It’s early.

There is a museum, cornered on all sides by other buildings, the entrance poking out in an indoor alleyway. Slate roofs line the horizon, faint color blushing the clouds, though morning won’t strike for a few hours. The time ticks by on a grandfather clock in the corner.

The faceless girl and silhouette stare at each other. They do not speak, and they do not move, instead acknowledging and savoring each other’s silence as the security guards mill about and the cleaning staff sweep.

The silhouette figure is new, donated to the museum by a decorated name last month, and hung between two other works in the gallery. A light shines behind her, and she casts her shadow against the wooden floor detailed in a tall room, but the vagueness is apparent. She is not a masterpiece. Visitors rarely gather around her or gawk in awe of her beauty as they do with the faceless girl.

The faceless girl knows no name and has yet to claim one as her own. Her definitive entitlement is at issue, carved into the brass nameplate hanging below, perpetually out of reach. She knows herself through the sound of a dozen cameras snapping her photo and the squeak of the rag polishing her display; she sits in the finest glass case in the museum. In one hand, she holds a cello with gold, green, and brown streaks igniting it against the background. Her portrait, save her featureless face, bursts with color while the silhouette fades into the shadow. She does not have eyes — for she has no features at all — but she understands the room around her through the brushing of feet against the floor and excited voices against the wall. She is a masterpiece.

Dust collects in the air surrounding the silhouette, illuminated by a perimeter of sunlight, but the faceless girl remains unlit. A lighting fixture hangs above her canvas, one that a clerk will surely turn on momentarily, but she does not yet know the taste of sweet sunshine.

As the sun wanders across the adorned walls, stretching and climbing into the copper sky, two men in identical uniforms trudge into the room, pausing only to glance at the faceless girl. They stop at the silhouette, assessing her display with undiminished apathy. She grimaces at their dusty boots, their waxy faces, their wrinkled name tags. She cringes at their cold gazes and their calloused hands that hold such immense power.

After exchanging a few transactional words, they pry her away from the warm, white walls, her frame lifting, betraying her to these men, and no alarms blare. The faceless girl cannot watch, for she cannot see. Though she listens, she feels tears that cannot fall, a sob she cannot scream. The men tuck the silhouette into a bag and wheel her out on a cart, leaving a palpable loneliness in her wake. The faceless girl has seen pieces enter and exit the museum like the sun rises and the night falls, but only the silhouette, with her indefinite form, understood the featureless girl. Only, people fawned at the girl’s indefiniteness while the silhouette was shunned, not pretty enough to warrant permanence.

The room is, once again, met by silence.

When the grandfather clock strikes nine times, the museum begins to fill. Pairs of boots and heels flow into the space where the silhouette had just stood. The seteé in the center of the room welcomes new bodies to offer ease, and the quiet shudders into a cacophony of pattering: feet against the floor, lips whispering thoughts and ideas. Groups of watchers form around the faceless girl, drawn to her magnificence, but she does not glimmer as she should. The people watching her begin to wonder why she has gone sullen and gaunt. If only she had eyes, they could trace her gaze to the empty glass display across the room.

 

Filiz Fish is a current high school sophomore living in the Los Angeles area. She has adored storytelling from a young age, prompting her to participate in various creative writing workshops through organizations, such as Writopia Lab, a national non-profit that fosters writing among teens. She developed her writing further at the Interlochen Center for the Arts during their 2022 and 2023 creative writing summer programs and founded the Kalem Project, a non-profit dedicated to teaching creative writing to refugee children. She loves writing flash fiction and creative nonfiction. Beyond her writerly interests, one can often find Filiz reading or spending time with her tabby cat, Tarcin.