Summer solstice
Jane Nash: Story ‘Summer Solstice’
I wake and she lifts me as easily as if this body of mine was but 9 years old. At 52 there is the usual overhang, newly forming jowls and in my case, a certain crustiness. The morning sun spills through the wooden Venetian blinds onto the wooden floorboards. She places me feet first on strange shimmering fabric upon the warm bedroom floor. This material has no substance to it and is the most comfortable magnet you can imagine, tenderly pulling and gathering all that I have to give at the end of the night. I sleep in the warmth of my own snow. Criss-crossed flakes containing the blueprint of streets, the building blocks, the very form of me. Sloughing. It sounds smoother than the actuality of removal. I shed for her.
I was the cause of my own discovery. Picking and stripping tiny pieces of my own skin as it flaked and cracked upon my body was bound to leave a trail like winter’s frosty remnants. But no balls of fun and hilarity are the result of such conditions. Instead, I am reduced to insect bait. I am motioned not to scratch lest I lose the finest rubbings – lacewings drop from the skin on my forehead.
I am a delicacy or at least, is my skin. Not the pink healthy, pig-like thick dermis but the sick, the weak, probably diseased part of me. You should be farmed and managed, she whispers to me as she pulls the crusts from my eyebrows. Once thick, striking, beautiful, youthful and definitive, they now resemble the torment of singeing.
By some form of recompense she lulls me to sleep when I take my siesta. She breathes with me. She has taken me into her confidence. I cannot betray her. We have fallen into a strange symbiosis although I’m not entirely sure it manifests the correct or required balance. I am also too tired and too bloody sore to fight her any more. We have become co-dependent.
During lockdown she would crawl in through the open window in the attic in the dead of night so not to be spotted. She became more real now that lockdown had stolen the space for private vanities. Shape shifter. Her length denies imagination in negotiating those only slightly open windows. Now she steals my steroids and antibiotics, replacing them with night candy and I grow more for her. My doctors can’t fathom why I don’t heal. I’m a rarity she says. I try not to lose sight that I am her delicacy, she is not doing me a favour and this might never end. But it will. Soon there will be a thickening and that’s not her predilection.
This morning I’m wondering, as she looks disappointed with my offering, is there a network of them? How do they communicate? Will a different one come to harvest my scar tissue? It strikes me as being more painful. Not that this is – it’s just strange. The talons at the base of her wrists scoop and drag each fragment of rice-paper thin skin which threatens to leave me. Once renewed, taut, it pulls and cracks and in that instance of striking pain comes the relief of every teenaged cutter who doesn’t understand the processes of their pre-frontal cortex, of their amygdala, of their fight and flight responses. I’m flying now.
When she first found me my heart stopped. The same way it stops when you find a leech on the back of your calf muscle, barely feeling it but sickening you all the same. I was patting my skin dry on stepping out of the shower. I thought it to be my lover behind the frosted glass door but she had forgotten herself and was gathering the remnants of my DNA from my clothes left upon the bathroom floor. At 6ft 4, bent over like an aluminium tent frame, the iridescent patches, sensors, flashed and blinked like the perfect fly’s eyes. Multiplied. It has no face and I call it she because her touch is tender and considered. She has never made me bleed. That’s just the natural order of being stripped clean of loose, crusted skin every morning, every evening, every time I am alone.
At first I thought her to be a hallucination. I spoke to my shrink who gently considered which medications I needed to change. But I knew she was real when I saw the photos I took of my hands and face every week. Evidence is undeniable. I am being cultivated, harvested. Faceless, she makes me feel comfortable. I can imagine she’s some kind of exotic otherworld insect but once she’s sated, that’s when I feel afraid. That’s when I close my eyes and wait for the night to roll into my mind. She quivers, each sensor on her body assimilating each crumb of me and she emits a bismuth light and for thirty terrifying seconds, she becomes a gossamer pyramid, enclosing each fallen scrap of me like organza crystals and emits an eery sound akin to the calling of the wind through the broken milk bottles of my youth.
