PIEL MUERTA / DEAD SKIN

She begins each morning by peeling the dead skin off her lips.

Sometimes, she feels like she is shucking corn and other times, she feels like she is unwrapping a present, but mostly, she enjoys the aloneness that allows her this ritual, this tiny indelicacy. She enjoys death in small doses, which she tells herself is not the same thing as enjoying death itself, the same way a person who collects miniatures knows they aren’t collecting the real version of whatever has been miniaturized: everything is just an imitation of something else, a shrunken homage, flattened flattery.

In dreams, she imagines building a hutch and filling it with all the little deaths she acquires throughout her day: piles of dead skin; clumps of tangled hair snaked from the drain in her shower; the edibles that slow her heart rate so much that she can no longer feel her pulse when she presses two fingers against the inside of her wrist—arranged into a sticky, glistening pyramid; orgasms by her own hand, bottled or pickled.

She dreams of painting the hutch red and installing tracks of LED lights, the color-changing kind, on each shelf so she never gets bored. (She knows herself well enough to know that she will get bored, though, and that once she does, it will be incurable.) In these dreams, she makes acrylic plaques by hand and engraves them with witty titles for each item, as if they were pieces of art too obscure and profound for the average person to understand when, really, they couldn’t be more self-explanatory. She always makes a plaque for herself, too, but rarely engraves it. Once, all she could think to write was WOMAN, but halfway through, she ran out of space and wrote WOMB instead.

Sometimes, the dreams end with her attempting to drill the plaques into the wood and accidentally drilling a hole through the center of her hand instead, and other times, the dreams end with the entire hutch falling on her as she tries to push it as close to the wall as possible.

But they always end, is the point, and she wakes up, her lips chapped, cracked like unwatered soil, pieces of dead skin like seedlings. If she peels them slowly—which is how she prefers to do it—she bleeds, and the blood briefly wets her lips, staining them with a color so rich that she wishes she could conjure someone out of thin air just to kiss them stupid and share it with them. But because she can’t, and because she doesn’t want another person to see her bleed, she has begun to leave lip marks for herself all over her apartment: on her pillows, on her ironing board, on the walls, on the hood above her stove. Her favorite place to leave them is on the pendulum of the grandfather clock she keeps in her office; her second favorite is on a wooden rolling pin she doesn’t remember buying.