Imago

Her skin was crawling toward her across the floor of the cell, seeking reunion with the muscles, ligaments, nerve endings, and blood vessels it had so recently abandoned. 

If beauty is, as is said, only skin-deep, then the entirety of her beauty was advancing by degrees, through minute epidermal fluctuations, in her direction. The hairs on its outermost layer had gained a new function, as cilia, the locomotory apparatus of an amoeba or a paramecium. She glanced at the areas where she expected to find her breasts and her hips and realized that these features whose acquisition had taken so much time and patience had disappeared completely. They were nothing more, after all, but cutaneous accumulations of fat, and now belonged entirely to her cellmate, this new organism consisting only of a single system of organs. She appeared more perfectly smooth than ever before, but felt like an infinite fractal of sharp edges and sore points. 

When and how had it come off? In her sleep, but that was hardly an answer. The hole through which her captors lowered her meals opened onto a corridor where the lights were kept on continuously. Fluctuations in the light depended therefore only on their presence or absence. If there was any cyclic pattern to the feedings and observation sessions, and the briefly perceptible darkenings that resulted, she had yet to discern it. Had they removed the skin? Yet she could see no cut, no seam, and how could they have done that even? Of the various impossibilities, the notion that her own skin could have detached itself, peeled itself off of her, and recomposed itself into an unblemished whole seemed the least improbable. 

Unblemished? No, not quite. The deprivation of natural light, the imperfect nutrition of the feedings, the infrequency of water for bathing, and the occasional more intrusive examinations had left marks, scars, plentiful blemishes whose locations she had memorized through countless hours of wakeful idleness. These marks were replicated perfectly, if perhaps a bit stretched out, on the skin making its way slowly but unstoppably toward her. That was how she knew it was her skin, and not some other kidnapped being or a new interrogator. 

What did it want? What would it do when it reached her? Since it had taken her lips, but left her in possession of the remainder of her vocal apparatus—teeth, tongue, throat, and lungs—she could neither pose the question nor expect a response even if she could find her voice. She assumed, however, that it regretted its separation from the rest of her, and sought to recompose their original apparent unity. Would she welcome this?

If it arrived in her sleep then she would likely be as powerless to prevent the reunion as she had been to halt the separation. Should she try, then, to remain alert, to try and fight off the traitor’s return? Or seek, despite the sensitivity of her exposed nerves—sensitivity is too euphemistic a term, let us call things by their right names—the agony of her exposed nerves, to lapse into unconsciousness and hope that the reassembly would be as imperceptible as the division had been?

Had it, though, been imperceptible? Or had the memory of the experience succumbed to the same traumatized suppression as the memory of her original abduction and imprisonment? If an experience leaves no trace in conscious memory, arises only in the instant before a panicked and amnesiac waking, can one be said to have lived it at all? In the time it took her to think these things, to pose these questions to herself, her skin had moved another inch. Only an inch. An entire inch!

She missed her eyelids most of all. Without them, the only way to give her eyes rest from the cell’s rarely shifting pattern of light and shadow was to turn them to the darkest corner, pressing her exposed frontalis muscles as close to the walls as she could bear. She had not seen a mirror since her abduction. So it was only after the separation that she realized that half her eyelashes, once the feature she believed to be her finest, had fallen out, perhaps due to malnourishment. The white lanugo on her belly and arms, also a symptom of starvation, she had already known about.

Had her captors observed the separation? Or the independent movements of her skin? What did they make of this? Did this sort of thing happen routinely in this facility? Or did they believe it to be somehow peculiar to some unique feature of her background—her species, her culture, her gender, her time of life? She had only seen a few other hostages briefly during her intake. She could hear them, and assumed that those that could hear at all could also hear her—though the loss of skin on her outer ear, including the eardrum had left her experiencing all but the softest sounds as piercing shocks to the brain. The quality of her hearing was moot; as far as she could tell, none of the captives shared a common language, and the captors’ mode of communication was mute, electrochemical. No patois had come about through which the imprisoned could compare their particular unseen indignities with one another.

An electrochemical signal, but it seems weaker than usual—perhaps she is distracted by the novel sensory signals from her exposed nerve endings—"Only one occupant per cell. Dispose of the excess." She tries to get them to hear, smell, sense her thoughts in response: It is not another occupant, it is part of me. "You have one day." She does not yet know what the signal that she understands as "day" means to her captors, what span of time or orbital or biological cycle it refers to, only that it always seems both endless and too short. She is surprised at how quickly they detected her response, but when the skin resumes its undulation toward her she realizes that they were not addressing her, they were addressing it; they had been addressing it as her.

She opens her mouth as if to say to the skin "I guess we’re in this together," but only the first two syllables emerge before she is stymied by liplessness. Instead she stands, for the first time since the separation, reaches the skin with two halting steps, and kneels to pick it up. She is uncertain where to lay hold without doing further injury to any part of self. The skin communicates through smell, as one does to a lover: Hold me, do not be frightened. Her right hand alights on what had been a padding of fat on or near her left buttock, drained by weight loss. The skein of stretch marks works as a guide for her fingers, which fit into the grooves. The left hand finds its right counterpart at first, but the skin is too fragile there to be lifted. The hand stumbles instead toward the breast. The skin shudders, then relaxes. Worn by even this small effort, she tosses the skin onto her pallet and falls to her knees beside it.

It is tangled, everything out of place. The face is under the belly, the left arm twisted around the right leg. This will not do. She must straighten it out, make a blanket or a sleeping bag out of her own skin, to have any hope of following orders. She begins by trying to pull the face out from underneath. The skin attempts to cooperate, loosening where she needs pliability and tensing wherever some rigid definition would aid the task. She is finished when she sees her deflated self resting face up on the pallet

All that remains to be done, then, is for her to lie atop it, go to sleep, and hope that some inversion of the occulted separation will undo her current division. If it works, she will once again be whole, but she will still be imprisoned. If it fails, she will be discarded as so much excess organic matter, in whatever way her captors see fit, her place usurped by this imago. All that remains is to submit to one destiny or another.

She stands. She thinks.