A Girl Less Ordinary

When Juliet peels off her skin at night, leaving it crumpled beside the bed, I beg her to teach me how. She says she’s trying. Then she pads across the mattress on suddenly luminous hands and knees and slides her long square fingers down my thighs. When she slips them inside me, I forget what I was asking.

If I push it, she’ll get bored and leave me. And then I’ll never know what I’m worth.

†

The first time Juliet unskinned, strips of gossamer peeling away, we danced until last call and she told me she loved me as I fumbled with my keys in the door.

I wrapped her discarded skin in the tablecloth and hid it as she slept, even though she asked me to throw it out. I couldn’t stand the thought of it rotting in a pile of soiled diapers, broken dishes and maggot-filled meat.

The maggots would love her skin. I couldn’t take it.

Underneath her skin with its deep brown freckles, she is the subterranean cavern looking into the penguin tank at the zoo: shimmery, mottled, furtive. I want to dip my fingers into the murky darkness beneath her skin and lick my hands clean until I’ve taken in enough of her that I too am a marvel, a girl less ordinary.

†

On shedding nights, I wait until Juliet’s asleep and creep around the foot of the bed to scoop up her skin and carry it to the kitchenette. I fill our biggest Pyrex bowl with warm water and let the skin float on top. I light candles, swirl the skin with my finger so the flame reflects off the peaks and valleys of the slowly spinning folds, an opalescent galaxy.

A few drops of oil in the water, bergamot and vetiver, transport me, and I am her devotee performing a ritual of preservation.

Juliet’s skin has amazing wicking properties, hangs dry in seconds. I fold it, smoothing it as I go so it won’t wrinkle, and wrap it in one of my shirts, because paper seems too vulgar. I tuck it away in a box beside the others. I’m up to ten.

I tried pulling one on, thinking maybe that would teach me how, but my toes busted through and the whole thing turned to dust.

†

I asked her once if she’d taken off her skin in front of anyone else. She pouted red-stained lips at me, pulled my shirt over my head and wrapped it around my wrists, kissing my neck into gooseflesh.

It was a stupid question, and even though I know it shouldn’t matter, the unspoken answer makes me feel even less special.

†

It’s selfish, her not teaching me. She’d rather keep me a disciple, bent-kneed and worshiping from my lesser state.

I refuse to languish.

I make a quilt of Juliet’s skin. It sounds gruesome if you’re picturing eye holes and open, empty mouths all over the place, but it’s not like that at all. It’s pieced together in one big pinwheel I learned to make online, numinous and coruscating like my Pyrex galaxies.

I wear it often.

†

Juliet discovers me one day with the quilt draped over my shoulders like a cape. She doesn’t understand what it is at first. The realization runs through her face, widening her eyes into big inky coins and then narrowing them to angry slits. She yanks her skin off me and throws open the fire-escape window.

I grab at it as she’s straddling the sill. Where the quilt rips, little white moths flutter out of the fabric, and she jerks it away from me so hard I stumble back and hit my head on the metal frame of the futon. I scramble up to stop her but I’m too late. A breeze blows it into a thousand shimmery moths–frantic flapping wings and haphazard turns of flight.

I crumple to the floor as my quilt scatters in the bright summer sun.

Juliet takes three deep breaths before crossing the distance between us. She reaches down to me, scowling as I flinch. She grabs my wrist, pinching the skin between thumb and forefinger so sharply I try to wrench my arm from her grip, but her hand holds me firm.

She pulls until my skin tugs away in a thin strip. It doesn’t hurt.

I stop struggling and let my arm hang in the air as she peels it like an apple. At the elbow she uses her teeth to sever the strand.

Underneath I do not look like Juliet. Underneath I am matte and dull, the color of a fetal pig in formaldehyde. I am not surprised.

Juliet’s head hangs, slowly shaking.

When she’s done collecting her belongings, Juliet says she hopes one day I’ll see what she sees, and I can’t help but laugh—as if I didn’t just watch her realize she’s been wasting her time on someone like me.

Alone, I spiral my discarded skin around my arm like a bandage, hiding the regrowth that already stipples my lackluster insides.

© 2022 E.C. Barrett

About the Author

E.C. Barrett attended Clarion West in 2018, Community of Writers in 2021 and was a 2019 Saltonstall Arts Colony Fellow. She recently completed her first story collection and is working on a novel. Her debut story appeared in Bourbon Penn. Barrett spends the rest of her time making, arting, and gardening, all of which can be glimpsed on her IG @ecbarrett. She built a tiny house in the woods from trees she felled, milled and raised by hand with her craftsman partner, and now they’re slowly renovating an old farmhouse outside of Ithaca, NY.