by Unknown
“How could you, Helene?”
“Look at it,” Helene said, lifting the bag. “How could I not?”
Denise’s eyes were captured again by the golden glow of the leather. She felt her indignation begin to melt.
“But it’s human skin!” she said, as much to remind herself of that hideous fact as to drag it out into the open.
“Not human … at least according to the Supreme Court”
“I don’t care what those old fails say, it’s still human skin!”
Helene shook her head. “Fetal skin, Denise. From abortions. And it’s legal. If fetuses were legally human, you couldn’t abort them. So the Supreme Court finally had to rule that their skin could be used.”
“I know all about that, Helene.”
Who didn’t know about Ranieri v. Verlaine! The case had sent shock waves around the country. Around the world! Denise’s church had formed a group to go down to Washington to protest it. As a matter of fact—
“Helene, you were out on Pennsylvania Avenue with me demonstrating against the ruling! How could you—?”
Helene shrugged. “Things change. I’m still antiabortion, but after we moved away from Fairfield and I lost contact with our old church group, I stopped thinking about it. Our new friends aren’t into that sort of stuff and so I, well, just kind of drifted into other things.”
“That’s fine, Helene, but how does that bring you to buying something like …” She pointed to the bag and, God help her. She still wanted to run her hands over it. “This!”
“I saw one. We went to a reception—some fund-raiser for the homeless, I think—and I met a woman who had one. I fell in love with it immediately. I hemmed and hawed, feeling guilty for wanting it, but finally I went out and bought myself one.” She beamed at Denise. “And believe me, I’ve never regretted it.”
“God, Helene.”
“They’re already dead, Denise. I don’t condone abortion any more than you do, but it’s legal and that’s not likely to change. And as long as it stays legal, these poor little things are going to be killed day after day, week after week, hundreds and thousands and millions of them. We have no control over that. And buying foet accessories will not change that one way or another. They’re already dead.”
Denise couldn’t argue with Helene on that point. Yes, they were dead, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. But
“But where do they sell this stuff?” Denise said. “I’ve never once seen it displayed or even advertised.”
“Oh, it’s in all the better stores, but it’s very discreet. They’re not stupid. Foet may be legal but it’s still controversial. Nobody wants trouble, nobody wants a scene. I mean, can you imagine a horde of the faithful hausfraus from St. Paul’s marching through Bergdorf’s? I mean really!”
Denise had to smile. Yes, that would be quite a sight. “I guess it would be like the fur activists.”
“Even worse,” Helene said, leaning closer. “You know why those nuts are anti-fur? Because they’ve never had a fur coat. It’s pure envy with them. But foet? Foet is tied up with motherhood and apple pie. It’s going to take a long time for the masses to get used to foet. So until then, the market will be small and select. Very select.”
Denise nodded. Select. Despite all her upbringing, all her beliefs, something within her yearned to be part of that small, select market. And she hated herself for it.
“Is it very expensive?”
Helene nodded. “Especially this shade,” she said, caressing her bag. “It’s all hand sewn. No two pieces are exactly alike.”
“And where’d you buy yours?”
Helene was staring at her appraisingly. “You’re not thinking of starting any trouble, are you?”
“Oh, no. No, of course not. I just want to look. I’m … curious.”
More of that appraising stare. Denise wanted to hide behind the settee.
“You want one, don’t you?”
“Absolutely not! Maybe it’s morbid on my part, but I’m curious to see what else they’re doing with … foet these days.”—
“Very well,” Helene said, and it occurred to Denise that Helene had never said very well when she’d lived in Fairfield. “Go to Blume’s—it’s on Fifth, a little ways up from Gucci’s.”
“I know it.”
“Ask for Rolf. When you see him, tell him you’re interested in some of his better accessories. Remember that: ‘better accessories.’ He’ll know what you’re looking for.”
Denise passed Blume’s three times, and each time she told herself she’d keep right on walking and find a taxi to take her down to the train and back to Fairfield. But something forced her to turn and go back for one more pass. Just one more pass. On the fourth, she ducked into a slot in the revolving door and swung into the warm, brightly lit interior.
Where was the harm in just looking?
When he appeared, Rolf reminded her of a Rudolf Valentino wannabe—stiletto thin in his black pinstriped suit, with plastered-down black hair and mechanical pencil mustache. He was a good ten years younger and barely an inch taller than Denise, and had delicate, fluttery hands, lively eyes, and a barely audible voice.
He gave Denise a careful up-and-down after she’d given him the code words, then extended his arm to the right.
“Of course. This way, please.”
He led her to the back of the store, down a narrow corridor, and then through a glass door into a small, indirectly lit showroom. Denise found herself surrounded by glass shelves lined with handbags, belts, even watch bands. All made of foet.
“The spelling is adapted from the archaic medical term,” Rolf said, closing the door behind them.
“Really?” She noticed he didn’t actually say the word: foetal.
“Now ... what may I show you?”
“May I browse a little?”
“Mais oui. Take your time.”
Denise wandered the pair of aisles, inspecting the tiers of shelves and all the varied items they carried. She noticed something. Almost everything was black or very dark.
