And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  The first incision is the most important. Choose right, and there will be no blood, no chance this boy in the garish sports jersey will know what we’ve done to him. Tomorrow, he’ll awaken with what looks like a mild sunburn. No surprise really. He spent the day in a beach town, after all.

  Choose wrong, and the blood will come. And it might not stop, not until we have a mess to clean up.

  I wriggle the tip of my knife into his lower abdomen and trim off a thin cut of flesh as pale and translucent as Queen Anne’s lace. There’s no pigment in this layer. Pigment comes deeper in the skin. We don’t go that far. We try not to be covetous, try not to take more than we need.

  Over and over, I slice his chest and pass the pieces down the line, as though I’m carving a Christmas ham. The girls and I paste ourselves together like paper dolls, covering our rough patches first. The oil works on us too, gluing the new skin to our hides.

  The flesh takes hours to blend with ours, so we gather on the floor to wait. We need to give it time. We can’t live without the skin.

  “It fuses to our bones,” Emily told me once. “It’s part of us. If the skin dies, so do we.”

  As we sit cross-legged, Emily places her hand on my bare thigh. Genevieve watches us, but says nothing.

  The boy murmurs through heavy dreams, his body pink and raw but alive. At last, his flesh merges on the strata of our skins.

  Bodies buzzing, the girls and I lock the door behind us and scatter into the night.

  On the street, Emily hooks her arm in mine. “Walk with me for a while.”

  I squint at her. “Won’t Genevieve be jealous?”

  “Maybe.” Emily grins. “But she’ll get over it.”

  We stroll together through downtown. Half the buildings are boarded up, faded for lease signs stamped on windows. At the end of Main Street, the concrete turns to sand, and we stand on the border of the old boardwalk. A rusted chain link fence with a NO TRESPASSING warning holds us back.

  I sigh, and the sentiment ripples through our skins. In a tragic way, we belong here. This tourist town dies a little each day, and with our bodies always wilting, so do we.

  Emily tugs my arm. “Don’t get melancholy, darling.”

  She kisses me hard on the mouth, on lips that aren’t mine. Not one exposed piece of this body belongs to me. She’s kissing a stranger.

  I hold tight to her hand, but she pulls away from me.

  “See you around, Clare.”

  ***

  And just like that, Emily vanishes from my life. Not completely, though. Our skin bridges us together. She vibrates through my body until everything else is white noise. Her joy tastes like cotton candy melting in my mouth. Her disappointment is like copper, like blood rising up the back of my throat.

  Behind the counter at the coffeehouse, my eyes glaze as the soccer moms and moody hipsters bark their orders at me. Cortado. Americano. Macchiato. The flesh on my arms withers, but I take no new skin. Why would I want these people on my body when simply frothing their lattes every morning disgusts me?

  It’s early spring, a chill lingering in the brackish air, when Emily meets someone. From across town, I feel his flesh fuse with hers. A “regular,” she soon calls him, and tosses Genevieve from her bed. Emily loves this new boy, or at least she loves what he does to her.

  All night, I roam the streets, the taste of salty tears on my tongue. At the edge of town, the ocean mumbles louder than Emily. I can escape her here, if for a moment. I peel back a weak section of the boardwalk fence and crawl inside.

  The old thoroughfare is hushed and crumbling. Faded murals promising an authentic Fiji mermaid decorate every wall. In a fever dream, I stumble past the graveyard of abandoned rides and derelict food carts with splintered planking nailed over the windows. Next to the rusted skeleton of the Tilt-O-Whirl, a figure slips out of the shadows.

  A woman with skin like fresh cream.

  I blink at her, half-convinced she’s an illusion.

  “What do you want?” she asks, scowling.

  Her flesh gleams in the moonlight, and my mouth waters just looking at it.

  “A cup of tea would be nice,” I say.

  Her name is Nathalie. She lives here in a loft among the ghosts of bygone summers.

  “This apartment used to house traveling vaudeville acts,” she says, and shows me inside. Her voice is bright, as though she’s been waiting years to tell someone this story.

