FICTION: “Dead Skin” by Maria Giron

Illustration by Maura Walsh / Black Nail Studio.

FICTION
Dead Skin
By Maria Giron

I read a study once that said our idea of pain was stronger in the present than when we were asked to recall it later. We’ll say “It wasn’t so bad after all” when it had been bloody shitty. Just like school. The nostalgia of the place. Maybe the more you suffered someplace, the more you missed it. The more that place made you. So, sometimes, we come back to it.

Life outside was dull. Faded out. Too many spins in the washing machine. Bits and pieces coming out smaller and dimmer. Waiting in line at the grocery store, thinking “Shit you forgot to weigh oranges, did you have time to go back and weigh them while leaving the rest of the groceries on the automatic belt by the cashier?” People stood behind me. A girl with a pack of tampons and an ice-cream birthday cake beginning to melt. An old guy with dog food and six bottles of coke. I just wanted to curl into a ball. So I left all my groceries on the belt, and walked out, just as the cashier's voice shouted, "Who's groceries are these? Hey? hey!" and I was gone.

More than once, I came home to an empty fridge after having spent forty minutes at the shop carefully selecting everything I'd need, checking the best prices and all the promotions. Veggies and carbs and proteins. Then it became too much. I shed many tears between the yoghourt and the cheese. So many different versions of the same things. Was it what outside-people do? Look at all of this everyday, for the rest of their life? All the cheese. All the yoghourt. Meanwhile, I yearned for the sound of the mush hitting my plate. Not thinking. Just queuing. And then the splash of food like spit on my face and the cook looking me in the eye, daring me to say something. Outside, the supermarket people… they smiled. They asked if I wanted to try a sample, the whole new foodstuff, the whole new way to have us eat shit.

Sometimes my body would shout “curry curry curry” in my head all day and I’d order curry and then smelled it and threw it in the trash. Because I wanted a doughnut. A big one, smooth inside, with a translucent layer of glaze all around so that when your front teeth squeezed it, the glaze whitened and broke and there’d be thin cracks all around the point of impact. So I got a doughnut and after a bite I left it on the counter to rot.

I knew my body was lying to me but I had other things to do than stand around the shop and wait for it to stop fucking with me. You’d think it would tell me if I needed water, when my skin began to burn, when I was tired, thirsty, sleepy, sick. No, ma'am. It waited until I was burnt crisply, passed out or vomiting my guts. The fucker hid every warning sign deep down, plotting it all behind my back, and then let it explode in my face.

We used to talk. My legs used to tell me: cross me now, ankle on the knee, or we’ll get heavy later. The hairs on my arm rose to whisper confessions. The thickness of my saliva informed me I wanted to lick, to kiss and to taste. I sweated when in impending danger (a motorcycle grazing me at an intersection) and now all I needed was a toddler throwing a tantrum in the subway. And that was fucked up. I didn’t need to sweat like a pig for that.

Yet how to talk a meat suit into behaving? Did I ever do anything wrong to that meat suit of mine? Don’t go believing in that. It did something wrong to me, that bitch. It couldn’t even answer simple questions. Ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce? The kind of questions you get asked everyday. I just wanted someone to look me in the eyes and tell me "Hey, what did you want to do with your life when you were 10?" but the hot dog person wasn’t asking that. So I said "ketchup" and I sucked it in. They made-up new sauces the other day too, and that had me confused like crazy. Spicy-I-don't-know-what. All new. You should try it. I won't.

One supposed a big fat wall separated jail and the ‘real world’, and inside this wall convicts’ existence were on stand-by, waiting to live the real stuff again. Here they were, all eager to get out, to unplug the game and join the real, the authentic, the true. Why did I feel then, that it was the other way around? That jail was as real as could be. We had nothing but ourselves. Meanwhile, outside people were thinking about stuff and working to get stuff and were wasting time with what I call ‘the living’. And I don't want to be glorifying this hell hole, because I do think it's a shitty system. Because if it worked, God, I wouldn't have come back to it for work. If it worked well, I would have tried that new sauce, the spicy-whatever.

Some convicts got tattoos in jail, to let the world know. Five little dots. A clock without hands. I met a girl with a spider web tattoo on her elbow once, each row of webs supposedly amounting to the years spent inside. I nearly talked to her, but unless she went on a killing spree in primary school, that tattoo was phoney. Things like that were in fashion now. Lost their meaning. Lots of things did.

