How Subcutaneous
Mom shakes her head as I hang my skin out to dry on the balcony.
“You’re gonna go into debt, doing laundry like you do,” she’s at the kitchen table, Tina snoring at her feet.
I sit across from her, the chair sticking to my bare muscles, “it’s only fifty cents a wash, Mom.”
“It adds up!” she gets up to pour herself another cup of coffee. Tina starts with a jingle of her tags.
Mom is visiting this week.
She hasn’t told me why or for how long. She arrived last night, leading her suitcase and Tina, and made herself at home in the guest bedroom.
Outside, my skin flaps wetly on the clothesline. Sunlight seeps through the thinnest parts, giving it a burgundy glow.
On her way back to her seat, Mom digs her fingernails into the yellow-white globules padding my hips. She tears away, balling the fat in her palm.
“Mom!”
“What?” she sits across from me and clicks her tongue for Tina, who sits up and readily laps my fat from Mom’s hand, “you’ve got to make it even now. Can’t go around lopsided.”
Tina looks up at me, her beady eyes bright and greedy.
“I’ll do the other side later.”
Mom huffs and glares out the balcony. The skin around her lips has been pulled taut. She’s a different shade than she was the last time I saw her, more golden undertones.
I’ve never seen Mom without her skin. I wonder at the texture of her muscles, the clumping and curvature of the fat she has yet to carve away. I wonder if anyone has seen her without her skin or if anyone ever will.
“You should get a new one.”
“What?”
“That one’s stretched out.”
“I like the one I have, Mom.”
A gust rattles the clothesline and my skin smacks against the sliding glass door.
Most people go through dozens of skins a year; Speciality Skins for the office, date night skins, party skins, skins for laying around the house, skins that fit the style of the season.
Mom throws out skins the day they start wrinkling.
My muscles reflexively blink though there are no lids to close.
“Mom?”
“Hm?”
“Is everything ok? Back home, I mean.”
Mom scoffs, “is it so wrong for a mother to visit her child?”
“No it’s not wrong, it’s just…does Dad know you’re here?”
She looks out onto the balcony, “you don’t wear a separate one to work?”
“Mom--”
“I’ll get you a new one for your birthday. Something firmer.”
She blows on her coffee.
Tina grumbles in her sleep.
I imagine Mom spilling her mug down her torso, burning her skin. I imagine her stripping off her ruined hide and tossing it onto the floor. I imagine the two of us, naked and exposed at my kitchen table, unable to close our eyes.
Mom brings the coffee to her too-smooth lips and sips, careful not to spill a drop.
Stevie is a creator and educator currently based in Cambridge, MA. Their work has previously appeared in Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Beyond Words, On the Run, and The Blood Pudding. They also manage a multimedia arts collective on Instagram @rotary_arts.