  The whole boardwalk belonged to her family, but after a legacy of empty bank accounts and emptier bottles, she’s the only one left. Now boxes of freeze-dried food and faded carnival memorabilia pile up in every corner. She’s exiled from the world, the heir of forgotten magic.

  “I’m alone too,” I say.

  At her kitchen table, we sit together and sip chamomile from steaming mugs. The heat likely burns my lips, but I can’t feel anything except the weight of wanting her.

  She sniffs the air, her nose curled. “What’s your perfume?”

  I pick at my flaking shoulder. “I’m not wearing perfume.”

  It’s the oil she smells on me. I smell it too, caustic and soaked deep into my skin. I could take a thousand showers and never fully wash it away.

  I fumble through a stack of mail-order catalogs on the table. “So you don’t go out much?”

  “Why would I?” The question, defiant and cold, sounds like a challenge. “What’s out there worth seeing?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and mean it.

  We finish our tea in silence. I thank her and move for the door. Her face goes gray as if she expected me to stay. She’s lonely, same as me. She doesn’t know yet what I’ll do to her.

  I should be better than this. She was kind to me, and I should leave her alone, but that skin. I need that beautiful skin.

  At the door, I turn back. “May I see you again?”

  She hesitates. “If you want,” she says.

  I smile.

  ***

  Every night for a week, I venture to the boardwalk, and like a serf before a princess, I bring Nathalie gifts. A bag of Gala apples. A head of iceberg lettuce. Silly little offerings that make her smile. These are the closest she’s been to real food since the day the last concession stand was boarded up. In her loft, she dances in the kitchen, dicing up the produce, and singing off-key to an old cassette of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers.

  “It’s my anthem,” she says, and blushes when she sees me watching.

  I haven’t touched her yet, not even a handshake. I’m waiting for the ideal moment, but exactly when that moment will come, I don’t know.

  I’m halfway back to the boardwalk when my skin burns as though I’m being flayed alive. The girls need me. My real, grotesque life needs me.

  At the same beachfront motel, they titter in a second-floor room, panicked as headless hens in a coop. A lifeless man reclines on the yellowed mattress, and Genevieve quivers nearby, her hands stained red.

  “It was an accident,” she murmurs.

  Emily coos and runs her fingers through a tangle in Genevieve’s hair. “Don’t worry, darling,” she says. “It happens to everyone.”

  Not true. It’s never happened to me. It’s never happened to Emily either.

  The girls and I strip the soiled sheets from the bed and bleach the bloodied box springs.

  “Could you do the next part, Clare?” Emily smiles as if slicing up dead bodies like tomatoes is the most normal request.

  The man’s eyes are open. I flip him on his belly, so I won’t have to see those dilated pupils, vacant as tide pools, staring at me. His flesh is still warm. That’s good. Heat makes it easier to divide the body.

  The girls and I absorb all the skin, even the fat, and we devour the heart and the other organs too. My stomach cramps, and I gag up mouthfuls of bile. We all gag. This isn’t ideal. There’s too much flesh on us—and in us. But this is the rule. The cleanest way to hide a body is to ensure no body is left to find.

  Emily grinds up the bones into flo
ur and promises to bake Genevieve soul cakes for breakfast.

  “I won’t go with you,” Genevieve says, sobbing. “Not back to that horrible boy in your bed.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Emily says as we gather on the floor to sleep. This much skin will take until tomorrow to settle on us.

  I curl in the corner, and a small, misshapen pomegranate topples out of my jacket pocket. This was meant for Nathalie. I bite into the bitter flesh, and the blood of the fruit spills across my lips.

  Emily nestles next to me, and we fall asleep, her hand draped across my heart.

  ***

  An hour before dawn, something rips inside of us, and we awaken, sweat-caked and moaning like a deranged choir. But there’s no blood. No withering. It isn’t our pain we’re feeling.

  Genevieve’s gone. At first light, we hear the report on the local radio station. The Coast Guard discovered what was left of her on the shore, the gristle the ocean tossed back. A membrane of skin, but no bone.

