My Wife Has a Removable Face
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Samantha told me about it on our third date. We were watching a movie on her couch when I made my move to kiss her. She whipped her hand in front of my face and blocked me.
“There’s something you need to know,” she said.
I braced myself. Here it comes. “I’m not ready for a relationship. Nothing to do with you, of course.” It was the absolute last thing I wanted to hear.
“I have a removable face,” she said.
That’s a new one. “You have a what now?” I was about to laugh, but she was deadly serious.
“I have a removable face.”
“Is that, like, a metaphor or something?”
“No. My face is literally removable. Look. Closely.” She lifted her chin and traced her jaw line with a finger. “You can see the seam.”
After admiring how beautiful her neck was for a dizzying moment, I leaned in for an inspection. It was hard to see, but it did look like there was a slightly unnatural transition there from her face to her throat. I grew dizzier, as a dozen questions rushed into my brain.
“Don’t bother asking why or how or anything like that,” said Samantha. “I can’t tell you that. If that’s going to be a problem, you should leave now. I’m letting you know this because I like you, and I want to take the next step, but this is non-negotiable.”
“Okay,” I said, unsure of what was happening. “Not a problem. So what? You have a removable face. Who cares? It looks good.”
“There’s something else. Once a day, usually in the evening, I have to remove the face and disinfect the inside of it. If I don’t, it will rot. This takes about an hour, give or take, depending on how my day went. During this time, you must never ever look at my real face. Never. Do you understand?”
“Y… yes. Got it. Don’t ask about it, don’t look at your … ‘real’ face.”
Samantha stood up. “Now, I’m going to go into the bathroom and clean my face. That will give you plenty of time to think about what I’ve told you. If you’re here when I’m done … that’s great. I would like that. But if you’re gone … I’ll understand.”
She turned and walked into her bedroom. I sat in stunned silence as the door closed.
I gave the thing some serious thought. It was possible that it was a joke of some kind. It was possible that it was a delusion. Was it possible that it was true? Well, it was certainly possible to transform an actor’s face with movie makeup, so I supposed it was possible that Samantha wore a “removable face” every day. Maybe she had had a horrible accident where her flesh had been mangled. Maybe her face had been melted by acid, or burned by fire, or the skin shorn off by heavy machinery. If it had, I would never know, because she would never tell me, and I would never see it.
I pictured a face of raw, naked muscle, rotting away. Could I kiss her, if that was what I was kissing? But wasn’t that what we all were, under the skin? Just muscle and bone and blood and squishy organs.
I paced around the living room, running my hand through my hair. I liked Samantha, a lot. She was smart, and funny … and beautiful. But was that beauty real? Did it count? Did it matter if it was ‘real’ or not? Was I being superficial even worrying about it?
When she came out of the bathroom, I was still there. I looked at her face. She smiled and I was in love.
We dated, we moved in together, we decided to get married.
For the most part, it was a normal relationship. During the day, it was easy to forget about the face altogether. It looked natural enough, and only in certain positions, in certain lights, was there ever any indication that it wasn’t natural.
But every night was the same. Samantha would close herself in the bathroom — sometimes for an hour, sometimes for two — and clean the inside of her face. The curiosity never left me. I would sit there and wonder what was under that face. I came so close to barging in on her a few times, but I never did.
I did occasionally ask her about it. About what, if anything, had happened. About how it was possible to make the removable face look so real. About what it really looked like underneath. I tried to coax her into showing me, assuring her that I loved her no matter what, and didn’t give a damn what her real face looked like. I was just curious, that’s all.
She never showed me or told me the story behind it. She didn’t get upset at me, unless I was really badgering her. She’d just shrug and say, “You know you can’t see it. You know I can’t tell you about it.”
I never told anybody about Samantha’s removable face. It’s not that she asked me not to. I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business.
Except once, I did tell somebody.
It was during my bachelor’s party. We had rented several cabins by the coast and spent the night drinking and packing our noses with powders we shouldn’t have been packing our noses with. Everyone else had passed out and the sun was creeping up from behind. I stood on the majestic cliffs with my friend Chris, looking down on the pacific waves crashing against the rocks.
Chris was my best friend; as close to a brother as I’d known. We’d grown up together, and visited each other at college, and spent the summers together. After college, we’d moved to different cities, but we stayed in touch.
Standing there on the cliffs, I told Chris about Samantha’s removable face. At first, he thought I was joking. Then he had a thousand questions, most of which I couldn’t answer.
