A/N: This is for a literary competition. I need serious reviews and critiques as well as nitpicks. Please, please take to it with your cleavers and your sledge-hammers, but leave me with something to work with.
Skin and Bones
Her
Sitting before the mirror, she watched the way her fingers moved through her hair.
“Honey,” she called without moving her eyes, “do you need anything dry-cleaned for Saturday?”
He frowned over the rim of his glasses, then continued reading.
“No, I don’t”
With the boneless grace of a dandelion, she stood up and twisted at the waist. She studied the buttons of her upper spine, her eyes eventually coming to rest on the thing poking out from her silk night shirt. It was a strange thing to her, an anomaly and despite her efforts to will it to lower and smooth over like the perfect skin around it, it refused her. She traced a loose thread of hair behind one ear and reached back over her shoulder, tentatively pressing it with her thumb nail, squashing it and folding it.
She took the green dress hanging from the back of the bedroom door and pinned it to her chest.
He coughed into his fist, folded a business card into his book and shelved it beside the bed with his reading glasses. He laid flat and blinked a few times.
“Are you going to be up much longer?”
“No,” she said absently, “not much longer.”
The following morning she spent cleaning the apartment. After an apple and a glass of green tea for lunch, she took the lift to the basement and took the sedan out for a long drive. After visiting a few boutiques in the city, when lights were coming on and traffic was heaving slowly along, she turned in at the chemist. The pharmacist greeted her by name. She regarded him, smiled and leaned over the counter.
“Can I show you something?”
The white tuft of hair above each eye lifted and he tilted his head to the point that his chin sunk into the dewlaps.
“What is it?”
“It’s on my back,” she said, dropping her bag on the counter. With a shrug her coat fell to her elbows and she gathered her hair to one side. “Can you see it?”
“What am I looking for?”
“The bump, do you see it?”
He adjusted his glasses and frowned at her back. “I see something; it looks like a skin tag. It’s benign, by the looks of it but if you are concerned you should see—”
“No, I’m not concerned. I just want it gone.”
The pharmacist nodded, still frowning. He marched past her, stopped and studied a handful of white boxes from a shelf. He leaned back and held a box out as though he was farsighted then brought it close to his face as though he was near sighted. At last, he held it to her.
“Skin tag removal, extra strength, you could try this, it’s simple enough to do at home.”
She arrived home to find him reading the newspaper on the kitchen bench. He had two open boxes of take out and she forked a load from each into her mouth then filled a glass of water and took a few measured sips.
“Is that all you are having?” he asked.
“I can’t eat anymore. Don’t you want me to be skinny for Saturday?”
He swallowed a mouthful of chow-mein before he responded. “You’re skinny enough, don’t be so ridiculous.”
“I’m not, I want to be perfect for the party.”
He eyed her as if an important decision were pending. She looked away.
“Who do you want to impress?”
“No one.”
“You want to impress no one?”
“No,” she said, leaving the room with the paper bag from the chemist.
Him
He heard a door close and sat a little longer, looking still as though an important decision were pending. The television quietly reeled news stories and the rain was beginning to tick against the glass leaving spots that warped and magnified the image of the buildings outside. He pressed his cheek to the window and could see the door open on the side of a yellow taxi. Someone stepped in, a woman or perhaps a man with long hair. He poured a few fingers of whiskey and sipped it a while. Sometime later, he went to the bedroom.
Before he entered, he could hear sobs arrested and swallowed. His eyes found a brown bag torn open, a pressurized canister and a few foam nibs with plastic handles. Absurdly lewd, for she wore only a wedge of satin, yet her eyes were frightful, her arm was chicken-winged behind her and her bones rattled.
“What in the name of god are you doing?”
One of the nibs hissed against her spine.
“Tell me, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing nothing?” He asked, his eyes suddenly wide, incredulous.
He pulled her hand away gently. On her back, a fold of skin was changing. It was no longer skin but a chip of casting plaster marbled with red seams rising like tiny veins.
“I just want to get rid of it.”
“Rid of what?”
“The mark on my back: the skin tag.”
He drew her hair away from her damp cheeks. “If it means that much to you, I will do it.”
He scanned the sheet of instructions. A cool cloud rose around his hand and disappeared as he pressed the first nib into the can. He pinched it with the tweezers and stretched it, placing the nib at the base, the stem. Her body tightened, her ribs carved like the bones of a half-built ship.
It shrank and discoloured. He felt cold yet intimate and his hand softly trembled with it. He considered that surgeons must have had that feeling once. The power to change a body. Skin reacting, chemicals, molecules changed. The power to scar.
“You must really love me,” she began, “To do this, to see me like this, you must really love me.”
He didn’t smile or respond. He just continued to work one nib at a time, four in total. When the procedure was complete, it didn’t fall. It had grown, it was inexplicably transformed.