*

I took a smoke break with Gary, the guard managing the commissary. He was used to handing out tampons and food stuff. Last week however, a girl wanted gel pens and batteries.

“Which is fine,” he told me, sipping his coffee. “But today, she’s back at it and it’s gotten  weirder. She bought the top prize.”

A splash of rain pissed in his paper cup. Storms didn’t stop us from going for a smoke, arms crossed tight over our chest to keep warm, juggling with the hot end of a cigarette and the cold coffee.

“She got the hair clipper?”

“Yup. Full in, the hair clipper. ‘You got the cash for that?’ I said, and she did.”

“What’s her name?”

“Pechell.”

I took a drag, my cigarette so short it nearly burnt my fingers. The rain doubled down, pouring now. We recoiled under the awning, our backs against the closed door and I could smell the rank of him and the way his armpits farted when he raised his arms. Then again, the last thing I wanted was perfect colleagues queuing for hours for a bakery item. Some of the guardians were like this, I didn’t talk to them much. Gary wasn’t like that.

“Do you think she’s making a vibrator?” he asked, in sudden disbelief.

I scoffed. That didn’t explain gel pens. 

“She’ll ask for a lighter soon,” I said, then. He shot me one of these looks, pupils going half-way under the lid, the iris cut in half by a row of lashes. The look that realised with growing suspicion that I knew too much.

“Or maybe not,” I added. “Better start betting.”

And he chuckled and that was more like it.

“That’s good. I’ll bet on…” then he said something stupid and I stopped listening. Pechell never bought a lighter. But I noticed I lost one of mine recently.

*

I never had a strong sensitivity in art, but I knew bodies and I knew skin. Seeing new lines blossoming on convict’s collarbone, chins, necks… well, it felt like witnessing the birth of something. How the ink moved against smooth muscles, slipped between skin folds and disappeared under a sleeve, like it was alive. Pechell invented new shapes, ripples, hollows, shadows. She opened the options you had on how you present yourself to the world. 

I wasn’t obsessed about appearances, mine or anybody else. These were just carcasses that we carried around, sometimes reluctantly, because our souls just couldn’t climb the stairs or get milk from the supermarket. Walking in the courtyard, seeing convicts playing table tennis with tattooed arms, and these carcasses felt like they were saying something, they talked. They had agency.

Pechell sat on the concrete bleachers. Here she was. The new tattoo artist. When someone was about to rule a place, you’d think they’d have the decency to be an asshole about it, but Pechell didn’t have a gang. She remained somewhat of a loner. And I stared and she looked at me right then and waved, wiggling her fingers in a funny way so I nodded curtly and left.

One of the most prized jobs to have in jail but it was hard to be one, and harder to be a good one. Helped if you got locked up for tattooing a guy without his consent. I heard he was in a comatose state due to a horse riding incident. She just snuck into his hospital room and had fun. Covered him from toes up to his ears. Guy woke up two hours later. The nurse who helped her got locked up, too.

Surely Pechell always got nurses to help her, because she came to me to disinfect the needles. Making sure not to transmit anything. The day nurse refused and so she turned to me. Why was I bummed to be the second choice? I was about to rebuff her but something in her gaze told me she knew I would and I found myself wanting to surprise her. So I said, sure, here’s the disinfectant, medical gloves, paper tissues, do your thing.

And she did. Concentrated. As I pretended to do the inventory, Pechell snapped the gloves on and poured the disinfectant in a tray, her gestures immaculate and precise. The suffocating air plated her baby hairs against her forehead, and they curled around her hairline like a natural inner crown. My eyes were riveted, glued, against every curl, before venturing lower. The lines of her nose converged quickly, leaving one to expect a pointed finish, only for the tip to widen sharply, allowing two nostrils to filter the hot air. She had no tattoos.

“Been missing a lighter. The one with the cat on it,” I said. Just to regain some power, which I was losing drastically for every second she was in the room.

“Sorry,” she replied. And I couldn’t say the one with the cat was my favourite but you might want to take the Eiffel Tower one if you want now, could I? Because I was a grown woman and all. “I should have asked.”

“I’d have said no.”

“Do you want it back?”