“What’s underneath?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t that drive you crazy, not knowing?”
I shrugged. “Lots of stuff I don’t know. Don’t know how to do calculus, and I don’t know what happens when we die.”
“But dude, she’s about to be your wife. And you don’t even know what she looks like. I mean, I’d have to take a look. Like, you could set a camera up in the bathroom. That’s where she does it, right? Set up a camera and have a look and then you’ll know.”
I sighed. “Yeah, it drives me crazy. I’ve asked her a million times. But she told me I could never look. Gotta respect that, man, even if I don’t like it. That’s love.”
Chris was in town for business last week, and planned on spending the weekend at our house. That conversation had happened four years ago, and we hadn’t spoken about Samantha’s removable face since, despite keeping in close contact and seeing each other as often as we could.
It happened on Saturday evening. We were lounging lazily in the backyard, deep into the beer, having just finished with some grilled steaks, when I got a text from work.
“Goddammit,” I groaned. “I have to make a work call.”
“Seriously?” said Samantha, raising an artificial eyebrow. “On a Saturday night?”
“My biggest client, baby. Sorry.”
“It is what it is, I guess,” said my wife. “I’m going to head inside and get cleaned up. Chris? Are you okay just hanging out for a bit?”
Chris smiled. “I’ll be fine. Got my beer, got some weeds to pull in your garden. God knows your lazy-ass husband isn’t going to do it. Those tomatoes are choking to death. It’s a tragedy.”
I rolled my eyes and went into the side yard to make my call.
Fifteen minutes into it, I heard the screams coming from inside. Both my best friend and my wife were wailing in terror.
I dropped the phone and ran into the house and down the hall to our bedroom. The door to the master bathroom was wide open.
“Don’t come in!” screamed Samantha. “I don’t have my face on! Call an ambulance! He looked! Oh God, he looked!”
I wanted to rush into the bathroom, but I knew suddenly that that would be a mistake. Samantha didn’t want me to look at her real face not out of a sense of vanity, but for my own safety.
Chris staggered backwards, out of the bathroom. He was holding a straightened out paperclip, which he must’ve used to pick the privacy lock. He stabbed it again and again into his eyes, shouting gibberish.
“Call an ambulance!” my wife screamed. “Don’t come in here! He LOOKED!”
I turned and ran back to the side yard, where my phone was lying in the newly mowed grass. My client was still on the line, alarmed, asking what was happening, what all the screaming was. I hung up on him and called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, Chris was having a seizure in the hallway. Samantha was stroking his head, sobbing. Her face was on, but it had been done hastily, and everything looked a little off.
My world has been dark this past week.
Chris is in a psychiatric hospital under suicide watch. He’s completely blind and mostly catatonic, except when he slips into a violent, babbling mania. The doctors are optimistic that his state is temporary, but they don’t know the truth about what caused it.
I saw no good reason to tell them what had happened. Who would believe that one look at my wife’s real face would make somebody insane? At best, we would be the subjects of a long investigation; at worst, we would have to prove that what we were saying was true, by showing somebody Samantha’s face. Then the same thing would happen again, and what after that? I had no idea, and no interest in finding out. For Samantha’s part, I knew that she would never consent to show anybody her real face, no matter what the consequences of refusal were.
Samantha is in a state of her own. She still cleans the inside of her face, though not as regularly, and when she puts it back on, it’s always crooked now. It is beginning to smell a little bit.
I’ve tried to assure her that it wasn’t her fault. “He knew,” I said. “I told him that nobody was ever allowed to look at it. He knew and then he broke into the bathroom. This is not on you, baby. Please. Talk to me.”
“Not on me? That one look at my face makes people insane? Please. I just need some time alone.”
As for me, I am doing my best to hold it together. Do you know what’s strange, though? Despite what happened to Chris, I still find myself curious about what my wife’s real face looks like. More curious than ever, really.
This story was originally published on the subreddit ‘No Sleep’ by reddit user nslewis. It was the most upvoted story of July 2020, with 13,000 upvotes and 400 comments. He gave Make It Personal explicit permission to publish his story, and he was financially compensated for it. You can find the original post here.
About the author:
Nathaniel Lewis writes horror while living in Belfast, Maine, and staples his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He regularly publishes horror stories on the ‘No Sleep’ subreddit. Read more of his stories here.