“It’s done. I will sterilize it and cover it. It should come off in the next forty eight hours.”
“It needs to be gone by Saturday.”
“It should be.”
Her
It began to itch the following morning. Wincing, she pressed the scab softly with her finger tips and scratched the skin around it. She rolled onto her back and thrust her pelvis up. As she read the newspaper with her breakfast of a handful of granola and a glass of water, she scratched. It continued throughout the day.
Two more nights, she was going to look perfect. Better than last year, how many of the other wives could say that? And his boss would kiss her hand and tell her how lucky he is. The girl would be there with the blue butterflies inked over her shoulder and hair straight and black as polished jet. When they met a year earlier, they shook hands. She could conjure nothing more than a closed-lip half smile and she sipped her cocktail without looking away as his boss led the girl to meet the other guests with a gentle grip on her elbow like a father and a bride.
The itch continued that evening. She rolled, scratched and picked it. She squeezed it until it hurt. She felt it growing, swelling like a boil. She found the lamp switch and when pulled her hand back over her shoulder. A crust of blood had worked its way beneath the nails.
She left bed and crept to the bathroom. Pink skin haloed the scab. A thin tear of fluid ran like sap from tree bark. She pressed a Band-Aid over it and decided to leave it, because if she did it would be gone by Saturday.
That day she left the bedroom window open. In the afternoon, a burring sound filled the apartment. She considered the refrigerator or perhaps his electric shaver was left running. Yes, that’s it. In the bathroom, the shaver was off.
It grew from a whisper to a drone when she entered the kitchen. Above the sink, a dragonfly beat itself against the window. It was no wider than the span of her hand yet when her eyes found it, fear nailed the soles of her slippers to the hardwood. She watched as it hurled itself again and again against the window.
She shuffled back a few feet then without looking away, reached back into the pantry, found the broom and began forward. She got it with the broom head in one swift joust. The buzzing stopped but the wretched thing’s wings continued to twitch. They folded together then split and beat and folded back together. She disposed of it swiftly with the vacuum cleaner.
He entered. She worked her lip with her teeth and watched him pour two fingers of whiskey then kiss her forehead as he crossed the room to the couch.
The phone rang.
“Hi Mum,” she said as she left the room. He glanced up.
“How are things, dear?”
“Good, Mum. Good,” she said lowering herself upon the bed in the spare room.
“So they are getting better?”
“Things are good.” There was a long pause before her mother spoke.
“Well you tell me if anything changes, okay?”
“Yes Mum.”
She sighed and told her mother she would call her back after the weekend. She told her she had to get ready for a party the next day. Her mother sighed too. She imagined her mother with her arms akimbo and the telephone wedged between ear and shoulder.
“Well, keep in touch; I’m sorry we couldn’t talk a little longer. But call me after the weekend, won’t you?”
“I will,” she said then they said Good-bye.
Rain started as specks then grew to teardrops while she sat. Her jaw become tight and her hands trembled in her lap. It was slightly to the left of her spine. She found it with her finger tips and winced. It began as a light scratch with her thumbnail. The pang made her eyes shine. She worked the tips, the nails of five fingers into the spot. Tomorrow, the party, him, his boss, her it didn’t matter, nothing except the itch. The itch, first and forever. It grew deeper and the itch was proportionate to the pain which grew as she picked and kneaded it.
When she met him, he was dating a girl, whose name she forgot a long time ago. He kissed her and asked her to a party at his parent’s boathouse. They got to drinking with the others. She drank wine and as she stood to leave he took her hand and lead her outside to the lakeside. They sat in the grass and he kissed her and touched her but she moved away. When she looked down and picked pine needles from her dress her long fringe tumbled over her face. He parted it like curtains and pressed his lips against hers and they fell back together.
Her stomach contracted and her head hurt. She watched outside; the rain came down in a steady mist and the clouds came down with it. When she got up, thunder hit like a concussion but she didn’t see lightening.
Him
He didn’t ask her about the call when she walked back into the lounge.
“Oh Martin, you should have seen it,” she said with her hands under the tap.
“Seen what?”
“Today a huge dragonfly came inside. It was this big, I swear. I squashed it with the broom.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in the vacuum. Isn’t it strange? What business does a dragonfly have here?”
“Sometimes these things find themselves in the wrong places, I suppose.”
That evening, he didn’t move when she slipped into the sheets. He waited until she had settled, until the sound of her head compressing the pillow gave way to the quiet nasal draw of her breath. Then he reached out and pulled her hair back away from her face. As he moved closer and nestled her, she bunched her knees to her chest. He lifted himself on his elbow and kissed her neck.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” he said but she didn’t answer.
She held her knees and closed her eyes. She reached back and gently pushed him away. He rolled, jerking the covers with him.
“It shouldn’t be like this,” he said before they both became still for a sleepless night.
Points: 1355
Reviews: 27
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