2nd Place

Sentence Contest Entry, November 19, 2025

Write a story that starts with this sentence: I didn’t wear the mask.

I didn’t wear the mask.

The others did—smiles stretched thin across their faces at the reunion, brittle as old cellophane—the thin camouflage over the scars they carried. Mine stayed bare, a wound exposed to the cold air. I wanted them to see me: the ghost who returned, not the man they preferred.

The truth is, the mask was for them. Not for me. I didn’t want to hide the tremor that ran down my arms when fireworks exploded like mortar rounds or shield my hollow, flat stare when someone asked, “How are you?” and expected the lie of a simple answer.

I remember the night patrol. The suffocating silence. The blast. How the sand swallowed screams, leaving only the echo of my own breath. I carried those echoes home, tucked inside my chest like shrapnel. They haunt my dreams—waking me in a cold sweat, heart pounding like the blast all over again. The VA called it PTSD. I called it the memory that wouldn’t die.

Without the mask, I was exposed, vulnerable. Every moving shadow in the grocery aisle became a sudden threat. Every slammed car door, a detonation I recoiled from. My daughter’s laughter—the bright, sudden sound, pure as silver bells—fragile, piercing, too bright to bear. And yet, I couldn’t clench up and hide it. To wear that mask felt like betrayal, like reburying my brothers who never came home.

So I walked into the world unguarded. I let the scars speak first. I told my story in fragments: sand, blood, the unending silence, survival. Some turned away, unable to look. Some listened, and in the listening, I found a strange kind of mercy.

The mask might have made me look whole. But without it, I’m honest. And honesty, jagged and slow, is the only peace I could claim—unmasked, scarred, but mine.

© Copyright 2025 J.R. Geiger. All rights reserved.