Edited by Liam Mason

They say I was born with claws coming out of my neck. I don’t believe them. In fact, I think the idea is rather ugly. I like to imagine how exactly I came to be, sometimes, when I’m lonely and scared and alone. All crumbled up like an old newspaper, cast to the wind, my limbs flipping maddeningly on persian carpets. I like to think of my mother as a soft figure, with limbs so thin she looks malnourished, and a wide smile like a court jester on her thinning face. Maybe that’s why I was born the way I was – maybe she just didn’t contain the nutrients necessary to grow something fully human. 

In these dreams – some may call them delusions – I am small and dainty and beautiful. Tufts of blond hair sprout from my head, and my cheeks are rosy pink. She presses her lips to my forehand, my father clutching her shoulder to counterbalance his shock. His admiration. His awe. His awe at the child he will have the glorious fortune of raising.

—

a well dressed man stands in the middle of a cabin on the top of a tall, tall hill / hello, beautiful girl / he is holding the heavy weight of the world in the palm of his hand. it fits like the pit of a fruit within citrusy flesh. a piece he never knew he needed, never knew he craved. it would take so little to place it between the large hump of his tongue and the roof of his mouth and swallow it whole / the body is raw, twisted over itself with its arms curled around stalk black legs. in another world, the skin is red. in this one, it is dried brown and its lips are purple / he carries the half-dead girl to the cradle and sets it down amidst my newest pink teddy bear / what’s that you say? you’re cold? / he peels off the little bear’s skin and drapes it over the arms of the sleeping body / there. now you shall be cold no longer.

—

I can feel when the old skin starts to melt off. It starts as a cool, undercooked burn. A feasting. Sometimes I’ll try to lick it off, and sometimes that’ll work. Mostly, I’ll just end up with my head in the toilet seat and vomit on the outline of my mouth, but I don’t really care that much. As long as there’s no one around to watch.

“You know, my sister recommended a specialist to me,” a woman I barely know comments over the counter. Barely is an understatement, actually. She’s a regular customer, but I never even bother to look at the name on the prescription bottle. She remembers me, though. She looks at me with eyes that tell me she’s spoken about me uniquely when I’m not in the room. “To deal with all of it.”

“You’re going through something?”

“Well, no, but it’s always nice. In case I was ever facing any difficult decisions. You know, I actually tried to cut my hair a few weeks ago.”

“It’s grown nicely.”

“Well I didn’t end up doing it. Someone talked me down from that cliff. It’s a really permanent decision – I was so glad I had a second opinion.”

I smile at her. She winces – possibly a side effect of the way the skin folds on my face crinkle in an attempt to imitate smile lines – and walks off. I watch her go, then peel the excess folds from my cheeks and reapply new ones. One of the many reasons I’ve gotten used to avoiding smiling.

—

the baby is babbling from across the room. he can hear her. he walks over and runs his fingers over her sealed-shut mouth. she’s trying to say something / are you tired? going to sleep is the only remedy, you know / there’s a thin line across her face, spreading out into her blackened cheeks. a smile, cheeky and pink. he laughs – he can’t help it / you truly are a beautiful little one, aren’t you? / he takes her in his hands and rocks her from side to side. she continues gazing at him, her eyes big and droopy. slowly, he falls asleep himself, clutching her against the side of my chest, her cold little body so palpable that he can almost feel the beating of a heart.

—

My body is stretching like the plastic wrap around old children’s toys. It’s holding me hostage – I can feel it like a bandage with a wound underneath that’s been festering for far too long. I stumble rapidly through the inner halls of the pharmacy, crashing into employees whose names I vividly forget. I reach for an unlocked door and rip off the thin layer of skin just as it closes.

My shoulder crashes against the shelf to my left, pill bottles tumbling to my feet. The beautiful, beautiful flesh burns and boils as it hits the floor. I catch sight of a small mirror to my left, probably dropped by someone who didn’t know what they were doing, and I fall heavily to the floor.

I don’t move. If someone were to open the door, they would find a mass of something hulking and horrible, disfigured and monstrous and raw, collecting dust on the ground. An ugly, ugly nightmare.

The door slams into my naked skull. I look up to cigarette ash tumbling onto my face.

—

against his better judgement, he scheduled a meeting with a pediatrician. or, more accurately, a man who deals in things people do not understand, which simply happens to most likely include children. he’s waiting at the door with a smile and a nod as the man enters. he leads him to the bassinet. the man peers down into it. he mutters something under his breath, admires her for a few seconds, and then asks for tea / a few minutes later they are sitting in the dining room at opposite ends of a short table, drinking tea / isn’t she beautiful / not really, no / and what’s your verdict? / your monster needs to be better taken care of / i don’t tolerate that word / of course you don’t. doesn’t mean it’s not accurate / he gazes at the man for a good long moment. somewhere along the way, he loses sight of the man’s face. then his arms. then his legs. then his grinning little mouth.

—

When I was seven, a group of girls came over to my house to play. I can’t remember much about my childhood, or my mother or my father, but I remember that I had a very big backyard. They came over and they played hide and seek among the trees. They told me I was pretty. They told me I was nice. They barely even knew who I was, yet they agreed to come over the next week and play too. I had never been so happy. And then it began to rain.

The hissing came first. It was the melting that created the hissing, though, and the bubbling and the fizzing. The sounds of a witch concoction being mixed. That’s all I was. A witchy concoction. A mixture of bad parts and sewed up humanity stuffed into a fleshy carcass. I remember standing there, alone, amidst the hissing and the screams and the fresh scent of blood.

I remember crying. Or maybe that was just the rain.

—

there are shouts at the door to the cabin on the top of the hill. shouts and screams. pounding on the carmel coloured wood, stones chucked through the creaky stained glass windows on the third floor. he sits inside, calmly taking sips of his new tea / the man with the glasses and the opinions and the army of defenders sits on his couch, the back of his head angled towards him so he can admire the gaping wound / they’ll start chanting soon, he tells his little one. and they’re really, really bad at it / she doesn’t fuss. she just smiles again. outside, the men ready their torches. it’s been ages since the last time they did this, and it truly feels a little useless / as if to prove it, he tosses the body in the fire. she doesn’t burn. he plunges my hands in the fire to pull her out / he doesn’t burn, either.

—

I hurry through the halls, my face newly done up and pristine. People smile as I pass. I don’t smile back. I don’t see that man with the cigarette and the wide drunken eyes, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve left thousands of jobs thousands of times over. I’ve left people scared, I’ve left people happy. I can do it again. I can’t bear to watch those smiles turn to horrified gasps. It feels so wrong. So, so wrong. I’d rather fucking die.

The fresh air of the outside world would be a sanctuary if not for the scorching heat.

I look up, and I see smoke. A violent fire consuming the buildings, the houses, the pharmacy. People dashing for the doors, crushed by the debris. It materialized in only an instant.

I can feel the outer shell of my body melt the moment I push through the doors.