“It’s fine.”

“In exchange for one you like less.”

Well, fuck. “It’s fine.”

I punched holes in my papers and shoved them in the binder, keeping a low profile, aware I lost the battle and wanting to curl into a ball on a shelf and die.

“I’m surprised no-one confiscated my machine yet,” Pechell told me then, her voice crossing the room without her having to raise it somehow. All smiles.

“There’s more pressing concerns than your scratching tool.”

“Lethal weapons, stuff like that,” she said with a silly voice, low and husky.

“Yeah. Stuff like that,” I mumbled between my teeth, hoping the mellow words would sharpen on the way. They didn’t. I opened my mouth again, hoping. Well. Hoping to tell her that her tattoos were magnificent. That my own trembling body felt foreign to me on my best days, and I wouldn't know what would suit it, what would please it, any more than I would know it about another body waiting at the bus stop with me. I felt no attachment to that flesh. No connection. It was something I couldn't trade, so I had no use for it.

“It’s funny, I did some time a while ago… for peanuts. It wasn’t here, it was in the facility nearby… oh well who cares. Only I swore there was someone just like you.”

Today was the first time we met, I thought. But then again I was never really aware of my surroundings. People would say, “Saw you on Canal Street yesterday, you walked straight past me,” and I’d have no recollection. Maybe she’d seen me brooding around and it reminded her of another moody wench.

“I have one of those faces.”

“Which faces are those?”

Pechell let her gaze fall on my neck or my wrists and I knew she was drawing on me at that moment. Performing, perforating, her black blood mixing with my nervous system. Fingertips stained. She took her gloves off, it made a wet slapping sound.

"Did you know that people’s eyes are more likely to go on tattoos than on faces? It becomes a social interface. Only: you chose it. Not your mum and dad. Not your big fat DNA pool. You choose it. Worked on neck, arms, mostly that. Cleavage. Legs in the summers."

“Yet you have none.”

She grinned, not irked in the slightest. Her cleaned needles slid inside a neat little bag: “I can think of a design for you if you want.”

No tattoo and yet she must have been very desperate to get her hands on some skin if her chosen canvas was an unconscious, unwilling man. Any skin, but hers. I said no, thank you. She thanked me for the disinfectant, doing some kind of dramatic salute and I said anytime and she left.

I pulled her medical records, battling with the computer which was ever so old and slow. And there it was. Haemophiliac. A lovely thing inherited through the X chromosome. Women got two of those, the healthy one always taking over if things went sour. Except for Pechell. Both her X chromosomes carried it. A walking bag of blood itching for a leak. I got the hemostatic wound dressings out and ordered new ones.

*

When I got out, I continued the studies I had to interrupt, I studied harder, struggled and became a nurse (I used to want to be a doctor, but had to adjust my standards). Hospitals, however, were places I wasn’t ready for.

The air was different there. Time was, too. Eating schedules meant nothing. Judgement, neither. Patients were checking in as big slabs of sick meat, filled with bones and muscles and fat. They were strange bags of fluids that could move, somehow, go from one place to another and have the occasional thought. Burst out crying in the middle of the hallway. Nobody would be surprised. I knew this world. Wasn’t so different from the one I left. Except that, now, I was the guard and had to force people to take their meds, puncture their skins, tell them to stop yelling. 

In the break room, one colleague had asked me to be more maternal and kind. Nurses were a common fantasy, and I was expected to tap into it.

*

Patients and colleagues didn’t know my criminal record, which was protected. Too bad, I found myself thinking. I wanted to tell them I didn’t pee alone for five years, I wanted them to know I got beaten for a slice of cheese and knew the sound teeth make when they break and all the strange angles an arm can create when twisted hard enough. I could handle more than they thought. But we were short-staffed and short-tempered.

One day, a ring went missing. Expensive stuff, triple alliance. Patient was senile, couldn’t tell her right from her left. Politically too. Naturally, all eyes on me. I realised quickly the staff knew I made time. Made sense, too. Hallway talk. Hallway stares. Me receiving an email saying the Christmas Party got postponed to December 20th, and arriving on the 20th and no-one was there.

Head-nurse said it had nothing to do with the ring, it was an attitude problem. Truth was, the reason I went to jail was simply because Medicine, the big M, had failed me. Here I was then, a nurse, trying to make friends with the practice again. But I was trespassing.

