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Return my Skin

Or else

By Rick PensionPublished 12 months ago 8 min read
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The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. It was Jeff’s. Jeff’s reflection stared back at me as if it didn’t want me there. I wasn’t sure whether it was Jeff standing behind me, or if I was having a hallucination, but what I knew was that my reflection wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Attempting to ignore the dark, oppressive feel of my once happy home, I squinted deeper in to the mirror, desperate to make sense of it. Then Jeff’s reflection stepped toward me, toward the mirror’s mirror. As it approached, the reflection began to dissolve, first its feet that were ahead of it, then its hands that swung forward with each step. Once Jeff’s reflection was completely gone, I saw my own, standing twice as far away as it should. I felt a hand on my shoulder and I broke from my vision.

“No!” I screamed, throwing myself off my seat.

“What happened?” The person who touched my shoulder, Mrs. Lupil.

“I don’t know where I’m at.” I stated, turning my head around to get a glimpse of where I was.

“Well, where do you think you are?” Mrs. Lupil asked.

“I think I’m in Hell.” I answered.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because I do not know that your name is Mrs. Lupil, but I do know.”

“Aw, sweetie. Why would that be the give away?” Mrs. Lupil began to cry. Her cries echoed the room we sat in. The room began to expand.

“I don’t want this.”

“This isn’t about you anymore.” She clarified. Her cries turned to chuckles, but tears still ran down her face.

Like a wall with a secret door, the room was a building. The walls swung open to reveal more rooms. Deep beats filled my head, growls barely reaching the surface of my hearing grew, and the rooms tilted.

“I feel like I’m going to fall.” I said to Mrs. Lupil.

“I don’t think you know what it means to fall.” Mrs. Lupil’s upper half turned all the way around, but in an instant, her lower half turned and stood at the same time to match her upper half.

“Is that all I do?”

“You’ll feel it all.” She said once more before stepping in to the next room where parts of her disappeared, and reappeared in a pattern I wasn’t able to decipher. She screamed, but it was a scream that sounded as if she saw a loved one die, not a scream of pain.

I dropped.

In the middle of the fall, I could see my reflection again, but it wasn’t in a mirror, it was falling with me. As we both fell, my reflection drifted toward me, staring me in the eyes. Rather, I was staring in to its eyes, attempting to determine whether it was the reflection or if I was. Was I real or were they? It’s eyes looked like mine, but they didn’t seem like they were mine. I felt like I was looking at someone else who was wearing my skin.

Turning through the air, wind caressing my face, my hair, my skin. My skin? Why was it mine? Because I was born with it? I realized I was a product of creation between two other beings.

“Let me take it back.” A voice uttered from the darkness. I spun my body to see who was speaking, but a hand nearly twice the size of me reached out and gently grasped the skin that sat across my chest. With two finger nails, like picking up a glass pen from the ground, it slowly pulled my skin up. If pain wasn’t real, then I was feeling something else. Perhaps anger from my treatment, or sadness to be departing from my flesh who I spent my whole life with, loving, connecting, growing with. The hand pulled my skin from my bones and I was a skeleton, with muscles and veins and organs. Crying out for my first friend.

I hit the floor, a puddle of blood assembled beneath me. I held myself up with my hands and knees, holding the tears that dripped from my lidless eyes.

“No, no you will not take this from me!” I screamed through my teeth, blood spilling between my jaw.

A foot rumbled the gray lifeless ground that I knelt on. Small rocks jumped from their idle state, and rolled at the presence of the foot. I stood and turned to face my oppressor.

“Give me back my skin!” A sight that was unexpected occurred in front of me.

A face revealed itself from the darkness beside the foot. Its teeth were normal, but in the place of its nose was a snout, like a pig’s. Its eyes were beady and glistening black. Its eyebrows connected with the middle of its cheeks, darkening its eyes with shadow. Instead of hair that laid over its forehead, it was arms and hands of all colors. As it moved, the arms moved.

“Wretched fool who lives an idle life of pointlessness. You’re existence is as relevant as a vermin to a god. You sleep to refuel your machine’s capabilities and glimpse into the possibilities of reality that you deny. What’s yours is not truly yours, what you see is not what you truly see, and you have the audacity to demand for a resources meant for greater purpose?”

