SKINMATES
SKINMATES
by Phillip E. Dixon
The obsidian scalpel slides beneath my skin and lifts, serving a slice of subcutaneous pie. A faint sucking sound accompanies the quickening pain, sharp and juicy, filling me with the promise of deeper delights. Claret brims in the fresh void above my breast, cascading the slope, tickling from nipple to thigh. The Molting Man holds up a perfect square of my milky skin to his equally pale lips and blows softly. I can’t help but moan when the tiny vellus hairs spring erect, every follicle electric, begging for attention. He teases the skin off the scalpel onto a slab of black bone between us, then stands.
It is time to choose my skinmate.
The Molting Man raises his arms and rotates slowly in the candlelight. I can’t say they are his arms, not anymore. It’s impossible to tell the Molting Man’s age or what he once looked like. His slender, naked body is a quilt of ebony and olive, freckles and moles, hairs fine and curly-coarse, each one-inch patch perfectly seamless. He tilts back his hairless scalp full of scars and callouses and birthmarks, and his mottled neck tempts my eyes down the constellations on his back, past the tailbone with tattooed snippets—a line of a wing, the shade of a beak—to firm checkerboard cheeks. An angry, sunburned square perches behind his left knee, perpetually painful. He keeps turning, revealing a foreskin that’s half elbow, half toe knuckle. Across his stomach, thighs, and one foot are a smattering of raw pink blocks where the skin has sloughed away because its creator died.
“How much of you is left?” I ask. Tongue removed so his words won’t influence the Choosing, his pale lips offer a melancholy smile. Hardly any, then.
The open wound on my chest burns, impatient. A cut of black melanoma on the Molting Man’s shin offers mercy. A pierced lobe on his shoulder promises admiration. A bit of tan jowl where his navel once was waits patiently for my gaze, soft and wrinkled, filled with wisdom, love—I lean forward, pulled in wonderment.
The Molting Man hisses and I draw back. My hair brushed his knee. Eyelids, yin and yang, blink rapidly over gray eyes. Skin so sensitive. How he can withstand years of endless stimulation—a thousand bodies—I can’t fathom.
There. A purple bruise on his left bicep howls its need for flagellation. My pocket of empty flesh wails its need for approval in return. This time, the Molting Man allows me to touch, and I can feel every pained synapse beneath my fingertip, every miserable cell, every layer in tender agony—a bruise so sublime I cross my legs and squeeze, lips suddenly humid.
My skinmate.
The Molting Man sits, eyes closed, scalpel bloodlessly excising the eager bruise in four perfect cuts. Side-by-side on the black bone, our tissues squirm toward each other, commingling corners probing and stroking. It tickles. Impulsively, I touch a bead of sweat from my brow against my orphaned skin’s underside to feel the glorious sting as it drinks.
The Molting Man extends his fingers and the square of my vanilla skin crosses the back of his quilted hand to slink up his ulna. Reaching the bicep, it pauses beside the meaty gap of its new home, waiting. Following his lead, I hold out my palm to the bruise, inviting it home. Slithering across my hand, it pauses at my pulse, then climbs my forearm. The dual sensation of my flesh upon him and his upon me is electric feathers. The bruise crosses my clavicle and the hole in my chest puckers with anticipation.
In unison, our shared skins lock into place like a perfect kiss, edges glowing cerulean until the seams vanish. I look down at the purple climax on my chest and can feel him. “It’s—” The syllables won’t form, my breath held in suspension.
A lone tear of relief escapes the Molting Man’s bulging eye. He presses the scalpel’s stone handle into my hand. I pull my tongue to its limit and set the scalpel against the taut underside, ready to become his final piece.
Fiction © Copyright Phillip E. Dixon
Image by efes from Pixabay
Phillip E. Dixon is an English Professor from Las Vegas. His fiction has appeared in Book of Matches Literary Magazine, The Colored Lens, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, speaks lousy German to his two cats, and spends his rent money on coffee as a good addict should.
