The Man With Stretchy Skin (incomplete/fractured)

The Man with stretchy skin read books about famous French philosophers, never by them. He could shmooze, smile and order wine. He could dance waltzes and he could play them. He could talk about anything, but never for very long; he was a master at changing subjects. He had practiced his attentive look to the point where you could almost hear him listening. He thought that people were charming and told them so. He excused himself halfway through every conversation; sighting someone he should ‘get back to’ and ended every meeting with ‘take care.’

As long as he could remember, his skin had no elasticity. The muscle and the skin had met, briefly, and rejected one another and now, he could pull his skin almost a foot off his body and it would simply stay like that, drooping, for hours. He walked around every moment of the day with intense caution; scared he might get caught on a tack or turn around to find himself stuck in the car door. Aware, always, that a part of him might be lagging behind.

Every night he went out in his fitted suit, to the most exclusive restaurants and took home a woman with skin so taut it looked it would snap right off with a bend of her knee. He would lay her down on his tight sheets, kiss every piece of her tight body with his tightly pressed lips and send her home, confused. Later, as he lied in the crease she’d made in his bed, kneading his arms like dough, he’d laugh ‘I’m falling apart at the seams.”

He knew her type, veiny with small pores. Tight, but with the slight pulls of aging. The type he knew he should make every effort to avoid. The type who thought there should be strict rules for poetry, and a few weeks later when he sat across from her at the newly opened Italian restaurant reading the description for the Veal Parmigiano he looked up to ask “Isn’t it poetic?”

“Not really,” she replied, and ordered fish in white wine sauce.

Under the table he pulled a piece of skin from his arm and buried the butter knife in the folds. He had a beautiful collection of silverware.

2: “Nobody is supposed to be able to kiss their elbow,” He told her as she lied on the bed, trying, “that’s why we need to find a partner in this world, we need someone to kiss our elbow.”

She smiled back at him, playfully, thinking it was the cutest observation any man had ever made, until he pulled the skin from under his elbow and held it to his lips. “I don’t need anybody,” he said, and left her naked in her bedroom.

It took a week of persistent calling to convince him she wasn’t afraid. He used to get a thrill from their reactions, their lips bunching anxiously as they tried to trap in their gasps. Like the time his fifth grade teacher sent him to the corner for making a comment on her yellowing teeth. “No skin off my back,” He told her and held a piece of it over his head. Or the time with his first love, when, after getting back from a night on the town he removed his coat, shirt, pants and underwear before attempting to take off his skin. He waited, held in his chuckle, fully expecting her to bolt from the room in a fit of terror, and then burst out laughing a few minutes later when she did.

These days he got to the point quick. He’d made all the jokes about being stretched to the limit or bouncing back. He’d grown old for parlor tricks. It was a relatively simple concept; pull the skin and the skin hangs.

“I could’ve given you the medical version, or the funny version,” He said, “but they all end the same.” He let go of the skin he’d gathered along the length of his wrist and it plopped down, flaccid, and draped down over his knuckles. “It goes back,” he said “eventually.”

She poked and prodded and pulled at his skin for proof. She held a chunk of it in her hands and felt it as if she was interested in buying it. She tried to think of a way to convincingly tell him she didn’t care. She wanted to yell out “I don’t care” and smile, as if she was overwhelmed with happiness at the fact that he had felt close enough to confide in her. By the glazed over green of his eyes, it seemed her reaction was being closely monitored, like he would consider anything that sounded consoling as pity, or anything affectionate as covering up. She wanted to at least say that it wasn’t gross, disturbing or, that word that echoed in her brain and seemed like an obstacle not to say, freakish. She wanted to laugh at the thought that she would ever be scared or anything less than supportive, but as she heard the scraping sound of papery skin against papery skin she could only think to ask “Can you do it?”

“Of course… more of me to love.” He said to her, while she watched in awe as he wrapped the skin from his hand slowly around his wrist.

“Does it affect that?” She asked without the least hint of interest in the answer and he laughed, harder than with any woman before her.



3: They had movie sex. She made love to him as he poured over the bed. She could feel the muscle inside him, unglued, disjointed, like parts that had been carefully laid out one on top of the other. Stacked, but loosely. She felt overcome with the desire to open him up, bury her hands deep in the creases of his body and pull his skin until it slipped off like wrapping paper. She wanted to tear him apart and rebuild him, stitch him, give him some structure and make a man out of him.

His skin cloaked her body, covering her ever inch with sweaty droplets like big, lipless kisses. She imagined getting trapped within him, lost under his folds. There, she’d meet at least a half-dozen other women with moist, tanned skin, they’d talk about devotion and ask each other if anyone had a lighter.

“Parts,” she said to herself. “He’s just parts.” Thinking of him as a man of parts made it easier to excuse the moans, the incessant tears and the sentimental pillow-talk monologues on vulnerability that should have begun with a quote from the dictionary. Parts had been an amusing concept when she was younger, something to mull over while she lied naked under the bed sheets with her legs crossed. Green eyes, brown hair, long legs, firm ass. “I’m over that” She thought, “I need a little togetherness in my life.”

The biggest problem, as far as she could see, was that there was really no problem. If there were a problem she would’ve told him. She would’ve flung her hands over his mouth when he was about to say, “I love you,” she would’ve pouted and made him notice it, when he asked her if there was a problem she would’ve said “yes, there is,” and then told him exactly what it was. “There’s simply nothing wrong,” she thought and bit open the canker sore on her lip.

They made love for hours, every time. When she got sore they would stop, share a cigarette and he would call her by his own name. “You are part of me” he told her while she wrestled her pinky finger out of his stomach fat.