“The bag my friend showed me was lighter color.” “Ah, yes. I’m sorry, but we’re out of white. That goes first, you know.”
“No, this wasn’t white. It was more of a pale, golden brown.”
“Yes. We call that white. After all, it’s made from white hide. It’s relatively rare.”
‘Hide’?”
He smiled. “Yes. That’s what we call the … material.”
The material: white fetal skin.
“Do you have any pieces without all the stitching? Something with a smoother look?”
“I’m afraid not. I mean, you have to understand, we’re forced by the very nature of the source of the material to work with little pieces.” He gestured around. “Notice, too, that there are no gloves. None of the manufacturers wants to be accused of making kid gloves.”
Rolf smiled. Denise could only stare at him.
He cleared his throat. “Trade humor.”
Little pieces.
Hide.
Kid gloves.
Suddenly she wanted to run, but she held on. The urge passed.
Rolf picked up a handbag from atop a nearby display case. It was a lighter brown than the others, but still considerably darker than Helene’s.
“A lot of people are going for this shade. It’s reasonably priced. Imported from India.”
“Imported? I’d have thought there’d be plenty to go around just from the U.S.”
He sighed. “There would be if people weren’t so provincial in their attitudes about giving up the hides. The tanneries are offering a good price for them. I don’t understand some people. Anyway, we have to import from the Third World. India is a great source.”
Denise picked up another, smaller bag of similar shade. So soft, so smooth, just like Helene’s.
“Indian, too?”
“Yes, but that’s a little more expensive. That’s male.” She looked at him questioningly.
Denise put it down and picked up a similar model, glossy ink black. This would be a perfect accent to so many of her ensembles.
“Now that’s—”
“Please don’t tell me anything about it,” Denise said. “Just the price.”
He told her. She repressed a gasp. That would just about empty her account of the money she’d put aside for all her fashion bargains. On one item. Was it worth it?
She reached into her old pocketbook, the now dowdy-looking Fendi, and pulled out her gold MasterCard. Rolf smiled and lifted it from her fingers.
Minutes later she was back among the hoi polloi in the main shopping area, but she wasn’t one of them. She’d been where they couldn’t go, and that gave her special feeling.
Before leaving Blume’s, Denise put her Fendi in the store bag and hung the new foet bag over her arm. The doorman gave her a big smile as he passed her through to the sidewalk.
The afternoon was dying and a cold wind had sprung up. She stood in the fading light with the wind cutting her like an icy knife and suddenly she felt horrible.
I’m toting a bag made from the skin of an unborn child.
Why? Why had she bought it? What had possessed her to spend that kind of money on such a ghoulish artifact? Because that was just what it was—not an accessory, an artifact.
She opened the store bag and reached in to switch the new foet for her trusty Fendi. She didn’t want to be seen with it.
And Brian! Good God, how was she going to tell Brian?
“What?”
Brian never talked with food in his mouth. He had better manners than that. But Denise had just told him about Helene’s bag and at the moment his mouth, full of food, hung open as he stared at her with wide eyes.
“Brian, please close your mouth.”
He swallowed. “Helene? Helene had something made of human skin?”
… not human … at least according to the Supreme Court …
“It’s called foet, Brian.”
“I know damn well what it’s called! They could call it chocolate mousse but it would still be human skin. They give it a weird name so people won’t look at them like they’re a bunch of Nazis when they sell it! Helene—how could she?”
… they’re already dead, Denise …
Brian’s tone became increasingly caustic. Denise felt almost as if he were talking to her.
“I don’t believe it! What’s got into her? One person kills an unborn child and the other makes the poor thing’s skin into a pocketbook! And Helene of all people! My God, is that what a big pay raise and moving to Greenwich does to you?”
Denise barely heard Brian as he ranted on. Thank God she’d had the good sense not to tell him about her own bag. He’d have been apoplectic.
No doubt about it. She was going to return that bag as soon as she could get back into the city.
Denise stood outside Blume’s, dreading the thought of facing Rolf in that tiny showroom and returning her foet, her beautiful foet.
She pulled it out of the shopping bag and stared at it. Exquisite. Strange how a little extra time could turn your attitude around. The revulsion that had overwhelmed her right after she’d bought it had faded. Perhaps because every day during the past week—a number of times each day, to be honest—she’d taken it out and looked at it. held it, caressed it. Inevitably, its true beauty had shown through and captured her. Her initial beguilement had returned to the fore.
But the attraction went beyond mere beauty. This sort of accessory said something. Exactly what, she wasn’t sure. But she knew a bold fashion statement when she saw one. This, however, was a statement she didn’t have quite the nerve to make. At least not in Fairfield. So different here in the city. The cosmopolitan atmosphere allowed the elite to flash their foet—she liked the rhyme. She could be SO very in here. But it would make her so very out in Fairfield—out of her home, too, most likely.
Small minds. What did they know about fashion? In a few years they’d all be buying it. Right now, only the leaders wore it. And for a few moments she’d been a member of that special club. Now she was about to resign.