So I got hired in a jail. Night shifts. Not the old one I came out of, but another. The job was exactly what I needed. I wasn't squeamish. I could say stuff like “I know how that must feel" to convicts, handling their bruised ribs, without feeling like a hypocrite. A small break room allowed me to sleep onsite, a couple times a week. I had nowhere to go during the day. Within six months, I was perfectly content.

*

I panicked while doing the groceries again. When I came to my parents’ house on Sunday for a barbecue, I had nothing to show for it. The garden was full of my sister’s in-laws which meant a spoon would hit a glass at some point and my sister would make an announcement. My bet was on marriage –hers and Mitch– or maybe a long trip, like biking around the world and being smug about it.

Mitch’s aunts asked me what I did for a living and I said "nurse" and they thought they knew exactly what it was all about and they nodded, but they didn't know, so I finished my sentence, I said "in a correctional facility" and their behaviour changed and again they thought they knew exactly what it was, but again they didn't know anything. So I looked around and added “Hope it doesn’t rain” and jinxed it. Within twenty minutes it started raining like crazy. Everyone went inside, smelling ratty.

Chatters from the kitchen. I stayed behind a bit, haunting the living room, looking at framed pictures above the blocked chimney. The only picture of me dated back to high school, with my uniform and my high socks. The resemblance between us –the grainy image and me– was purely physical. Time away forged someone foreign to others and my family never understood that, not in the slightest. Neither did my sister. How did I know? They never changed the toilet seat. It was one of these novelty seats made of resin, a bit transparent with fishes and starfishes and seashells and seaweeds stuck inside. Did you know how much it’d cost to get a new one? Fifteen pounds. But they didn’t buy a regular one or just basically any other fucking design. Which meant I never went to the washroom when I came over, and held it all in.

My sister came out of the kitchen, waving a sieve.

“The sausages need an extra five minutes.” Then silence. She waited for me to keep the conversation alive, but I let it die slowly at my feet, squeezing my heels on its jugular. “Did you get the mayo?”

“No, I went to the shop but… I forgot.”

“I texted you twice.”

“It was spicy truffle mayo, it costs more than a brand new bra.”

“Did you get a bra?”

“No.”

“Just regular mayo would have been fine.”

She sent her boyfriend to get some. Mitch accidentally learned I existed about two years into the relationship. Wondered why he never saw me around. So my sister said I went on sabbatical. It was the story used now, by my whole family. That, or “involuntary vacation.” Or “taking a break” or “taking a breezer.” I had to deny having lived what I lived to the point where I sometimes doubted myself. Years of my life had passed that I couldn't explain to people. No one here had ever met the person I had been there. I was another, and was relentlessly asked –in between two glasses of wine– to paddle back. Go back to that grainy picture on the chimney. Stand up straight and laugh and pass the hot-dog platter around, and ask for details on anecdotes I didn’t care about. I dreamed, inwardly, of becoming that stereotypical ex-convict who spat, who swore, who didn’t fit back in.

I took a sip of coke, not too much, I couldn’t pee here. I said yes, sabbatical. Then medical studies. I’m a nurse now. New to meet you, Mary-Edi…Edith? Oh, you’re Mitch’s mom. Yeah, I wonder why we never bumped into each other.

And at dessert, my sister’s spoon hit a glass and she declared she was expecting.

*

About 11 years ago, I had to take the bus for my medical school admission test. My stomach was killing me with stress. Or was I constipated again? I’ve had trouble shitting for months. So when I went to the loo that morning, I knew I had to get rid of that dizzying pain and I pushed like crazy. You know the scene in Alien? Yeah, that one. That was how it felt. At first, I thought something in my stomach had burst and I was bleeding internally. I was alone, my parents worked but I yelled my soul out nonetheless. And now my soaked hands were holding a child I never knew was there.

I remembered clammy hands and bad breath sometimes the year before, first time I shagged. Last time too. I hadn’t liked it much.

I had been my own person for such a short time, and this was already taken away from me. Here I was: a bag of flesh, a womb, something made to carry another, an animal that couldn't help making a copy of itself for safekeeping. Nothing humbled you more than the sheer independent will of cells revolting. Saying “I’m taking over now.” Against your very needs, your deepest desires and the identity under which you thrived. In any other circumstances, revolting cells were removed, but here they were never described as anything more than “a beautiful accident.”

