Donna looked at the guy who had spoken, letting her gaze travel up his body. He had pulled the skin on like pantyhose, stretching it tight in most places, ripping it in others, until his shaggy beard, thick eyebrows and bushy hair stuck out of the skin’s head-cap like a decrepit halo of steel wool. Donna couldn’t help herself: she started laughing. The fat man’s companion, whose skin fit him somewhat better, while the large, empty breasts hung like depleted sacks, spit loudly and began pulling feverishly at the skin.
“Ah, fuck this, Matt! Who needs these old Hallowe’en costumes anyways? If she wants ’em, let ’er have ’em. Sides,” he added, finally stepping out of the skin, “wearin’ this thing has made me so goddamn itchy, I could scream!”
His fat companion said nothing more, but his hangdog expression made it perfectly clear that whatever fight he had in him had dissipated. Sheepishly, he peeled the skin off and handed the crumpled remains to Donna.
“Here,” he said. “Have a party.”
Donna gratefully took the two skins. She held them against herself and lightly ran her hand down the length of each one, smoothing out the worst wrinkles in the filmy treasures. Already, she knew they would be perfect additions to her new family. She folded them loosely, carried them back to her truck, and headed for home without another thought about further scavenging.
In her bedroom, Donna pushed her bed to the wall. She spread out her two newest skins side-by-side on the floor, unpacked her first skin from the guitar box, and gently arranged it beside the others. All three bore obvious signs of wear and tear: one of the female skins was missing its facial area and the male’s genital area had been ripped from the crotch leaving a shredded flap. Even so, they looked good together, these three skins. They did look like a family. Her family… now.
Donna went into the bathroom and began filling the tub with warm water and bubble bath. She returned to the bedroom, picked up the man-skin and carried it to the bathroom. After checking the temperature of the water, she turned off the taps. Then she knelt beside the tub and gently laid the skin on the soapy surface of the water. Her prize floated amongst the bubbles, its slack-limbed repose unnatural yet strangely restive.
She couldn’t give it a real scrubbing, so she reached into the tub and swished the skin lightly about. When she withdrew her hands, a tingling sensation spread from her fingertips and progressed rapidly up her arms and into her shoulders. Her chest and back became itchy, and she had a raging desire to scratch herself. With the flesh between her shoulder blades rippling like a flag in a wind storm, Donna caught sight of her image in the medicine cabinet mirror, clawing at her chest like a frenzied attack on her own body. Angry red welts crisscrossed the flesh above her breasts.
There was no end to the itching; her skin felt so dry she feared it would split.
Frantically, Donna tore off her clothes and climbed into the tub, not even caring that her abrupt plunge interfered with the water’s other occupant. Her skin needed moisture and she needed relief. As best as she could manage, she stretched out supine in the tepid bath and submerged herself.
The water was a blissful dream. Donna wallowed in the fluid’s fragrance until every inch of her body was deliciously wetted.
Sitting up, Donna raised her hand to pull dripping hair from her eyes, and a slight pressure tugged at her wrist. Her fingers had become entangled in the remnants of the manskin’s genitals, and she clutched a soggy, limp facsimile of a penis in her palm.
At that moment her husband Rick appeared in the bathroom’s doorway, his eyes widening as he took in the scene.
“Donna? What— what are you doing?”
Donna smiled, feeling a sudden ecstasy of understanding.
“I’m becoming,” she told Rick. “I’m becoming myself.”
Rick looked at her in bewilderment.
Wednesday, the morning’s sunshine streamed onto Donna’s bed. She lay on crisp, clean sheets, clad only in a white silk nightgown, having kicked off the blanket hours ago. Her face basked in the sunlight.
She remembered climbing out of the tub, her flesh feeling like it veiled a fire. She had used a towel to dry off and a fine flurry of white flakes had accumulated in a ring on the floor, much like the residue of wood dust left after sanding. Then she had laid the man-skin on that same towel to let it dry before replacing it in the guitar case.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, stood and walked to the window. Her bare feet skimmed across the carpet. The room was drenched in sunlight. She placed her palms on the warm glass of the window and the sun stained her hands with a crimson glow.
“Mom?”
The voice startled Donna, the word a sharp knife inserted into her heart and swiftly withdrawn.
Donna turned from the light to see her youngest daughter in the doorway. Alysson’s close-cropped hair, dyed red and blue in wide bands, made her look like a frowning matchstick.
“Should you be up, Mom? Dad said I should keep an eye on you, that you’re liable to stumble or fall. You’re not taking pills, are you?”
Donna said, “Alysson, you’re being ridiculous. I’ve never felt better.” A sensuous heat like warm liquid amber coursed through her veins. She felt intensely invigorated by the sunlight filling her room. “Where’s the Illustrated Man this morning? Lost between tattoo parlours?”
Alysson’s eyes glazed over, but she didn’t counter her mother’s remark with a nasty retort of her own.
“Darrell had an errand to take care of. He dropped me off because Dad said I should drop by and look in on you.”
