CONTEST HONORABLE MENTION: The Skin She Lives In
Trigger Warnings: Mentions of miscarriage, suicide, murder, and slight gore
By Kylee Walton
“You never told me your name,” the woman says. She smiles, just like my late wife. She licks her lips. Her dark cherry lipstick shines in the pale moonlight.
“I’m not sure why you need to know my name,” I say, fiddling with the black lighter in my hand. “We’re not friends.”
“Really?” the woman asks. She drops her finished cigarette and puts it out before she digs her heel into my sneaker. I wince.
“Cut it out.”
She grabs my arm and pulls me into her. The notes of her musky perfume float in the air around us, swaying like long grass. She presses the tip of her nose into my neck and holds me close. We’re behind the bar that I work at, and where I first met my wife six years ago.
“Tell me your name,” she whispers. I scrunch my eyebrows and gently push her off of me.
“Why should I tell you? You haven’t told me your name either.”
She shakes her head and turns around. “You never asked.” She takes a few steps forward and keeps her back to me, wrapping her black wool coat tight around her. “You keep looking at me strangely. Do I seem…familiar to you?”
I shove the lighter back into my pocket and wipe my hands on my apron.
“You do. You look like my late wife.” I take a few steps forward, towards the woman. “You look exactly like her.”
She turns to face me, smiling with no teeth. “My name is Catherine. Do you think I’m some sort of apparition?”
Catherine grabs my hand and places it on her chest, the skin exposed due to the low-cut dress she is wearing. I start to pull my hand away but she grips onto me harder, pressing my hand deeper into her warm chest. It’s as if she wants me to carve out her heart.
“See, I don’t feel cold or lifeless or anything. There’s hot blood flowing through my body, just like you.” She keeps my hand on her chest. I spread out my fingers and stare into the pores of her skin. It’s true, her skin is hot to the touch and pink like fruit. She is a living person.
I slowly pull my hand away, but I keep my eyes locked on the skin of her chest.
“I refuse to believe it,” I say. “There’s got to be some way you’re related. You’re like her twin. Your face, your voice, it’s all the same. You must be her.” I reach out to touch her face and she grabs my hand and holds it to her cheek.
“Your wife, what was her name?” she asks.
“Lucy,” I answer, without hesitation.
She nestles her face deeper into my palm, humming to herself. “What happened to her?”
I bore into her face, the face of my wife in my palm once again. “She ended her life around a year ago. It wasn’t long after we lost our baby.”
“Your baby?” she asks.
“Yeah, our baby. We went to the clinic so we could have a child together, but it was a miscarriage.”
Catherine closes her eyes. “Poor Lucy. You both must have been devastated.”
I take a deep breath. “Yes, she especially was.”
“The poor thing.” Catherine opens her eyes and smiles, but I can’t pinpoint the emotion behind it. It seemed almost…hollow.
“Why don’t you tell me your name now?” she asks.
“I have this feeling that you already know my name,” I say.
Catherine raises one eyebrow, still smiling. “How could I possibly know your name when I’ve never met you?”
I smile back at her. “You must be her, you must be Lucy. There’s no way you’re not.” I start to laugh. It’s slow and quiet at first, but the longer I stare at her, all of her features, I can’t contain the excitement that flows through my blood. Lucy, my late wife, is right in front of me. “You’re Lucy given back to me. You know who I am. I’m your wife, and you’re my wife.”
She stares at me for just a moment, no longer than a few seconds, with a blank expression before it shifts to one of recognition. Her face folds into a big grin with crinkled eyes and she leans in to whisper in my ear.
“You’ll have to remind me of your name again, my dear.”
“My name is Louise,” I say, almost cutting her off.
Lucy shows me her pearly white teeth. “Louise. Louuuuuuu-ise,” she sings. She spins around and continues singing my name. “Louuuu-issssse. Louuuiiisssseeeeeeeeee.”
“That’s right, I’m Louise. I’m your wife. Don’t you remember?”
She continues to spin and I watch her, mesmerized. “Of course I remember. I remember everything. I remember laying in bed with you, cooking meals together, watching the sun set on our porch.”
I nod, over and over. My smile grows so wide that it begins to sting. “That’s right, yes that’s right. You do remember.”
“I remember…how you abandoned me.”
My smile starts to fall.
Abandoned her?
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I remember how you left me, Louise. I remember how you left me to rot with our dead baby. How you left me in that house to die. How you killed me.”
I take a step towards her. “No I didn’t–No it wasn’t like that. I was confused and..and I didn’t know what to do. Lucy, you know how much our baby meant to me. It was my–our future.”
She stops spinning and turns to me. I look down at her hands, focusing on her dark red nails, long and sharp, with silver gems speckled across. Her long brown hair is draped over her face, covering her black eyes. I suddenly don’t recognize the woman in front of me.
“Lucy?…Catherine?” I whisper.
All at once, she pounces on me, like a feral cat on a frail bird. The woman pins me to the pavement and pulls my arms over my head. She does this all without making a sound, as if she is the quiet chill of the morning, silently swimming through the air.
She shoves her face right in front of mine and I can finally see her eyes. Within the black irises are flecks of red, bright and burning like the afternoon sun.
“You killed me,” she spits out.
I try to escape her grip, but something has come over her. She’s much stronger than me all of a sudden, and her veins seem as though they want to pop under her smooth skin.
“You killed me,” she repeats.
Her hands leave my wrists and drift down to my face. She rests the tips of her slender fingers right on my hairline.
With Lucy’s voice, soft like the moan of a violin, the woman groans, “You’re the one who killed me.”
Before I can reach out to her, she starts to peel off the skin of my face.
Kylee Walton’s favorite activity is to put googly eyes on various items. She is currently studying Creative Writing and English at the University of Maine at Farmington. She loves Bugles, writing, and Franz Kafka. She’s currently hunched over a desk writing a longer piece with magical realism elements.