As she turned to enter Blume’s, a Mercedes stretch limo pulled into the curb beside her. The driver hopped out and opened the door. A shapely brunette of about Denise’s age emerged. She was wearing a dark gray short wrap coat of llama and kid over a long-sleeved crepe-jersey catsuit. In her hand was a black clutch purse with the unmistakable stitching of foet. Her eyes flicked down to Denise’s new handbag, then back up to her face. She smiled. Not just a polite passing-stranger smile, but a warm, we-know-we’ve-got-style smile.
As Denise returned the smile, all the doubts within her melted away as if they had never been. Suddenly she knew she was right. She knew what really mattered, what was important, where she had to be, fashion-wise.
And Brian? Who said Brian had to know a thing about it? What did he know about fashion anyway?
Denise turned and strode down Fifth with her new foet bag swinging from her arm for all the world to see.
Screw them all. It made her feel good, like she was somebody. What else mattered?
She really had to make a point of getting into the city more often.
THE CHRYSALIS
Lois Tilton
The majority of stories submitted to Borderlands are from totally unknown writers—that great, seething mass of people who send out story after story, gathering up their rejection slips as they learn their craft and hone their resolve to keep doing it till they get it right. But being unknown does not mean you can’t be a good writer, nor will it exclude you from the Contents page of Borderlands. The following story by Lois Tilton, who lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, reached out and grabbed me from the first sentence, and now it can do the same for you.
The morning sun came through the window and played lightly onto Mrs. Vivian’s eyelids. Half-asleep, she rolled over onto her side, where her hand met something cool and damply resilient. The unpleasant sensation jolted her awake, and she opened her eyes to see her husband Gregory’s discarded skin lying facedown on his side of the queen-sized bed.
He was gone, and he hadn’t even made a sound, hadn’t even wakened her to say good-bye.
An oily, yellowish fluid had oozed from the split in his back, staining the sheets. Mrs. Vivian got up to strip the bed, to save the mattress. She lifted up the skin by the armpits, but it was surprisingly heavy and awkward, like a damp rubber wetsuit. The limbs almost seemed to move of their own accord. Recalling her parents’ passing, she had expected Gregory’s husk to be somehow lighter, drier. It had split from the crown of the head down to the crack of the buttocks.
Curious, she flopped it over onto its back and stared at what had been her husband’s face. It was puckered and distorted, barely recognizable. An eyelid was half-open onto the emptiness behind it, and she brushed it closed. There was a gray stubble of beard on the chin.
How ugly it was, she thought, looking down at the wrinkled, age-worn husk, the blotches of age on the skin, the sparse gray mat of hair on the chest. And at the crotch, where the flaccid member lay in shrunken mockery of its former rampant glory. She thought of it stiffening erect, plunging inside her to discharge its seed. But the time for that sort of thing was over now.
She draped the skin over the back of a chair while she stripped the bed to the mattress and put on fresh sheets. She was alone now. What was she supposed to do until her own time came?
Soaping herself in the shower when she was finished with the bed, she was intensely, distastefully aware of her aging flesh—her sagging breasts, the loose skin of her upper arms, neck, and belly. How she longed for her own metamorphosis, to emerge transformed from her hateful, cast-off husk. The wrinkled lips of her sex reminded her again of her husband’s limp, shrunken organ. How they had made love in their youth, and she had borne children, the opening stretched impossibly wide by the pre
ssure of their emerging skulls. Her children were grown now and gone, having children of their own, and her womb was useless and dried out. Like she was.
She knew she ought to call her children, to arrange for the decent disposal of Gregory’s remains, but then she would truly be alone. It was easy to pretend he was still in the room, inside the husk draped over the chair. Gregory hadn’t talked that much, anyway. But he had been there.
The discarded skin was stiff and dry by the time she was ready for bed that night, and in the dark it almost looked as if he was sitting on the chair at her side. He had sat there that way, she recalled, when she had the babies. Not saying much, just sometimes holding her hand, waiting. She hoped he was still waiting now.
In the middle of the night she woke, panicky and alone. There beside her was the shape of Gregory’s husk in the dark, and she got up, lifted it, and brought it back to the bed. She had slept with him next to her for the past thirty years and it was too lonely without him now. The skin was light and dry, almost crisp. This wasn’t Gregory, she knew, pulling the covers up over both of them, but the wrinkled shell he had discarded was a familiar thing, and she felt fond of it, in a way, as a remembrance of him, still faintly carrying his scent. It made her feel better as she fell back into sleep.
The next morning she felt strong enough to make the necessary phone call, and soon the children had gathered, sober as befits a solemn occasion, her two sons and daughter. She had made the bed and laid the husk there on its side, but at the sight of the dried-out skin they knew at once what she’d done. “Honestly, Mother,” her daughter frowned in disapproval. “How long has it been?”
Her oldest son, named Gregory after his father, put a hand on his sister’s arm to shut her up. “Are you all right, Mother?” he asked. “Maybe you might want to come and stay with Eleanor and me for a while.”
“No.” Mrs. Vivian shook her head. “I want to be here, when my time comes. It can’t be long now.”
“But, Mother, you can’t be sure.”