almost cleared out; she was always last because people kept pushing her back. The teacher on dock duty today left with the first of the students so no one was around to stop it. Five boys stood in her way with a girl standing in front of them. It was Stacy and her gang; no doubt she banged all of them at one point or another.
“Hello Sandra, you poor little bitch.” The usual shit Stacy did, except stopping her from going out the door, this was new. “Mark and I have been talking, and we kind of feel bad for you. You see, Mark and Simon see it as you are such an ugly little fuck that you will never get laid in your life. So we figured we would do you a favor and let you taste what you will miss.”
As she was talking the two biggest boys, Mark and Simon, were pushing her back into a corner of the dock. As she finished Mark grabbed her and pinned her to the floor. Sandra realized what they were going to do, they wanted to have a fuck fest, and she was going to be the center whether she wanted it or not. She could handle insults and the occasional pain but this? No! She refused to just let this happen.
She started kicking wildly and shouting at the top of her lungs when they started grabbing at her shirt. Mark calmly punched her a few times in the face and then stomach; this made her hair fall back. No one had ever seen that side of her face before, she kept it well hidden and none of them ever hit her in the face before.
“Holy fuck Mark, she is uglier than shit.” She could not tell who said that, she did not care, all that mattered was she got away. “Oh no you don’t you fucking ugly ass bitch.” She felt pain explode against her face again, then she felt her shirt savagely ripped off.
“For shit’s sake, is there any part of this bitch that is not uglier than fuck?” All that was going through her mind was panic and the need to get away. She started screaming again when she felt her jeans being attacked. “Mark shut her the fuck up, someone might hear all that noise.”
The fact that somehow Mark had gotten a big rock in his hand barely registered in Sandra’s mind as he swung it down on her head cutting off her screaming abruptly. The last thing she heard before she lost consciousness was Stacy freaking out in pure panic. “Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Holy fuck! HOLY FUCK MARK YOU KILLED HER!”
The police later found her body half naked in the drainage system savagely beaten to look like she fell from the dock. The police knew she did not fall, but that is what they told her father and the news. They said there was a problem with the surveillance and safety systems due to an electrical surge that they believe knocked her from the dock and the fall killed her. As far as the public knew her body was taken by the security ministry to perform an autopsy to find clues as to what may have caused it.
The government never performed the autopsy in any real sense of the word. They did try to repair her, from attempting to give her a new right arm to fixing her feet and giving her toes. None of it worked and it only made her look worse.
They started by cutting out the entire right side of her chest and attempted to make a synthetic bio-andro type of arm made of steel and bone plates. For reasons unknown her body refused to accept it and they ditched it and instead cut off her feet and replaced them with prosthetics. That failed too so they reattached her feet.
The level of decay made her feet go back on crooked and her ribs they took out unable to reattach. That is when they put her in the freezer taking her out once a month to give her an injection so she would age normally while frozen and beat her muscles with a meat tenderizer to make sure they did not shrivel and weaken.
While she was frozen they drew up plans to reconstruct her right ribs and shoulder and possibly insert an arm if it was possible. They also exposed her brain to radiation, ultraviolet rays, and whatever else they thought would make a good experiment. They cut up her brain as well taking parts that did specific jobs and put them in separate cases to study what their previous testing did.
Their only real success was in reconstructing her cheekbone and giving her a fake eye. They fixed her eyelid so she would blink normally too, but she wound never be able to see. As for her scars they just let them stay there, they saw no reason to waste money in making a test subject look less ugly.
For four years they did this and worse, then they finally figured out how to make her a functioning arm along with ribs and a shoulder. After they spent eight hours in surgery attaching everything they started taking her skin cells and growing new skin around her new metal parts. Of course they had to cut up her new smooth skin to make sure all the metal was in good condition while they alternated freezing her and electrically testing her arm.
It was nothing fancy, it just had simple functions and not much strength, and it was designed to act like a normal 16 year old girls arm. Of course they would add tracking chips, sensory chips, and remote access wires. After all they spent a good deal of time, people, and money on this so they would want as much monitoring as they could get.
They set a date to revive her, December 18th, if she lost her memory it would hold no importance. If she did not, she would be a little more secure thinking she was just knocked out. They never intended to tell her the year until they thought she was ready.
Sandra could faintly hear voices as her mind struggled on the edge of consciousness. “Vitals are stabilizing, Doctor Hemrick I think she is waking up.” She struggled not to lose herself; there was something about Stacy, something important. “She is fading, I need a Vitor Stim.” She realized that she was really sore, like she had been hit by a car. She also started to notice she could not feel the right side of her chest. That is when memory crashed back.
