A short little poem today! I like this, I like how sad it is at the end, and I love the ideas of the shapes and movement of the sleeping creature under the waves.
October 5th – Alfred Lord Tennyson – ‘The Kraken’ (1830) – Read it here.
I would point you to my novel THIRTEENTH for some Kraken mockery, and some Call of Cthulhu / Dagon influences. This time, however, I thought I would share a little short piece I wrote a while ago, called Sea Skins. It’s not a kraken, but it’s about bodies and changes, and the sea.
Sea-Skins
Of course he had let her use the bathroom. Alone in the beach house to write all weekend, he wasn’t expecting guests. But here she was.
There was something about the way she swam, like a seal, slick and smooth in the waves, that filled him with a sense of longing he’d never felt before. Not for her, but for the sea. It was a tug he resisted every morning, beneath his ribcage. He didn’t like swimming. Not for its own sake, but because there were parts of himself he didn’t like to display. For as long as he could remember, his skin had never fitted properly. It hung awkwardly on his frame and he could never tell from his reflection how much space he took up, how much width, depth, height. There was always something wrong, something too – too much, too little, not like the magazines or the actors, not like the movies or the album covers.
The sea didn’t care what he looked like, and yet the current was an intimate embrace he wasn’t ready to receive.
He never saw her arrive, or leave, for that matter. He didn’t want to keep watch, in case that was creepy. Instead, he would keep his head down, try not to actively listen for an engine, refuse to look up from the taunting flicker of the cursor, but whenever he did… there she was. In the water.
Except today.
Today, she was in his bathroom.
His heart had nearly stopped when she rang the bell, standing there smelling of salt and cold, her hair dark and plastered to her shoulders, her skin gleaming in the grey, sunless afternoon. When she smiled, it turned him inside out.
“Can I use your shower?” She had an accent he couldn’t place.
For one wild moment, he wanted to climb inside her skin, and see if it fitted better than his own. But it wouldn’t. He would ruin it. He thought his body wasn’t the right shape for any skin, sometimes.
“Sure.”
And now—
“Do you need a towel?” he called to her through the closed door.
“Sure,” she said, and he cracked the door open a little to pass a towel through the gap, keeping his eyes on the floor.
She grabbed his wrist.
Seagull talons sank like fishing hooks into his skin, pulling him inside.
“Would you like to wear my skin?” she asked.
There it was – folded neatly, a perfect, smooth, gleaming thing.
Underneath, she was beautiful in another way. He saw her cracks and fissures, the battle-scarred scales, the half-mangled fin jutting from her back, the bright, glassy roundness of her eyes.
“No.” His throat was dry. “I want…to take mine off.”
She nodded. “I thought so.”
She flayed him in the tub and reshaped him, softly, quietly, underwater. He choked on salt and iron-tainted liquid, rushing warm and bloody down his throat.
She held him down until he could breathe through the neck slashes.
Underneath all that pink and red, he was grey, with streaks of bone-cream.
She dressed again, first in her own skin, then put the meaty suit of his skin on top, modelling it, and he saw himself for the first time. He looked wonderful, but only from this angle, being worn by someone else.
He watched himself leave, wet bare footprints left on the tiles and parquet, and followed.
He couldn’t stand upright – she had reformed his vertebrae like a Rubik’s cube, finding the right configuration, just for him. He loped on all fours, dragging errant skin fibres.
She took his skin off on the beach and left it there for him, as if she knew he would come back for it, that he might change his mind.
Perhaps he would.
It could wait.
He slipped into the water for the salt to seep into his wounds, finally a shape that felt right, and the sea’s permissive embrace no longer scared him.
Leave a Reply