Skin Grows Over by Lucy Elizabeth Allan

Author:Lucy Elizabeth Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ghost Orchid Press
Published: 2022-07-18T23:00:00+00:00

6

The bog, in the rain and the cloud-covered dullness of the rainstorm, is vaster than any place on earth has the right to be. It’s a skyless hole in the world. It goes on forever and ever in each direction, fading into grey on all sides, and I am alone. My limbs are heavy, like they’re giving up already. Better just to sink. Get it over with. I’ve stopped watching my step in the bog. I’ve stopped caring. I feel like I’ve walked for hours and haven’t moved.

I feel lost in a way that I’ve never felt lost before; lost like an astronaut whose tethers have been cut. I wish it was true, now; I wish there were creatures lurking in the marshlands with lanterns. I wish they’d come and take me into the earth to drown.

I close my eyes and I try to remember Ana, try to shake the image of her in a coffin in the ground, try to remember her as a person. But she doesn’t come. The comfort I want from her isn’t coming. I want to remember when she made me laugh, or when she liked a film that I made her watch, or when she went on a long and manic tangent about a song or a TV show she was obsessed with, but there’s nothing coming to me. So I force past that; I force past the memories that make me happy and find what’s buried deeper.

It was the night we went to the concert in the Grand Ole Opry. I think that was my last chance to hold on to our friendship, that night. That was the night when I decided to let it go. But this was before all that; before the walk home, before she told me about the skin on her nipples and I knew I couldn’t keep this up.

I was in a good place, for a minute. For a minute, during the break between the opener and the singer we’d come to see, I was feeling things properly, and letting myself be moved by the place we were in, and the way it wore its quaintness and campness so openly and with such pride.

She could have said anything to me, in that minute. Anything in the world.

“You know that every time I’m back in Glasgow I get this horrible paranoia that everyone we went to school with can see my Tinder profile. Like one of those awful wee boys who used to ask me if I had a pussy or a cock will just be swiping around and then they’ll see me, and they’ll screenshot it and send it to their friends.” She shuffles up in her chair and puffs out her chest, putting on a voice like the young men who’d shouted at her from across the street earlier today, “Like, ‘look at the fucking state of it, look at its fucking hair, oh my god. What’s it wearing? Where’s its tits gone?’” She took a drink, grinning at me a little awkwardly over the rim of her glass.

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