Last year, we asked our teen writers to tell us a story about a scar, true or made-up, in any form they like. Here we present the winner and finalists:
WINNER
"The Scar That Will Not Close"
I used to be a child.
Then I saw a child pulled from rubble in Gaza,
white dust on his face like ash
from a birthday candle no one got to blow out.
Then a child in Sudan,
hunger carved into her ribs.
Then a child in Congo
holding her mother's hand.
Or what was left of it.
Then a child in Ukraine,
standing in snow
where her home used to be.
I used to be a child.
Now I'm sixteen and I've watched more children die
then birthdays I've had.
There was this video. Three seconds.
A hand reaching up through concrete.
Still moving. Still hoping.
Then it stopped.
Something tore open in my chest. I cried until I had nothing left.
And I don't know, something in me
just broke. And stayed broken.
Now I can't scroll past anything.
I hear them and I carry their names in my chest
like shrapnel I will never remove.
The scar is this:
I know what a child sounds like when they're dying.
In Arabic. Swahili. Ukrainian. Sango.
The pitch of it.
How it cracks.
How it calls for a mother who can't come.
I can't close this wound.
Not until the last child stops crying.
Not until someone with power
finally chooses mercy.
Some nights I wonder
if I'll ever stop hearing them.
I used to be a child.
Now I'm a witness.
And this scar will bleed
until they come home.
Sara Abdelsamad, 10th grade
FINALISTS
"Fault Line"
My scar is a white line across my fingerprint. It’s where the wire bit.
My mother sculpted with copper wire, bending silent birds and thorns for our home. Her art was her only voice. I lived in its quiet, sharp beauty.
The silence broke over a ‘C’ in Art. She looked from my report card to me, her eyes filled with a sculptor’s disappointment. At her worktable, she took my hand. Not gently.
“This,” her hands said, “is truth.”
She pressed my finger to a taut copper length. With her other hand, she pulled a shorter wire across it—a swift, cutting demonstration of tension.
The wire snapped.
The recoiling end lashed my skin, a searing line. A perfect bead of blood rose against the copper. She stared, horrified, at the flaw in her lesson and in my flesh. The only sound was my breath.
She never worked again. The sculptures gathered dust, then vanished.
The scar she left isn’t the memory of the cut, but of the silence that followed. It is the ghost of her voice, the art she killed, the love she couldn’t shape into safety. A permanent record, etched into my identity, of the moment her precise world broke and cut the one thing she never meant to shape: me.
Abdul Rehman, 10th grade
By the time the scar settled into me, summer had already begun its slow performance of excess. We wore our days loosely then, skin bare and careless, believing ourselves immune to consequence. The injury itself arrived without ceremony: an elbow split on the edge of a dock, the wood old and unvarnished. I remember the brief astonishment more than the pain, the way the skin opened as if it’d always intended to.
The lake received the blood without comment. It bloomed briefly in the water, a thin red cloud dissolving into blue, and for an instant, I felt absurdly chosen, like I had given something of value. The others laughed somewhere behind me, their voices skimming the surface, and I understood how easily damage could be mistaken for bravery.
The wound closed, as wounds tend to, but the lake didn’t forget. Each time I returned, the scar warmed before the rest of me, a small private heat. In a certain light, it seemed to glow faintly, pale and insistent, trying to remember its own beginning. I began to suspect the lake had taught it this, that bodies learn their habits from the places that witness them most closely.
Years later, long after the summers thinned into memory, the scar still tightens when I think of those days. It’s not an ugly scar, just a narrow line where youth once believed it could pass through the world untouched.
Grace Yang, 11th grade
In South Bronx nights, when flames made orphans of the dark,
there walked a man named Blue,
whose face bore the mark of fire’s hand.
Half-lit, half-ruined,
his face did stand as a testament
to all a mortal frame may suffer,
yet endure.
The folk, in wonder mixed with fright,
did christen him Picasso,
for the flame had split his features
as a painter might,
dividing sorrow from the man he was before.
Yet he, unmoved,
did wear the name as one might wear a cloak
stitched, not by choice,
but by the hour which fate struck its blow.
Half-scarred, half-whole,
yet entirely his.
And in his passing,
whispers rose like embers in the wind:
Look upon the one the inferno failed to claim.
Annabelle Lang, 12th grade