I felt no kinship with what I could only describe as a blob of flesh. Some people just didn’t feel that connection, even if they had wanted it in the first place. And it was all right and I didn’t know that. I didn’t so I thought I was a monster and I did what I did and became one for good, didn’t I? 

Only later did I realise I didn’t commit a crime by not loving, I committed one by the means I used to cover my tracks thinking I did –thinking I broke the very law inscribed in the heart of human nature, the one called “Inescapable motherly love.” So what was one more law to break? And I did what I did.

I put it in a dumpster. Far from the house. Then I took my exam. Got one of the best grades, and a letter saying I got in. Then… well. Sentences like mine varied widely. I heard some people got two years. Others got twenty-five. For the exact same act. It depended on two things: circumstances and outcomes. If it was garbage collection day, or if the neighbours heard crying, the baby lived and you were better off. If no one heard it, no one found it until late, it died, no dice. These were outcomes. Then, the lawyer could prove the circumstances were not in your favour. You had neither the money, the family support, nor any arrangement that could provide for a baby. A toxic lifestyle, drug use, violent setting. No choices.

Mine didn’t cry. I wish it did, I wish it’d been found. I came back to the bin a week later, scared to find something even though the garbage truck came in between there and then. Two days later I was arrested. You should have seen my family's faces.

I bet I could have found a solution if I had really wanted that child… so when my lawyer got me a reduced sentence because of circumstances (read: connection), I felt I got away with something big. I felt I got them good.

Another sentence awaited. I had to live in that body, despite knowing it had betrayed me once and I had offended it every day since, and we were in a terrible feud. It said I was made for something I know I wasn't made for and every month it hurt me with the same ghastly pain, to punish me again and again.

*

Pechell peered into my eyes, soaking her needles again. I swore she read my mind sometimes. She said: “I’ve been awake all night thinking: ‘Where do I know that face from?’ And at 5am, I remembered.”

“I’m busy here, Pechell,” she replied, taking the blood pressure of our eldest convict, who spent half her time here mumbling. How could a nurse take care of patients when she dumped a baby, was the question I expected. I expected it because I heard it every day in my own damn mind.

“Oh, Miss O’Neil won’t mind, won’t you sweet pie?” she asked the old lady, who waved at her in a “I don’t care” kind of way. The pressure was good.

“Take a nap, O’Neil,” I said, closing the curtains all around her bed.  “What do you want?” I asked then, writing notes on my chart.

“Oh,” Pechell said, taken aback by my tone, “Are you thinking…?”

“Yes.”

“That I’ll blackmail you?”

“Well, it certainly isn’t an opera invitation.”

“Maybe one day.”

I put the sphygmomanometer (can appear in crosswords, jot that down) in the cupboard, slapping it shut, trying to appear unbothered. When I turned to her, her mischievous smile had disappeared. She looked solemn. Placid.

“I remember you being the only convict thinking themselves guilty. We had to do these group talks and everyone screaming their innocences and when you got asked, you shrugged. And here you are,” she made a ‘look at you’ gesture, “Never left, did you?”

“It’s a job.”

“Counsellor always said that there was no right or wrong way to grieve. We know that’s bullshit. We both did a shitty job of grieving, didn’t we? But you… you keep doing it, girl, and I don’t know why.”

“Don’t call me girl.”

My first thought was “Grief? Bullshit.” Only. Only maybe, yes, I was grieving this tiny person. And I always felt I couldn't, because you couldn’t miss someone you've put away yourself, could you? You couldn’t grieve someone you would put away again if you could. No, of course you couldn't. And yet, I felt like a ghost sometimes. Biting my lips sometimes. Biting my nails and the inside of my brain sometimes. I wanted to have conceived that baby in another body, someone else’s. Like boys did. Should have gone to another body. That's what I grieved. Outcomes.

“We grieved so… we did what we did,” she added, putting the needle on her bag, and leaving. Okay. That was weird now. That last part made no sense.

*

A group of animal activists jumped on Pechell just before lights out. Gary –stupid man– had told them Pechell’s previous animal cruelty charges (“peanuts”). Battery no one cared about. But if you killed kittens, then they minded. Even me. I minded. I liked kittens.

