Twice a year, her skin peels off.
It always starts with her fingers and toes. They ache for days, creak and crack, until the seams split. Each fingertip, down across the palms. Every toe, heels scraping. It’s a relief, the peeling. An escape from the ache. There’s still pain, but there will be an end to it eventually.
If she spreads her toes far enough, she can watch the thin skin between them split, raw red revealed beneath. It’s fascinating to see the webs separate.
It moves down her arms and up her legs, spreading, shedding, like a snake. She used to think maybe she was one—no one else had their skin slough off twice a year. They all looked at her in horror when she asked. But if she was a snake, related to some sort of reptile, it would be normal. Make sense.
Her scalp comes off in large flakes, like snow falling down. Down over her nose and chin, which make snow of their own. How odd it is to peel off ones’ lips in one go. Up her thighs and yes, even there. Just another type of shedding, right? It’s used to that by now. Down the throat and across each breast. Nipples come off, pop, pop.
There’s something new underneath. A new her or possibly something else? Pink and raw and fresh, sensitive to heat and cold, touch. It’s so soft, that new skin, once it loses its sheen. It feels so much.
Maybe that’s why her skin peels? She feels far too much, so much that her skin must shrivel up and blow away, escape from it all. Must leave a new shell behind to take it all in again.
She doesn’t know. All she knows is the trails of skin left behind when she walks across the floor, the patches rubbed off with a towel after a shower.
She used to be afraid of it, the shedding. Not so much, anymore.
The change comes on slowly, slowly enough that she almost doesn’t notice it. She stops wanting to go outside unless it’s dark out, eyes and skin both too sensitive to the light. Even in her apartment she keeps things dim. She doesn’t need it anyway.
Her shedding starts, earlier than usual. Larger chunks of her peel off; there’s a pile of casing on the floor.
She thinks she sees an ear, several clumps of hair.
This is a new kind of shedding.
It doesn’t frighten her, though, this new shedding. She carefully lifts her nails from their beds, drops them on the counter with ten resounding clicks. What’s left beneath them makes scratching off her old skin easier.
Her fingers seem longer, can reach places she’s never been able to touch before. Can feel the bony knobs and protrusions that are growing in.
There’s no ache to this shedding. Just a pleasure, a knowing.
She is becoming something raw and red and new.
And she is exquisite