Waking with a start she tried to scream, to open her eyes, to move to get away. Pure panic filled her, she could not move, she could not even open her mouth or her eyes. “She is up, she will damage herself, someone sedate her.”
“No.” She was struggling harder now, she barely heard anything, she had to get away. “Sandra, it is ok, calm down.” She felt a hand gently touch her face and flinched back. “Please Sandra, calm down, you are safe now. It is over, that’s it calm down, it will be alright.”
Her first thought was it was a teacher but when she managed to open her eye and recover from the first painful moments of blinding light she saw a face she did not recognize. She allowed herself to calm down and take in her surroundings. The man was standing over her and he was wearing a slab grey windbreaker. There were other people too, but they did not register in her mind once she realized she was strapped down.
“I am going to remove the restraints now.” He leaned over her and started unfastening the straps when she realized she was naked. She was naked and appeared to be more maturely developed; she kept thinking she was in shock. It was almost if she had aged several years while she was knocked unconscious. “Can you sit up? Don’t try to speak, just nod or shake your head, but do it slowly.”
She did not understand any of this, but she obeyed and slowly nodded. She needed help from three people to sit up, she shuddered where she could feel the man’s hand on her back suddenly cut off around the middle as if she had no feeling left, not even numbness; like it was simply gone.
“Can you feel this?” He asked her as he touched her left shoulder. She nodded then he repeated his question but touched her right shoulder. She shook her head. “The nerve stim might not be working. Can you feel this?” He kept asking her as he touched down her back on both sides. She nodded when he touched her left and shook her head when he touched her right.
“Ok I am going to touch you in a spot you might take as inappropriate, but I need to check if you can feel anything in your chest. Are you ok with that?” If she could move her jaw it would have dropped. No one ever talked to her that way; they would just grab her and be done with it. No! She would never be touched there again. She shook her head to fast and almost passed out from the nausea it created. “Whoa, careful, you will pass out if you move to fast. Now if Sung over there checked you, would you be ok with that?” She shook her head again, and made sure not to move to fast.
Sighing he walked over to the lady he called Sung and started whispering. She suddenly caught a sense of exasperation and his voice went through her head. ‘…an’t knock her out to check, she needs to be awake but she won’t let use touch her to find ou…’ She gave a start at this sudden assault in her mind; it sounded like her was right next to her. Her start moved her to fast and she almost passed out again falling sideways on the bed.
The three people that helped her up were there immediately picking her up and setting her in a wheel chair. “Take her to a room.” Was all the man in the windbreaker said.
They carted her through a building with whitewash walls but she was still struggling to remain awake and noticed none of it. She did not notice when they placed her on a bed and left turning off the lights after putting a surveillance sphere above the door. They had no reason not to watch her now that she was awake.
After she managed to get a grip on herself the first thing she noticed was the presence of the sphere. It emitted a soft pale glow from the power source inside of it. The sphere had a 360 degree angle of everything, and they were everywhere. The police liked to use them along with the other ministries of the government, though why one would be watching her she had not a clue.
The room was to dark to make anything out so she instead started taking inventory of what she knew. Stacy and her boyfriend Mark and their gang tried to rape her when she was knocked out. She had no idea if they managed to rape her or not. Absently she wiped a piece of hair out of her eye and stopped dead. She used her right arm, but she did not have a right arm.
She turned slowly and felt along with her left arm, and she definitely had a right arm now too, though it had no feeling. This was starting to freak her out more than just a little bit. She remembered being hit with a rock and now she woke up with an arm she never had before, what the fuck, was all that went through her mind.
Now that she thought about it, a lot of things were not making sense. The wrong side a area of her face hurt, she had an arm she was born without, and people were being nice to her. None of it made a damn bit of sense. She started remembering her shock at seemingly have matured several years too. Something not natural was going on.
She started to feel panic swell up again and crushed it before it started; she needed to think, and hard. She started to go over what she knew in her mind slowly trying to come up with a solution. She only got as far as this might be dangerous so she should play carefully, react and do whatever they would expect.
She thought that she must have been saved by a teacher or maybe a custodian after she was knocked out. It did not really matter, what mattered is she felt taller and older than 12 years. Then there was that moment when she could feel an emotion that was not hers and almost like someone was talking to her but in her head. And last, she had two arms again when she clearly remembered having only one. That was it, she was going crazy she figured.