I arrived just in time, her open body throbbing in my hands. Emptying itself on me. Pechell was small, frustrated, flapping beneath me like a gutted fish. Red varnished her. They never told you how slippery blood was, how thick and smelly. It was a tap open on her, pouring right up against my brand new uniform. Six months I’ve been waiting for a new one. It had pockets.

“Stay with me, Pechell,” I called, but her eyes went up and rolled and all I could see was their off-white sheen as the lids quivered. If she hadn’t passed out, I would have sworn she sassed me.

*

I went to the hospital a couple of days later, going through two different blocks to avoid the maternity ward. Pechell’s gaze was unfocused, barely scratching the surface of things. I sat by the bed, thinking about kittens.

"It was pigs, if you must know," Pechell whispered from the bed.

“Didn’t ask,” I replied, shifting in my tiny seat.

Something warm pressed against my leg. A clear bag was attached to the bed railing, filled with piss. I didn’t move away. I didn’t mind.

“Thanks for visiting.”

“Just working,” I replied.

She bit her cheeks to suppress a smile. She knew what I was doing, and never let me have the satisfaction of vexing her. A silence. So. Pigs. I barely remembered something about it, but our shared time together inside had been short and we had never talked. Just hearsay.

 “So, you fucked pigs?”

She giggled, then nearly choked on something. I got her a glass of water and she downed it in one go. Quick breathes. Long ones. Then she gestured for me to take the glass away and I did.

“Just branded some.”

God what a let down. “That’s it?”

“They weren’t mine.”

“Still.”

“When a mom takes her child from school, it’s okay, but when someone else does it, it’s kidnapping. Same here.”

“Yeah, weird how things work.” We smiled and I was afraid she was going to choke so I stopped smiling. Instead, I thought about branding and red-hot irons or ear tagging. Tattoos seemed nicer.

“I did most of my training tattooing numbers in dogs’ ears,” she said. “Little surface available, let me tell you. Now, my neighbour had these pigs, god… huge and hairless and pink.”

“You could have trained on a dead chicken,” I said.

“Dead skin… rips easily, it does. Nothing holding the skin together. The ink goes everywhere, it’s a mess.”

I noticed the bags under her eyes. She was tired, and was indulging me. I didn’t beat around the bush any longer.

“And then you turned to unwilling people.”

“Nah. This guy. He was a pig, too.”

I knew that now, I knew it since this morning. It was in the newspaper in the staff room. But Pechell just laid there and didn’t know.

“There’s been a development in your case.”

“So it happened?” she asked, barely a whisper. If by “it” she meant that new facts came to light, then yes. If she meant that the tattooed victim –a choirmaster– was currently being accused of sexual assault by four girls in the choir, then yes. Been going on for years. Might affect her sentence, the day-nurse told me. I thought, yeah, might excuse the fact the guy had detailed accusations tattooed from his shoulders down to his thighs. And a pig’s head inked right on his chest. I said, maybe, it could change things. The circumstance of her case had morphed into something else.

Truth was, I could smell when a prisoner was going free soon, even if they didn’t know it themselves just yet. I had that gnawing feeling.

“Yeah, you showed them,” I said. “You really showed them.”

The monitor on her left beeped steadily. Pechell blinked several times in disbelief, pinching the base of her wrinkling nose, the drip taped on her hand. She couldn’t move all that much. Her voice was strangled. She wanted to say something but couldn’t so I said it. 

“Most times, people don’t see things until you show them, don’t they?” I asked.

She nodded, smiling. Tattoos could do that, I guessed.  Get the inside on the outside. Get our guts all over our face.

“I’ll leave you now. You look awful.”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, knowing what I meant.

“I’ll get someone to change your piss bag.”

“Cheers,” she replied, calm and earnest.

The guy was a pig alright. But what was I?

*

I received my sister’s Baby Shower invite the day Pechell came back to us. My parents’ house was the hosting place, and again I’d have to avoid drinking anything, and to hold it, smiling. When I said “hold it,” I sure meant the pee. But also all the corners of myself that threatened to fall out like the top of an ice cream melting over a waffle cone. Along with the invite, there was a small package with a post-it. It said: “In-laws asked about your sabbatical year(s!!) and I said it was a working holiday thing in Australia. So here’s a guidebook so you know a bit about what you’ll be talking about.”