  “They won’t find the rest of her,” Emily says. “She’s settled to the bottom by now.”

  I choke back rueful tears.

  Still queasy, we flee the motel, and I walk alone in the amber morning.

  At the boardwalk, Nathalie’s asleep in bed. I watch her dreaming, my body bloated beneath too many pieces of patchwork skin. Another layer might be too much, but I don’t care. I need something on me that’s mine. Something I want.

  I climb quietly onto the mattress, gripping the knife and oil. But before I lift the blade, Nathalie opens her eyes.

  Her jaw clenches. “Will you kill me?”

  “No,” I say. “If I’m careful, you won’t feel a thing.”

  Her chest rises and falls like a restless sea. “Why?”

  “It’s how I survive.”

  A ridiculous answer. She deserves better. She deserves anything but me. Cheeks burning with shame, I recoil from the bed, but Nathalie seizes my wrists almost violently, her eyes black as flotsam. We linger in this strange embrace, staring into each other. Then with a careful hand, she peels her nightgown up around her waist, the pale of her soft belly exposed.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  She nods. “What about the flask?”

  “It’s oil,” I say. “To relax you.”

  “You mean knock me out?” She shakes her head. “I want to be awake.”

  I grip the knife tighter. “I’ve never done this with the person watching.”

  “Would you rather I look away?”

  “No,” I say, and make the first incision.

  She doesn’t tremble. Her gaze, curious and bright, follows my every movement. She’s a voyeur for her own body. I paste on her skin, and each piece merges at once with mine. No waiting. No sleeping it off.

  My body hums pleasantly, like I drank too much champagne, and I wander into the bathroom to rinse off the ugly parts of tonight. I try to rinse off Emily, though it doesn’t take.

  The shower curtain whispers behind me, and Nathalie steps into the tub. Her breath is warm against my back.

  “May I touch?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Her fingers trace the outline of the transplanted flesh. She’s close, so close, and I wish I could inhale her scent, the melody of her skin, but all I can smell is the acid stench of turpentine. Nathalie doesn’t care. She pulls me into her and kisses my shoulders, my neck, my lips. I let her. In the dark, I pretend our skin is one. I pretend we’re the same.

  I pretend she’s Emily.

  ***

  The real Emily finds me at the downtown farmers’ market on a Saturday morning. I’m picking up Swiss chard and kale for a stir-fry Nathalie wants to try tonight. We’ve become that couple, the one that prepares silly recipes clipped out of full-color magazines where the pictures are always prettier than what you cook. No more freeze-dried dinners for her. I want to make this evening special.

  I’m sorting through a crate of leafy greens, so I don’t notice the tingling in my skin or the spun sugar in my throat. By the time I look up, Emily has her hand on mine.

  “Hey, darling,” she says. “Where you been?”

  My body stiffens, and I struggle to free my fingers from hers. “Nowhere special.”

  A lie. And a transparent one too. Emily smiles a serpent’s smile.

  “So you found yourself a regular?” She nudges me, like a horny teenager in a locker room. “It’s the best, isn’t it? How the layers of skin melt together like butter?”

  I inch away from her, clutching an armful of soggy produce. “No,” I say.

  She raises an eyebrow. “No, it isn’t good?”

  “No, I don’t have a regular.”

  I shuffle to the checkout, and Emily follows, her hand grasping for mine. For an instant, I taste copper, like a penny’s caught beneath my tongue. Emily’s jealous, and that scares me a little. Emily’s never jealous.

  I pay with a roll of quarters, and gather the brown paper bags.

  “One more thing.” Emily steps in front of me. “I want you to meet my fiancé.”

  She invites me to Sunday brunch the next day. I almost laugh at the absurdity of it—Emily with her quilted skin, sipping mimosas and dining on egg white omelets. As if she’s normal. As if any of us are normal.

  “We’ll be at a table in the back,” she says. “Noon sharp. Don’t be late.”

  I watch her go, those beautiful bones shimmering beneath her skin. I want to drop these bags on the pavement and chase after her. I don’t care where she goes. She could lead me into the bowels of hell, and I wouldn’t mind.

