19 November 2025 • Creative Writing

SKIN

By Ella Curran (she/her)

What she remembered most was skin. The blueprint of being.

In dying light she cherished her skin; cleaned it, covered it with make-up, pierced it, painted it, made it her own. Then she let it consume her.

The coffee they brought her was cold in its paper cup and she carried it absentmindedly down the corridor. The hospital gown crunched like paper as she walked. With each window she passed she surveyed her reflection, watching her shape shift across panels of dimly lit glass. Like a film reel released ecstatically from its spool; stop motion and freeze frame. There was something vaguely beautiful about the way she looked in this artificial lighting; like the wasted remains of a saint.

In the bathroom she obsessed over the freckles that lined her collarbone. A necklace; one on the left shoulder, three across the clavicle, one on her right. In her room as a child with the lamp that had stars cut out of it, her mother reading the Yeats collection. Come away, O human child, / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Changelings that would steal you in the night and leave a replica so accurate no one would be able to tell the real you had gone missing.

‘They’ll take me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be gone by morning but you won’t even know.’

‘I’d know. I’d just count your necklace of freckles. Changelings aren’t smart enough to copy that.’

She dragged a finger absentmindedly across them now. Outside the bathroom window she could see the belt of snow that covered the parking lot. The earth had been peeled back to its bones; a flat expanse of white rib. Down her leg she imagined the warm dripping that she hadn’t felt in nearly a year. Sometimes on the toilet she prayed for the burgeoning of blood on cotton underwear, a gardenia sprung overnight. She remembered the first time it had come. Her thighs tinged with orange light from the bathroom windows because the clocks had gone backwards that day and already it looked like everything was on fire. There was a revolution within her before all this stillness.

Now there had been nothing for months. The pill packet on her bedside had gone untouched since last June. It refracted dim light like the surface of the moon, pocked with craters from where she had punched out that day’s dosage until suddenly, one morning, it lay very still and small in her hand and she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore. A quiet rage oxidised inside her. She couldn’t remember what had made her hate it so much but it had something to do with Yeats and the Changelings, the feeling that her skin had been zipped up over her body, and the rotten smell of egg coming from the sink.

The only colour that had breathed itself into her now came from the pimply spores clustered on her cheeks. She picked and pushed at them until the skin was thin and raw and urgent, until she started to cry but couldn’t even notice, until her jaw was locked so tightly in place her teeth began to hurt, and an outpouring of fluid ran from her face and stained her fingertips. Vampire. She wanted blood.

There was a knock at the door and the nurse was standing in the middle of her room and calling her to sit on the bed.

‘The doctor will be in soon. But really, I think you know you’re fine.’

They’d been saying that a lot to her. That most of it was probably in her head.

Nothing serious.

Her skin looked fine, she was just vain - like most women in her generation.

Go in the sun a little more and she’d be right, she’d feel better.

Calm down. Breathe. Colour in.

Mindfulness. Have you heard of it?

Try this meditation from India. Over there people ride elephants in the street and eat with their hands.

Or there’s a lavender ointment they sell in the pharmacy.

We can’t do much for you here. We don’t know what's wrong with you because it's probably a case of You Made It Up.

She lay still and stared at the ceiling. It looked like it was made of chalk. She wanted someone to paint her the colours of a sunset, just like it had looked in the car park behind the grocery store, feet up on the dashboard of the Sedan, when the police found her. Toenails drying in the sun, 60 kilometers from home. They asked her what she’d been doing so far out here all on her own. The policeman had this lovely curl of hair that framed his face like Clark Kent, and she told him that she just didn’t feel very well today.

Before she got in the car with Constable Superman she asked him if she could buy a coke from the service station. He sighed and said yes and she wondered if he had a wife at home. The entire length of the drive to the hospital she just held the unopened coke bottle in-between her legs, feeling the skin around it turn numb from the cold.

The doctor’s steps sounded choreographed and she lay motionless. He stood over her, thick fingers flipping through the chart.

‘Police have all the psych clearance they need. You’re fine to go.’

She continued to stare at the ceiling. ‘I haven’t bled in nearly a year now. And my skin…just feels so thick. Like I’ve got all these layers on me I can’t shed.’

‘That’s normal.’

He said it absent-mindedly. ‘If you want we can just put you on the pill. The hormones will sort you out.’

In the sterile overhead lighting she glanced at her arm. It stayed very still on the pale blue sheet even as she tried to move it. It began to look almost blue and she remembered when it used to clutch her mother, gripping her tightly as she read come away come away come away.

That was when she began to scream.

She knew, then, what she was. Organs melted down and re-hardened in her body, her liver now a polymer cube. She could barely see anymore, eyes coated in resin that clouded her vision and all she could think about was the child who had been stolen. Full of weeping, weeping, weeping. The texture of her life had been stamped smooth. Forget the gentle bloom of organisms that had taken place inside her mothers womb, the fibrous enmeshment of bone and body and skin. She was made of plastic. A rigid stretch of vinyl neatly moulded around tight muscle, not a freckle in sight.

When she left she didn’t bother to take the hospital gown off. The air outside split bone. It went straight to the back of her throat like a razor. Maximum Security. Barefoot on the asphalt, blood beading to crystals in the snow. Elbows tight to her body, walking along the footpath near the Garden Square. Careful not to step on the cracks. The gardens were buried in snow so deep it covered both her feet, and for a moment she imagined her arteries freezing over, carrying polyethylene blood away from her heart. Nothing inside her had flowed in what felt like a lifetime.

Without hesitation she dropped to her knees and began to dig. Several inches deep, she could feel her toes start to reach the frigid ground, but her plastic body could not feel at all. Pulseless skin under her nails now blue like the synthetic nest of a bower-bird.

Finally her fingers reached earth. She stopped, breathing mechanical mouthfuls of vapour into the air. The last line of sunlight broke across the horizon in a whimper. There was nothing left for her here except this underworld. She clawed through soil until it choked her fingernails, tore through icy weeds and uprooted the thick stems of plants from their hibernation, shockingly dark against this earth made anonymous by snowfall. Come away come away come away and now return, unearth the stolen child.

The grave was not yet nearly deep enough. She took handfuls of dirt and began to shovel them into her mouth, letting the muck stick against her teeth and catch under her tongue. She swallowed it in heavy gulps, spraying it onto the snow when she coughed. It wasn’t enough. She spread it over herself until the white sterility of her skin turned sepia. Amid the dirt, her fingertips touched something soft and warm, something that exhaled small puffs of air onto her palm. She brushed the dirt from it gently; thumbing the outline of something warm and living amongst the cold, the mesh of some strange cocoon, something embryonic that had been silently beating, hibernating, down here for years, packed below the thrum of the city above it.

As she peered down into the hole she smiled. She knew what she would find here. Her skin, so pink and healthy, so full of blood. A lovely sight. She traced the features slowly, dragging her finger up the bridge of her nose as though she were summiting a small mountain.

It was dark now, and cold. But the girl was hot beside her and her heavy breaths misted onto the thick, plastic skin of her cheek. Neither one spoke. She simply rested her hand on the girl’s beating chest and felt it humming with warmth; a small bird inside beating its wings against her rib cage.

In the dim silence her breath formed to a whisper; ‘for she comes, the human child.’