Just like that, the waffle cone got tighter and the weather got hotter. What a job it was, to pretend to be human, to learn the customs and to reproduce them, afraid to be called out any minute. And why? Because humans were not supposed to do what I did. I had to prove I could fit these ranks again.

The party was in three months but I couldn’t sleep, and began reading the Australian guide. Halfway through the “How to get out of the airport” I felt I needed to blow my nose real bad and left the book and started wailing. Man, I looked like shit. Saliva everywhere. Spittles and hot tears and mouth stretched open.

Washing my face to calm down, I saw it all. My crooked teeth, the scar on my jaw (from falling against a coffee table when I was toddler), my dangling ear lobe, the way my skin dressed itself upon my skull. My face moved as I did, which always surprised me. It hit me then: I didn't want to be dead skinned. I wanted it to be alive, even if I wasn't. To make something of my life for the worms to repeat to other worms, so the tale would spread under the ground.

*

Oh, her smile, when I asked. The way her face just lit up, like she swallowed a firefly somehow and it was showing in the wet corners of her eyes. That glint.

Pechell asked if I minded the pain. She knew I didn't, she knew I just wanted to feel something. The mechanism of her machine clicked into place. She stared at me. The sound of an electric toothbrush filled the room. My breath quickened.

Before now, I had no proof whatsoever of what had happened to me. So nothing had happened. And if nothing happened, then nothing was broken, yet my body didn’t want to hear it. It wanted a reminder. It needed proof. It’s all it ever lacked. A scar, somewhere.

As soon as the needle sliced the derm, something repaired itself. The pain came, sharp and salty. A cold hand on my cheek, wiped it.

"You're going to be all right,” Pechell whispered, as the needle broke my skin again. And again. Repeatedly. In between the two separate sheets of skin, something grew that had been inside too long, rotting away. There, it moved. Head going first, eyes underdeveloped. I wasn't going to do what I did the first time. I was going to welcome it. But like every birth, it drained me so, like every birth, there was a risk I could die.

“Just a little longer,” I heard, and no one told me that the first time. No one accompanied me the first time. Just me and the toilet seat, slippery with sweat and amniotic fluid. “You’re doing great.”

My exhale came out shaky and I felt it impossible to relax. Only when she said “Let it go” did I take a good look at that immersing new person that came alive and welcomed it. Its skin opened. Lips moving. Are you all right? They asked. I said yes. I felt a kiss.

Pechell put the gun away and stayed seated, dazed. It took me a minute to notice she’d stopped. Despite how quick it was, we were both tired. Building a human was the same amount of work, it seemed, as birthing one.

I remembered what she said about grief. She didn’t talk about the one that followed our crimes, but the previous loss that led to them. An earlier loss. I grieved the person I stopped being as soon as I pushed.

*

The tattoo didn't look vulgar, as I first feared it would. Under each eye, discreet little drops, travelling downward. Black. Smooth. Assertive. These tears have always been missing. Had been missing when I stood in front of the trash can and didn't cry. I always felt I wasn't allowed to.

One side meant you felt responsible for someone’s death. The other that you suffered a loss. A murderer and a victim. They weren’t incompatible. I was allowed both. I told my body that. I told it I remembered. How I understood now, the hate it had fostered for me: I took away what it had spent months to create.

I’m sorry, I said.

*

Got myself a little shopping trolley the other day, with two wheels and a handle. No one ever told me about these things. Absolutely magical. I went to the grocery store, dragging it behind the way knights did with their huge swords, dust rising up in the air. A cool mist spread above the veggies. An anti-theft convex mirror throned above me and looking at it I swore I saw Pechell smelling a cantaloupe. I turned, my feet tripping over the wheels of my trolley, and it wasn’t her at all. 

Once I had everything, I went to the self-checkout line. Scanned the stuff. Breathing exercises. Inhale. Slow movements. Exhale. Shit, scanned the same soap twice. Machine flashed red, I stopped and a guy in a body warmer scanned a card and took my soap and scanned it again and said “All good now, go ahead.” And I went ahead. Inhale. Beep, beep motherfucker. Then I was free. Exhale.

