I Saw The Scar Glow
Magnetic rotcore. The tape clicks into the player with a heavy chunk, and static floods the screen—white lines writhing like worms. A tracking error skips once, then resolves into an image: a man standing shirtless in a motel bathroom, staring into the mirror. The timestamp reads “NOV 10, 1994. 3:06 AM.” His jaw is wide, his eyes hollow, and something faint glows beneath the skin of his chest.
He’s whispering. You can barely hear him under the hum of the motel’s fluorescent light.
“It’s not a scar. Not anymore.”
His fingers trace the jagged burn mark running from clavicle to navel. It pulses—softly. Like a heartbeat, but sideways.
REWIND
The footage jumps back. Earlier that week. Same man, different motel. He’s younger here, or maybe just more alive. He's with a woman. Face blurred, even when she looks straight at the camera. No name. No voice. She applies a warm towel to a stitched-up wound on his chest. Says something you can’t hear. The camera zooms slightly, involuntarily, as if drawn by heat.
Then the screen glitches. For 0.3 seconds, the frame fills with something else: a geometric figure made of blocks, rotating endlessly. Inside it, his face—cracked, distant, glowing like reactor glass.
FAST FORWARD
He’s alone now. Always alone. The glow has grown. It shows through his shirt. Through motel walls. In one clip, a neighbor knocks, confused. Says, “Your TV’s shining through the drywall.” But there’s no TV. Just the hum of whatever’s inside him now.
FILE: TAPE LOG 6 — POLICE EVIDENCE ARCHIVE
The footage here is degraded. A camcorder left running in a wrecked rental car on the side of a rural highway. The windshield has melted in a perfect circle. A deer lies 30 feet away, hairless and blind, twitching.
The man—our man—is sitting in the front seat, eyes shut. He looks… peaceful. But the glow from his chest is now flooding the car, casting sharp-edged shadows on the ceiling. Etched on the glass are symbols that weren’t there before. One looks like a house. One like a block. One like a woman’s mouth.
PAUSE
Then a title card in lo-fi VHS font:
“THE SCAR WAS NEVER A WOUND.” “IT WAS AN INVITATION.” “THEY ONLY APPEAR TO THE BROKEN.”
FINAL SCENE
The last footage is from a CCTV camera in a rural storage unit facility. Timestamp: NOV 16, 1994. 3:33 AM.
He’s walking into Unit 6. Behind him, dragging, is something massive—block-shaped, like a concrete room with no windows. It emits no sound. Just light. The same glow from his chest, now pulsing like it’s alive.
He opens the unit.
Inside is another one of him. Not a twin. Him. Identical, but unscarred. Sleeping. Hooked up to IVs and cathode cables.
The glowing version walks in, looks at the sleeping self, and says—clear this time, no static—
“I’m returning the body. Keep the glow.”
The tape ends with the hum of the light, then silence, then a title:
SCAR GLOW “Do not fast-forward your healing. It grows teeth.”
The scar began to glow two days after she told him the truth.
It wasn’t the kind of truth that breaks something. It was the kind that warps it—quietly, deeply, like a hairline crack in a windshield that spreads while you're not looking.
The room had no reaction. Neither did he. Not until later. The glow started in the mirror.
He noticed it while brushing his teeth. A faint, flickering heat beneath the skin of his chest, where the old scar ran—jagged, accidental, long healed and forgotten. The kind of wound you carry like a vague note from an earlier version of yourself.
Now it pulsed. Softly at first. Like a warning light on an obsolete machine.
The motel room was beige and sour. The television didn’t work unless you whispered to it, and even then it only played static layered over strange commercials that ended too early. In one of them, a man offered a free trial for “reality reentry.” In another, a deer sat in a dentist chair while a woman hummed and cut her own hair with garden shears.
He stopped sleeping. The scar got brighter.
On the fifth night, he woke to find his clothes gently rearranged. The zipper of his jacket bent to the left instead of the right. His belt, looped through the wrong direction. The motel wallpaper seemed to crawl with mold that spelled out letters, though they never stayed long enough to read. The mirror showed someone standing just behind him, always turning out to be no one.
He peeled back his shirt. The scar was no longer a scar. It was a screen. Small, square, sunken just below the sternum. In it, he saw footage of himself—footage that had never been recorded.
He was in a hallway that didn’t exist. He was knocking on a door he’d never seen. Behind the door: the same woman, but younger, softer, looking up at him like he was someone else entirely.
She says something in the footage. No sound. Her lips move like this:
“You were meant to stay gone.”
The motel manager knocks on the door at 3 a.m.
“You’ve been here too long,” she says, though he only checked in three nights ago.
He asks if the walls have always made that sound. She squints.
“What sound?”
He doesn’t respond. The sound is hard to describe—like something heavy dragging across tile, like furniture being moved on another floor that doesn’t exist.
He closes the door. The mirror now shows two scars. One on his chest, glowing. The other on his forehead, faint and new. He touches it. It pulses like the first one did, before it opened.
That night, the TV turns on by itself. No remote. No plug. Just light. His scar responds—brightens. The footage playing is of a block floating in an empty sky. The block turns slowly, without sound. In one window, he sees himself sitting at a desk, writing this down.
He throws a chair at the screen.
The screen cracks, but the block keeps turning.
In the final hours, the woman returns—not in person, but as a hum. Her voice folded into static, speaking from the motel light fixture. From the toilet tank. From inside the pillows.
“You are only what glows through the damage,” she says.
“The wound was never healed. It was rewired.”
He sits on the carpet and watches his chest flicker like a dying cassette. He doesn’t remember who he was before the scar. He doesn’t know what the footage inside him is trying to show.
But he knows this:
Something is trying to leave him.
And something else is trying to take its place.
The motel is silent now. No guests. No manager. Just a single locked storage unit behind the building, humming faintly. Inside, a block-shaped room floats two inches above the floor. In its center: a man, asleep, shirtless, glowing faintly from two scars.
The VHS beside him is labeled SCAR GLOW in smudged red marker.
You press play.
You already know how it ends.