Skin Deep

When Jordan Reyes opened her eyes in the hospital, she didn’t remember the fire—just the heat. An overwhelming pressure, a roar, and then nothing. She woke to the sharp scent of antiseptic, the rasp of bandages against skin, and a numb ache that stretched from her jaw to her shoulder.

The right side of her face was gone.

Not literally, but close enough. The nurse, trying to be gentle, told her the words she would come to dread: “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”

Jordan was 34, a paramedic in Albuquerque. She was used to emergencies. She had pulled people out of wrecks, talked men off ledges, and once gave CPR in a grocery store parking lot. But nothing prepared her for the moment she saw her reflection in a blackened window during her transfer to the rehab unit.

Her cheek, once sharp and smooth, was now ridged with deep, uneven scar tissue. Her ear was partially reconstructed but looked artificial. The skin grafts on her neck were tight and discolored. Her mouth drooped slightly on one side, and talking was slow, clumsy work.

The fire had started in an apartment she’d entered to save a trapped child. The boy made it out alive. Jordan nearly didn’t.

The media had called her a hero. The headlines said things like “Bravery in the Blaze” and “Angel in Uniform.” But after the story faded and the reporters left, Jordan was left with the quiet truth: she couldn’t look in the mirror without flinching.

She left the department three months after being discharged. She told her captain she needed time, but she knew she wouldn’t go back. Her presence made others uncomfortable. Not intentionally—they just didn’t know what to say. Some avoided eye contact. Others tried too hard to act like nothing had changed.

Her girlfriend, Mia, tried to be supportive. “You’re still the same person,” she said often, too often. Jordan wanted to believe it, but she felt hollow. What did it matter who she *used* to be?

Mia left six months later. Not because of the scars—at least, not directly. But Jordan had changed. She’d stopped laughing. Stopped going out. Stopped letting herself be touched. Some nights, she slept on the floor just to feel something different.

She stopped seeing people. Stopped answering calls. The only ones she returned were from her mother, who spoke gently but didn’t push. Her mother had once told her, when Jordan came out in high school, “You don’t need the world’s approval to be who you are.” Jordan didn’t realize until now how true—and how difficult—that was.

The turning point came by accident. Her therapist suggested a local artist who worked with burn survivors to create visual diaries—portraits, masks, even sculptures—as a form of therapy. Jordan resisted for weeks.

But eventually, curiosity won.

The studio was tucked behind an old warehouse, full of half-finished busts and strange, beautiful metalwork. The artist, a woman named Sita, had lost her hand in a car crash and worked with a high-tech prosthetic. She greeted Jordan with a smile that didn’t carry even a flicker of discomfort.

Sita didn’t ask about the fire. She asked what Jordan saw when she looked at herself. “Not what’s there,” she said. “What *you* see.”

Jordan thought about it. “A mistake,” she said, quietly.

Sita just nodded. “Okay. Let’s build from there.”

Over the following weeks, Jordan molded clay, cut metal, and wrote journal entries that became fragments of sculptures. She began to see her face not as ruined, but changed. Marked by survival. She started going to group meetings for burn victims. She spoke for the first time at one, her voice shaking but steady.

“I thought no one would ever see me the same way,” she said. “But maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’m not the same. Maybe that’s the point.”

A year after the fire, Jordan displayed her first sculpture in a local exhibit. It was abstract—half of a face, smooth on one side, jagged and scarred on the other. But both sides were connected by a single copper thread that ran through the center.

She stood beside it that night, unsure what to expect. A young girl came up, no older than ten, her face pocked with acne and insecurity.

“Is that supposed to be you?” she asked.

Jordan nodded.

“It’s really cool,” the girl said. “It looks strong.”

That night, Jordan went home and looked in the mirror again. For the first time in over a year, she didn’t look away.