I got fired from the correctional facility soon after the tattoo, something about misuse of equipment or some made-up stuff, just because you couldn’t have a nurse looking so much like a prisoner. Sure, people stared at my face. The inside was now outside and people would run, unless they stayed.

I was part of a rehabilitation program now because I never did that. Never thought I needed to. We sat in a circle and we talked about our experiences and that was cool, even if the cookies were crap. So I brought doughnuts. Plain with white glaze.

*

People stared, and so did my sister. We ran into each other at the post office, and by “run into” I mean we were queuing in two different lines and noticed each other’s presence only because the man in front of me dropped his package and my sister looked across. Her belly was showing nicely (mine hadn't). The short hair of her neck, freed by her high bun, was sweaty and matted on her skin.

Her eyes went to the man’s package before climbing back up and there I was and her face changed, the way it always did. But then she saw the tears and her face changed again, the way it never did, never yet. Her two central incisors worried her chapped lips. Confused? I didn't know, I tried not to care, I know I tried. I breathed. I tried harder. Her gaze left me, looking around at the magical place that was the post office, then came back to me. I pretended to be fascinated by the collection of framed stamps on the wall so as to give her the pleasure of staring without thinking she'd be noticed. So on she stared. And stared. The clerk called her, startling her, and she stepped forward. 

I had the one thing she'd expected of me and hadn't found and hadn't suspected: Tears. She didn't think I could ever have them, just like I didn't think I could, either.

The next day, I got a text from her. I expected a quick “Sorry actually you can’t come” but it said “Due to the weather, we’re having the party the next day instead! Saturday instead of Friday, and can you come at 7pm?”

I said yes. I arrived on Saturday at 7pm. No one was there. And you know what, I wasn’t even surprised. Just like I wasn’t surprised when I missed that Christmas party at the hospital. The hard stuff was to react appropriately to the panicked "Oh shoot, did I write 8th? It was the 6th” that was sure to come.

I found my sister sitting in the living room, alone.

"Where's everyone?" I asked, prepared for the show.

"They'll arrive in an hour, I just got you earlier so we can talk. Is that okay?"

And I said yeah, yeah, I mean. That was okay. I saw at once she was scared, rubbing her belly. Not scared of me. Scared of that. Of what it was going to do when they left her body, what it was going to do when it grew up. Geeze. Sheer terror. She was the first in her group of friends to be expecting.

            “I’ve got the mayo. Truffle and all,” I offered. She snorted, and nodded and rubbed her belly harder. “And I’ve read the guide book, well I’ve read how to get out of the Sydney airport and that’s about it but I can talk about the Airport Link train, it runs every 10 minutes. Did you know they have that thing with the credit card, like... tap and go–”

“Is it going to hurt a lot?” she asked, eyes searching me, voice weak and breaking. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about mayo and the Sydney airport.

"They'll administer an epidural, you'll be right as rain."

"Yeah?"

"If I could do it on the toilet, you can do it in a nice hospital room with experts all around."

She laughed and it came out broken, too. I was floored. First time I talked about it so freely and it felt… easy. Meanwhile, she had slipped into my shoes for two seconds, and for one of them she felt she was making a huge mistake and wondered who she could talk to about it and maybe she saw the tears at the post office and thought she could. And I would tell her it was okay.

"I... I'm sorry, could you just get me a wet towel? Mitch is out, getting that stupid cake." Pregnant in the summer.

“The pink cake or the blue cake?” I asked, finally putting my bag down.

“Are you seriously trying to cheat?”

"I’ll get the towel."

I didn't really want to go to the bathroom because I never went to the bathroom. Always wished the toilets were separated, but no... they were right there, next to the bath. Just take a towel, quickly, wet it and don't look around too much, I told myself. And breathe, all right? Just breathe.

I was in the corridor when I heard my sister saying, as an afterthought: “The pink cake,” and I turned the doorknob and slid inside and figured I didn't need to turn on the light. Only, I couldn't see shit and I didn't remember which cabinet had the towels. My body told me ‘It’s going to be okay’ so I flicked the switch, so I turned it on. And saw the toilet seat at once.

It had been changed.

Maria Giron is a French writer with a screenwriting education. She trained in different fields such as film analysis, research and creative writing. Her writing has been published in the Short Fiction Journal and the Nivalis Anthology.

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