“Well, you needn’t have bothered. I’m as fit as I’ve ever been, and I can’t wait to get some long overdue work done around here.”
Alysson gaped at her mother. “Work? What are you talking about? Dad didn’t mention anything about you working.”
“Alysson, I’ve got a houseful of stuff that has to be gathered up and carried outside for Friday’s cleanup day. All this useless junk,” she said, sweeping her arm in a gesture that encompassed the house. “It’s all got to go.”
“You’re out of your—” Alysson began, then pressed her lips together on any further reproach. “Mom, I didn’t come all the way into the city to help you throw away everything you’ve collected. I mean, look at it all!” Alysson’s trembling fingers indicated her mother’s wealth of porcelain dolls, figurines, glass ornaments, baubles and novelties.
“Yes, yes, just look at it!” Donna’s voice almost buzzed with her excitement. When she moved she felt like dancing. She skipped over to the closet, pulled out jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a big sunflower, and quickly dressed. She was through the doorway before Alysson could even think about stopping her.
In the living room, an emaciated version of her eldest daughter slowly sat up on the couch.
“Hullo, Mom. Dad said you were sick, but you’re looking a helluva lot better than I do most days.”
Donna’s memories wavered. Somewhere within the hollow cheeks, drab hair and glazed eyes was the beautiful baby she had laughed with, the precocious little girl she had taught to ride her bike. In the years since, her youngest daughter had spent her life in desperation, searching for something she kept losing without ever really knowing what it was.
“Hello, Wanda.”
“Everyone calls me Squirrel, Mom.”
“Not me,” Donna told her. “And you’ll always be Wanda no matter how much you try to escape the person you are.”
Her daughter took a lung-swelling drag off her cigarette, flicked the ash into a candy bowl and coughed violently. She wiped flecks of spit off her chin with the back of a thin hand.
“Keep that up and you’ll soon be wearing your insides on the outside,” Donna admonished her daughter.
Wanda gave a one-note humourless laugh like the bark of a sick dog. “Next to last stage for all of us, Mom.”<
br />
“Ahh— the philosophical junkie! What a breath of fresh air.”
Alysson waved her arms in the air. “All right! Enough, you two! I got married to get away from this kind of shit, and I didn’t expect to have to beat my way through it again and again!” She stood with her hands on her hips and her lip curled. “I thought I might be up to enjoying this party of three, but since it’s obvious I’m not needed in any capacity, I’ll be off before this fucked up reunion really wears out its welcome.”
She grabbed her patched jacket off the back of the armchair and stormed out of the house. Donna thought she saw a tri-colored trail of excited atoms coalesce in the air in Alysson’s wake; then the door shut and the apparition disappeared.
Wanda whistled, the hollows of her cheeks deepening. “Guess that leaves just the two of us— together at last.”
“Peachy,” said Donna.
Wanda pretended to examine the column of smoke she had just exhaled. “You don’t like me much, do you, Mom?”
Donna stared at her. “You’re my daughter. I used to love you with all my heart. But I don’t think I’ve liked you for quite some time.”
Wanda gave a short, sharp laugh — one devoid of any humour — and shook her head slowly like a metronome. “Life has been so shitty to me, Mom. You really have no idea.”
“I know what I taught you, and what I gave up for you.”
Wanda lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, puffing it into life with an unrepentant hunger. Smoke wreathed her head.
“I need money for drugs, Mom.”
It was not an unexpected request. Still, the sheer audacity of her daughter, to spit her addiction in Donna’s face this way, as if her drug dependency had some sort of legitimacy within their relationship, was inexcusable.
“Get out,” she told Wanda.
Wanda stared hard at her mother. “You don’t—”
“Get out before I kick you out. I won’t enjoy having to do it, but I refuse to let my life be contaminated by the same kind of filth that’s consuming you.”
Wanda mashed her cigarette into the candy bowl and rose shakily to her feet. “Dad always gives me money when I ask for it,” she said.
“Fine,” said Donna. “You go right ahead and call your father. I’m sure he’d appreciate hearing from you right now. No doubt he’s somewhere where he doesn’t have to remember that he still has a family.”
There. She had said it. No sense in denying it any longer. Her husband… her daughters… Her family had become ripped apart at the seams. And once her collections were gone, she could say good-bye to all that useless crap and welcome her… new family into her life.
Wanda’s thin, pale face was stark with accusation, but she said nothing as she left through the same door her sister had used. In the wake of her departure, a bank of clouds masked the sun’s fiery face, sending whirligigs of color whipping through the air, as if the morning’s light sought renewal as well.
With her house empty of everyone, Donna raised the mini-blinds in every window in an attempt to fill her home with as much available sunshine as possible while she worked. It was only after she had boxed, bagged and bound innumerable small items that she realized the sun had once again flushed the sky with light, and that her living room was filled with a lucent presence.