“You will give me back what is mine!” I declared.

“I will do no such thing! Vermin! You do not mean nearly as much as you think you do. You think words are enough to express what is important, what is necessary for reality to exist? You lay down and accept your place in the importance of natural existence. Die. Die. Parish. Fade. Your life that you’ve lived is vacant with false meanings and dying values. Succumb. Behind you. Your whole life is a second for someone life me. Meaningless. Undeserving. Cave in on yourself.”

“Do not insult my soul!”

“Your soul!? Your soul is as dark as a dead light that’s been thrown into darkness. You are not a soul, you are a fraction of what is possible. Your soul is as strong as a radio wave that passes through your decrepit bodies.”

“Why is it you need my skin then?”

“MURDISH, FULISH, CANBANISHMENT, ORPHALSITICA, not BORRAPTISHA, CAPLAPISTIC, nor for your own mental state to convince yourself that you are at the top of existence, of beings. Others like you argue that there are probabilities that you live in simulations, in realities, concepts that are unknown to you, but you cannot know what is greater than you. You will not know, you will never know. You are not meant to know. Just as a molecule is never meant to know what it is like to be you.”

“What if you explain? Please?”

“ROUSHIPENT, EWARSACTAT. What does that mean to you? Nothing! You cannot be explained because you will not understand. You worry about hunger, sleep, love, survival, and there are more you cannot worry about.”

“Isn’t it naive?”

“Me!? Naive!? It is you who are ignorant! Arrogant even!”

“But we can be neither if what we do not know cannot be understood.”

“It is a means of accepting. You are not accepting the departure of your skin.”

“Or rather, I do not care and do not wish to depart from it.”

“Your care is only subjective to what you understand.”

“Of which I do not understand, therefore I do not care!”

“You must understand you-”

“You tell me I cannot understand why I must lose my skin. You tell me that it is impossible for me to understand, but then you explain that my care is only based on my understanding of what I do not understand, only acceptance. Nothing of what I’ve been told can lead me to an acceptance to losing my skin unless I understand. I will refuse, and deny until I am returned my skin.” The face’s mouth widened. The edges slid back behind its own face and into the darkness. Its eyes converted from an inward curve to an outward curve.

“You insignificant wretch! You fool of a disease! You unwanted vermin! OCHIGASTIC fool! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Diiieeee! Diiiieeeee! Rip apart! Cease to exist!”

“YOU ARE BY MEANS A DISGUSTING SERVANT TO YOUR MASTER, RETURN MY SKIN OR PARISH!” I felt the words from my mouth shift and turn as I spoke the threat. The face moved back slightly, noticably offended by the words I chose to say.

“You will see me in your sleep, and when you wake, and your eyes open, there I will be to greet you to your next nightmare. Every time you see a dark space or corner and you are unsure if something is in there, wonder no longer because there I will be. If I catch you off guard for even a sliver of time, I will separate you from your flesh once more and it will be the last time.”

I woke up in front of the mirror that Jeff had thrown me into. My arms bled, glass protruded from them, my true reflection showing my hauntingly empty face from hundreds of different angles. Jeff grabbed the back of my collar and dragged me to the back door, and threw me through, the clash of thousands of pieces of glass exploding into my backyard echoed through the house.

“Wait! Jeff!” I plead, but Jeff’s fury in his eyes didn’t let off from his mission to likely eventually kill me. I felt around the ground in a panicked state of mind, my hands grasping the nearest thing. Jeff knelt over my body, my throat in his hand. Then, blood trickled down his arm and on to my neck, as Jeff’s liquid life source spilled from his neck. I had shoved a piece of glass deep in his neck. As he gulped for air, his neck’s skin pulsed around the shattered glass.

Jeff died, Mrs. Lupil was safe from her husband, and I was cursed with the knowledge that I’d forever be alert to avoid the theft of my skin.

fiction
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About the Creator

Rick Pension

Writing has been a passion of mine since before I was 8 years old. I’ve evolved my stories in various ways since, and I only want to write for people to enjoy my stories. I don’t like to typically stay within a specific genre.

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