UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1)

by Michael Harris Cohen

  Now, she brings a hanky to her sex and dabs up the spillage. How is one meant to guard against an encumbrance in any case? She doesn't know. She was never taught such tricks. Her mother only told her to stay well clear of men, and as far as that goes, she has. If she has to run home to her mother with a belly full, at least she can say that she never broke her promise.

  Not having the first idea where to look for Kate, she pulls on her clothes and heads out into the gas-lit streets, beginning on Cable Street and wandering all around. Shortly after five AM, as she's about to give up and slink back to Kate's bed, a policeman's whistle sounds from beneath a railway arch on Pinchin Street.

  "There's been another one!"

  Between 1888 and 1889, nine women lost their lives in the East End. They were:

  Emma Elizabeth Smith, April 4, 1888

  Martha Tabram, August 7, 1888

  Polly Ann Nichols, August 31, 1888

  Annie Chapman, September 7, 1888

  Elizabeth Stride, September 30, 1888

  Catherine Eddowes, September 30, 1888

  Mary Jane Kelly, November 9, 1888

  Alice MacKenzie, July 17, 1889

  The woman whose dismembered remains were found in Pinchin Street on September 10, 1889, has never been identified.

  About the Author

  Keira Michelle Telford is an award-winning author with a love for the gruesome, the macabre, and the downright filthy. She writes dystopian science fiction, erotic lesbian romance, and other lesbian fiction.

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/keiramichelletelford

  Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/keiramichelle

  Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/keiramichelle

  www.keiramichelle.com

  Skin

  by Brent Meske

  Summary: After constant bullying in high school, Patricia vows to change her name and her entire being. When she gains the ability to mold and sculpt flesh, that vow very quickly becomes a terrifying reality.

  "If you repay me not on such a day,

  In such a place, such sum or sums as are

  Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit

  Be nominated for an equal pound

  Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken

  In what part of your body pleaseth me."

  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  "Hey pig. Piggy pig pig pig."

  High school's a bitch. Most of us felt the same way. A damn shame too.

  "Hey pig," someone laughed.

  "Oink oink." More laughter.

  Streaks of red and yellow and darker hues colored her shirt, colored her face. Bits of dried food littered her crumpled expression. A chunk of brownie fell down her face and into her shirt. She lowered her eyes and kept moving, clutching her books to her chest, because her backpack was still somewhere in the cafeteria. Someone swatted her ample ass on the way through the halls. Somebody else did a surprisingly good impression of a pig squealing.

  Tears divided the grime on her cheeks, but she wouldn't let any of them see it. She ducked into the bathroom and headed straight for a stall. Amanda Perkins and her friend Nina Calloway looked up at her through the mirror. Their giggles turned into laughter as she heard the door shut, and she was finally alone.

  Her name was Patricia Swaine. Which was good.

  Not good, it was perfect. It wasn't just that her name was totally perfect, to top it off she was five eight and a solid two twenty. It hadn't stopped being perfect through middle school, and it sure as hell didn't look like it was going to stop being perfect in high school. Piggy Swine the Porker. Hey Piggy. Piggy piggy piggy.

  She didn't hate her name, not the last name anyway. Swaine was almost a gentle word, something graceful, maybe even pure. Swan, Swaine. Like drifting on a lake in the sunshine and feeling the cool water on your body.

  Patricia, on the other hand, sucked it big time. You couldn't get anything pretty out of Patricia, not Pat (truncated and ugly, like an amputated stump), and definitely not Patty (which sounded like a kicked-around suburban housewife).

  Piggy Swine didn't think of herself as a Patricia, not the other two either. They'd been tried, by her friends, but none of them worked. She couldn't have been stuck with a nice name like Katherine, or Katarina, which could magically transform her into multiple different people. It couldn't have been anything pretty either, like Violet or Amber or another color. It didn't help that her middle name was Tamara. Tammy, she wasn't.

  It would be nice if you could get a name surgery. But Piggy couldn't. She'd tried before, cutting on her thick wrists with a steak knife. Her scars had faded to a dullish white-pink. You just couldn't incise your name out like a tumor. So the cancer in school, everyone else, had grown and transformed her name until it transformed her personality.

  Piggy pulled on her flesh, wanting to rip it off. She actually dug nail marks into her arms, into her baggy stomach. Tiny bubbles of blood bloomed on her skin. The pain felt good enough to chase away her tears.

  "It's all going to change," she told her skin, her fat. "It's gonna start with my name."

  The name she eventually chose was Jenna. Jenna Swaine sounded just wonderful, thank you very much. Not to mention, the prom queen's name was Jenna. If Piggy couldn't do anything else, she'd at least gall that uppity, size two, six-foot blonde bitch.