Thursday, Donna was at last sure that the part of her life involving Rick was over: he had not even bothered to call last night, had not even thought it necessary to tell her that he would not be coming home. Like the Berlin Wall, the vast separator between limitation and freedom that their marriage had become had crumbled, and new possibilities were already well within reach.
She didn’t even mind having to move all her junk from the house onto the street by herself. Cleanup day this year was the beginning of something new and wonderful, and she was determined to move ahead with insistence and enthusiasm.
In the final summation, with everything she deemed unnecessary to her new life heaped together in one room, she had amassed an incredible pile of stuff over the years. The sheer bulk of it surprised even her. But it had lost any of the allure it might once have had. It all needed to go.
So out it went — box after box, bag after bag — until Donna had successfully transferred the entire hoard to the sidewalk.
She stepped back to take stock and to give herself a much needed breather, and realized that her head felt like a balloon of hot air adrift over a rough sea. She had worked too hard, too quickly, obviously, struggling to get everything onto the sidewalk.
With her knees weak and her vision pulsating, Donna sank down onto the bottom step of her small porch while she tried to adjust to this sudden debilitation. She wiped her perspiring brow with the back of her hand and stared, perplexed, at the flap of skin dangling from her wrist.
She had no recollection of injuring herself, had no memory of experiencing any pain. But the moist smear of blood on her forearm attested to some kind of trauma. She pushed herself to her feet and stumbled back into a house now empty of all her collectibles and the life she had once lived there. As she wove her way to the bathroom in search of gauze and medication, frenzied but confused about the limitless expanse opening up for her, the sun filling her bedroom caught her attention with its irrevocable power. She turned toward the light, her immediate needs suddenly forgotten, and collapsed onto the carpet in a corona of luminosity and warmth.
Friday, Donna awoke on that same carpet with sunshine all around her. So hot, so hot it was, that she thought her body must be exuding the heat and lustre of a star.
She raised her head off the floor and stared, first in bewilderment, then in growing comprehension, at the guitar box under her bed. She had, in fact, overlooked it when tossing everything out. Her new family— they were all she had now.
Donna got quickly to her knees and clutched at the box, pulling it out from the shadows. She tossed aside the cover and lifted the skins into the light. They glowed in the sun with a translucent intensity. She held their limp yet dazzling hands and felt a burning from within, as if an inferno flowed through her veins. As the luminous core of her body seethed with energy, vibrating with a ravenous need, she dropped the suddenly lifeless husks and stared at the candescent expanse of her own arms.
It was too much.
The heat was too much.
Donna stood and flung aside her clothes, but her suffering continued unabated. She felt like she would explode if she didn’t do something to alleviate the pressure.
With her thoughts blazing like a furnace, she grabbed at the top of her head, digging her fingernails in hard until they pierced the sweltering veil of her epidermis; then she pulled hair and scalp mightily downward, ripping her skin away from her skull in two ragged flaps. A scorching swell surged through her then— a mindful, lucid understanding.
Using her fingernails like blades, she drew them fiercely down her neck and chest, splitting herself open like a pea pod. Out from the incision oozed something like liquid fire, hot as a brazier. Freed of its incarcerating crust, the radiant magma flowed out and pooled at her feet, so that she stood like a flame in hot wax. Continuing with her surgery, she opened herself from her chin to her toes with a brash enthusiasm, then grasped the two flaps dangling from her head, spread them apart with a tremendous rip, and stepped forth from her skin.
The burning radiance, Donna now realized, was her own brilliant self. Touched and quickened by the sun whose embrace was life itself, she had become a luminary. She blazed white hot.
She lifted her skin and moved with it out from the house and onto the street, where the universe awaited. Even as Donna’s rich luminous essence filled the air and the atmosphere and the stellar reaches of space itself, she let her skin fall onto the pile of cast-off items from her old life, and moved onward.
The light of her new life was all creation.
* * * * *
Vincent Grant Perkins has lived in Saint John, New Brunswick all his life, and enjoys the area’s proximity to the Bay of Fundy. “Canada often feels like some massive beast facing westward, while our lives here ebb and flow like the Bay’s great tides. I love the abundance of nature so near and accessible to us on the East Coast.” You can probably find him exploring the coastline and thinking of new stories.
Unwilling to Turn Around
J. J. Steinfeld
he is startled
when the crow
on the tree stump
forgives him
he is mildly bemused
walking in an uncertain
neighborhood
when he begins
conversations
with fictional characters
from books he read
when he still cared
about the next day
what was around
the next corner
he is taken aback
when he hears thunder
in a language he can
translate easily
but never learned
the mystery hardly
overwhelming
just disconcerting
he doesn’t know
if what confronts
his mind and senses
is lunacy or a trick
of divine proportions
he doesn’t know much anymore
but is unwilling to turn around
see the look on the ghost’s face
he is certain follows him
* * * * *
Fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published fourteen books, including Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), An Affection for Precipices (Poetry, Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), and A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner Books). More than 600 of his poems and 300 short stories have appeared in anthologies and periodicals in every Canadian province and internationally in fifteen countries.
Tesseracts Seventeen Page 23