Again, please please please please go through and add the line breaks where they belong, at the end of paragraphs. The pacing here is delicious, but it's ruined a bit by the blocks of text. Copying and pasting from Word only helps you so much.

So! Now that I got that annoying, nattering little statement out of the way let's get to the actual meat of the writing! Your description of your protagonist had my eyebrows furrowed a bit, so great job there painting a picture of her deformity -- particularly the features of her face. I'm not sure if objectification was your purpose, but I found myself reading Sandra more as a thing, and not a human being -- especially considering the detail you went into the physical look and nature of her, and not so much on her personality and who she was as an individual.

Because honestly, who in the story cared about that?

There's no happy ending in this story. It's a brief parable of destruction and revulsion. You caught my attention for its duration, and that's really all that I can ask for.

.. besides putting spaces in the text.

haha. I will be honest, I never copied and pasted from word before so I had no idea it would do that. I will make it better next time, I promise.

also, thank you for the review, I was going to turn this in to a novel, but I am unsure if it is a good idea. So I am going to ask you, do you want more?

No. I really don't.

And that isn't mean to be an insult, and it isn't meant to offend you. Let me explain. This is a story that lends itself almost perfectly to being a one-shot, or a short story. You have accurately captured the disgust and the life of your main character. You have successfully taken me on the journey of her miserable existence, and then rounded it out in the end to leave me with a feeling of almost modernistic dissatisfaction.

Not a lot of writers can do that.

If you were to turn this into a novel, Stone_Dog, you would be making a paragraph out of what is already a simple, short, and very powerful sentence. Do you understand what I mean by that? With the story's brief title ("Sandra") you've painted this disgusting, revolting picture that has a start, a middle, and an end. To extend it past its perimeters would do the writing a disservice.

Don't make this into a novel. Keep it as a short story. Polish it up, make it prettier, even as it becomes more hard to read.

Hope that helped!

Stone Dog,

I just read your story. And, all I can really say is "Damn!" That is a truly miserable existence, and definitely a life worth leaving behind.

On another note, I agree with Sato (ViceVersus). You really should take the time and clean it up a bit. This would be a wonderful Short story and I'm sure someone would love to publish it for you. But there is more work to be done. You should get a friend, or three (I have like 9) to be an editor(s). Have them read through it and correct misspellings and sentence structure. Then, have them give you ideas on how to make the story flow a little.

Now, don't get me wrong, the story is sickeningly awesome (meant in more ways than one). And, I wouldn't change what you have, so much as the way you've worded some of it. To me, and maybe only to me, it seems like -- I don't know -- an actor who is reading from a script and you can tell they are reading. But, not all of it is that way, just saying some of it is.
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Also, I wouldn't change it into a novel. I mean, it could very well be epic to go throughout what could happen to this miserable wretch of a girl. Turn her into a all power cyborg, have more and more calamities fall upon her, even seeing her get back at the cretins that caused all this. But, I think the story is perfect the way it is. Short, succinct, and leaves you, as Sato said "almost modernistic dissatisfaction."

But, other than those nitpicks, I think this is a wonderful, if not disturbing piece of art. You have a very vivid imagination and I think that you could go far with a lil polishing and some more practice. Keep it up!

thank you for the review, I unfortunately do not have any friends that like to read (unless it has more pictures than words) so I am SOL on that part. I use the internet for feedback as it is really my only option.

Like I said, I was debating, but I really would rather not go through the fun part of coming up with more story and you both are right where it really would not work to well. I also have almost nil experience in writing stories, I usually write poetry. I think I will try at least one more time to write a story before I decide to stop or not.

Once again thank you for the review :)