  At the corner, she grins back at me. “And feel free to bring someone,” she says. “I’d love to meet her.”

  That night, the stir-fry is tasteless and dry.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it,” Nathalie says as she rinses the dishes. Her hands are raw and chapped from what I’ve done to her.

  The next morning, I sneak out of bed early. “Business” is all I tell her.

  In a fancy new restaurant on the North Shore, the kind of place with bleached linens and pine-fresh floors, Emily waits for me, a gorgeous figure snuggled up in the booth next to her.

  He’s what I expect. Smiley and broad-shouldered, his lesion-spotted arm slung around her waist. Charming but dim. He would never suspect what she’s doing to him.

  When I sit down, she never says his name. I never ask. For the next hour, I chew tasteless fruit cocktail and listen to their meet-cute story retold again and again, enough to break my heart a hundred times. I don’t know why I came here. I don’t know why I let Emily invent new ways to hurt me.

  After my third Bloody Mary, I excuse myself and head for the door, but Emily gets there first.

  “Leaving already?” She smiles at me. “I thought we were friends, Clare.”

  Like Emily is friends with anyone.

  “I need to go,” I mutter.

  “First, let me tell you something.”

  Emily presses her lips to my ear, and I smell turpentine on her skin.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says.

  ***

  I feel every roil of morning sickness, every kick and contortion as the baby grows. I quit the coffeehouse and spend all day at the boardwalk, layering on Nathalie’s skin, more and more to deaden the sound of Emily, but nothing works. I still taste sugar, cloying and artificial on my tongue. She’s always with me.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Nathalie asks when I can’t sleep.

  I shake my head and try not to stare at the pink patches on her skin where I got greedy. Where I thought of Emily and dug the knife too deep.

  At night, after her fiancé dreams, Emily wanders through downtown, calling for me.

  Clare, darling. Where are you?

  I close my eyes. I want to go to her, but it will always be the same. She’s here and not here, haunting me like a ghost.

  “I love you,” Nathalie says, but I hear the words in Emily’s voice.

  ***

&n
bsp; I awaken to the sharp tang of blood filling my mouth. So much blood that I dry-heave over the bed. There’s no liquid in my throat. It’s Emily. Something’s wrong.

  I yank on my clothes, shirt inside-out and pants half-buttoned.

  Nathalie drapes across the mattress, the sheets wadded up around her like a shroud. “Don’t go.” Her voice is frail and pitiful.

  I pull on my boots. “I have no choice.”

  “Yes, you do,” she says. “You don’t need to run to her every time she calls.”

  My breath catches. I’ve never told her about Emily. I didn’t have to. Nathalie sees through me, through this mass of skin to what I am beneath it all.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I trudge across town. Emily lingers barefoot in front of her apartment, her belly round as an Old World globe.

  “There’s been an accident,” she says.

  On the floor of the half-furnished nursery, her fiancé gapes blankly into the dark, seeing nothing. His blood pools around the cradle.

  “The other girls came, but I sent them away.” Emily wraps her arms around my waist. “I only wanted you.”

  My heart in my throat, I vivisect him like a bullfrog, and we merge his flesh with ours. But we can’t hide this like before. He’s no stranger to her. Soon, people will come looking for him. They’ll come looking for her, too.

  “We need to leave,” Emily says, and grasps my hand so tight my bones crack beneath the skin. “We’ll start over. Just you and me.”

  I peer at her through the dim room. This could have been an accident, like she said. Cutting the wrong slice or at the wrong angle. It could happen to any of us.

  Or maybe this was for me. His body shared between us. A sacrifice. This might be the only way Emily can say I love you.

  She tells me to get my things and meet her at the bus station. At the doorway, I look back at her, and she smiles. For the first time, I can’t see the outline of her bones. Emily has assumed the shape of so many people in her life that now she isn’t anyone at all.

  My body aches every step back to the boardwalk.

  Nathalie waits up in bed, her eyes red from crying. “Are you okay?”

  I nod, not looking at her.

  She swallows the last of her tears. “Do you need anything, Clare?”