This morning, there is no skin. No callous, no glove, no covering, just pink, flayed tissue with no granulation and white tendons barely holding everything together.

I am a study in vivisection. My obicularis oris twists wryly. This just won’t do. No amount of Lydia O’Leary’s Covermark will hide this, so I rummage through the couch cushions for spare change.

Finding none, I resolve myself to placing a new set of skin on the credit card.

By the time I reach the boutique, my surface is dry. Dog hair from the last time I took Bunny to the vet sticks to my meat. I will have to scrub with a wire brush to remove every little bit of dirt and debris.

Anyone who’s skinned something can tell you that.

The sales clerk approaches me. He smoothes a wrinkle from the corner of his Pretty Boy(TM) eye. They must give him a discount to wear a second skin, even an irregular, of that quality.

More than likely he keeps a plain old sack back in the employee locker room and just wears this nice one to work in.

“Madam, you appear to have misplaced your skin,” he says, displaying a knack for the obvious. Perhaps the very reason he works in retail.

I frown at him, my Corrugator supercilii spasming.

“Just point me to a dressing room and bring me a selection and a latté.”

He hands me a key, points to a door.

The room is bone white, benched and mirrored on every surface.

I peel my clothing off and place it neatly on the chair.

The clerk brings three skins through the door, hanging them on a hook.

“If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am, what happened to your previous skin?” he asks.

I take the first skin out of the bag. It has an olive skin tone, a dark tan and brunette hair. It also has too much body hair.

“Not this one, too much upkeep and it’s a bit, well, dark for me.”

He takes the skin and puts it back in the hanging bag. I look at the next one and find it more to my liking.

As I tug on the pale, freckled skin, I say, “Well, I was out at a club last night. I believe I brought someone home with me. I think we had sex. I must have been too aggressive, because this morning he and my skin were missing. It’s all a blur really.”

He nods as though such indiscretions happened to him all the time.

I pat the freckled face into place and smile — rake my fingers through the red hair.

I think I like this skin until I turn to look at the rear.

“Oh, no, no, no. This skin makes my ass look fat.”

The clerk clucks in disagreement, but I can see in his eyes he thinks so too.

Rosanne Griffeth has stories published by Mslexia, The Potomac, Now and Then, Pank, Night Train, Keyhole Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, Thieves Jargon and Six Little Things, among other places.

Don’t open that note! The pages are folded over for a reason. Crackling of the adventurine-colored curtains gone moldy, and brittle, over the last century signals trouble all around you now you have started to read it.

See! A top hat falls off the shelf, a cobweb dangling behind it like the tail of a comic book comet.

Brush the cobwebs off your jacket, as the brilliant yellow of it must be pristine for your trial-by-jury-of-the moment. The cabinet-of-wonders-knickers underneath your jacket look up at you, and sigh for your older days of ramblings underneath the garret stairs, with women who’ve seen pleasures no one can imagine (but in paintings cracked with layers showing through which no one understands, but broods for, all that fervent, saturated color meaning something so spectacular, we can only guess.)

The mysteries contain you. You want out, and only answers allow escape. But it’s really the escape that draws you. So you must never really know the final reasons, the endings, strange as they may be, beautiful as you have heard they are.

You must never be painted in completely, covering over the layers of indiscretions no one speaks about, the spiders’ legs crushed against your thigh, the hats with extra trimmings taking over the structures beneath so fully that no one really knows the true shape of what rests on your head.

Tantra Bensko publishes her writing widely, in magazines such as The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fiction International, Evergreen Review, Mad Hatters Review, Bewildering Stories, Rose and Thorn, Cezanne’s Carrot, and many more. She lives in San Francisco.

Sage, the courier said, once burned, will remove all evidence that I existed, and have left this package here. Burn it now, or the old woman across the street will know.

You know how long and angular she is, how severe her dresses and her sidelong looks. Why, you’d think I delivered this to you in a shopping cart stolen from the corner store.

You know, her lover works there at the store. HA! You had NO idea, did you? A lover! Can you imagine? Ever? Her?

That’s why her sense of smell is so developed. It started with the cats in heat, the musk of raccoons foisted on the neighborhood by evolution of the planet’s open spaces into compact versions of themselves that only children can unravel when they play at night in moonlight at an angle lighting up the secret tunnels to the real size of the natural world.

Her sense of smell is all she has to find her man. It’s like a map, a doglike tracking of his pathways through the city. She doesn’t know where he lives. I do, being a courier. I delivered him a package like this one once, and she could smell it, and she told me never, ever, ever.

Tantra Bensko publishes her writing widely, in magazines such as The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fiction International, Evergreen Review, Mad Hatters Review, Bewildering Stories, Rose and Thorn, Cezanne’s Carrot, and many more. She lives in San Francisco.

1918 was the best of all creatures. You fear possible negative public feeling against them, and you cannot now retain my attention. Besides learned men from his meditation days, by asking of the north, she held him over a vat, a very large party with death. Know me who I am: the slayer of my predecessor in the prefecture below this one (1-f-1).

Project Gutenberg volunteers never forget what happened to the professor.

He tells me he is going to be the son of Kunti, and represent. “Oh, bollocks onto the King and his Great Aunt!”

Chimed in Wilson: “How are the mighty? I leave that to the issues of your new existence. Shall I think of thee? The word bhava in the second present parochial church is already dedicated: it lays on the floor, dead.”

His blue eyes were that of celestials who’ve obtained all the celestial.

Spam email arranged and massaged by Daniel “Cactus” Hintz, a San Francisco music theorist, media excavator, and post-haiku free-verse argonaut.

To broil a horse.

It closed around him. Here and there, for five minutes, tender boil’d, thick, with a little milk.

The major general served gratis, paid for the cross.

I held my head as high as I could, and very swiftly reviewed the scene. Just as I placed a blue ribbon around the donkey’s neck, and called out her name, Clara, we were visited by Major Powell. One sorrow comes close upon the heels of another.

Rapture? It is the invention of some madman!

“As ye please, for all of me,” said the doctor, who ignored his classes.

The garrison of Germans was armed, heading definitively for Bloomsbury.

Sometimes.

Spam email arranged and massaged by Daniel “Cactus” Hintz, a San Francisco music theorist, media excavator, and post-haiku free-verse argonaut.

The hors d’oeuvres approached, borne by a waiter in a white apron. Joanne’s mandibles clattered and clacked in anticipation, while Janice nattered on about her daughter’s debut.

“I just don’t understand how they could have said that about the silk in her cocoon,” she said crossly, sipping her latte.

Joanne did not reply, instead neatly parting the defleshed skull of the small primate, and delicately lapping at the redwarm brains within.

“Delicious,” she said, to which Janice replied, winking, “And low in fat!”