  "Patricia, are you in here?" Evan was a good enough guy, but he was ugly and fat, just like her.

  She said nothing in response, just hitching sobs at what had happened in the lunchroom. So Physics was next, a useless class, and she'd miss it again.

  "You're in here, aren't you?"

  She was in here probably once every other week.

  "Fuck off," she said, without any real conviction.

  "Hey, come on, it's going to be fine. Fuck them. We'll set the school on fire after we chain all the doors closed." He stepped into the stall and hugged her. She noticed every single time his arms couldn't get all the way around.

  "A pound of flesh," Mrs. Kirkenbaum said. She walked back to her desk and pulled up a scale, one of those with a little red pointer. It seemed to go from Empty to Full in no time, when their teacher placed her hand down on it.

  "It's not much," their teacher went on. "Sixteen ounces. Less than half a Kilogram. Less than a quarter of what your Social Studies textbook weighs."

  There were some polite snickers at this.

  "Mister Shakespeare, the venerable lord of the written word of English, calls for it. His villain Shylock, whom Shakespeare portrays a nasty Jew with a grudge, makes a contract for a pound of flesh. No more, no less. He doesn't wish for his money returned, or any extra money on top for interest. He wants a pound of Antonio, from anywhere on his body."

  With this Mrs. Kirkenbaum produced a lump of something the size of a tomato, but clear and squishy, like a stress ball. It was just larger than the size of their teacher's fist.

  "Do any of you know what this is?" she asked.

  "I know it's probably going to get eaten by Piggy later," someone muttered from the back. The class erupted, and Piggy set her jaw.

  Mrs. Kirkenbaum frowned. "This, class, is a breast implant." It was shown to weigh a pound when she placed it on the scale. More snickers followed. "I present this because it is easier than trying to find a pound of real flesh, and because one should take a look at this, to realize the sheer silliness of trying to change one's self. Change always comes from the power of will, the determination to change."

  "Someone ought to go on a diet of willpower," the whisperer went on, behind Patricia. More snickers followed.

  "Thus the adage, beauty is only skin deep," Mrs. Kirkenbaum said.

  "Not buried under layers of fat."

  Their small teacher folded her arms under her breasts and stared at the class in disapproval.

  "That will be enough. Now, to get back to the point: this entire play is about an evil money-loving Jew. Back then, this was a common theme: the Jews were usurers and moneylenders, and reviled
all over Europe for that. It became a stereotype leading toward Hitler's line of reasoning that the Jews were wicked and ought to be cleansed from the land in order to give the right to rule back to the Aryans.

  "Throughout the whole story, the characters ask Shylock to change his heart, to change his mind. But he's a stubborn Jew, and wants only his pound of flesh. It may become his undoing. We'll find out as the play unfolds."

  The silicone balloon continued to sit lazily on the scale, ignoring the derision and horror and laughter directed at it.

  Patricia flicked her eyes up toward the clock every few seconds, to see if perhaps ten minutes might miraculously pass without anybody noticing. After several eternities, the bell consented to end her torture.

  Some whore sonovabitch tripped her on her way to gym class. The hallway erupted into half embarrassed giggling. Her books scattered to the four winds and she hit her chin on the tile, clicking her teeth together. The tears came like a reflex.

  "Jesus, would you look at this big fat mess in my way?" This was Jenna Hawkins, resident prom queen and homecoming queen. The actual Jenna.

  Patricia-not-Jenna lay at her feet, trying to pull together her dignity so she could stand up. It wouldn't work. If she'd had as much dignity as body fat, she could chase her problems away with hard stares.

  "Hey, bitch," Jenna Hawkins leaned over her. Strawberry and cream scented blonde hair brushed her burning cheeks. It was shiny and perfect, not like Patricia's tangled mop of dirty brown. More than everything else about the past prom queen, her hair was just the right way every single day. "I heard you want to change your name to Jenna. I'm real flattered and all, but quit it now. People are going to start calling me Piggy, and I can't have that."

  She stood tall. "I mean, it's not like anybody's going to confuse us. You couldn't fit a pair of my underwear around your ankle." Her thoughtless, idiot, hanger-on, Kardashian wannabe friends got a kick out of that one, and she went with them, laughing down the hall, perfect hair swishing.

  "You'll always be Piggy to me," she called out.

  She never cried in front of her parents. Of course they loved her, but their love always manifested with stuff. They wanted to give her more clothes that might not fit in months to come, more jewelry she'd never wear, and toys. They still gave her fucking toys.

  The worst of it was the food. Both her mother and father enjoyed eating, enjoyed it prodigiously. They always cleaned their plates, at times wiping them clean with buttered bread so as not to miss anything. More than this, though, they stocked the house so full of food that the three of them could have eaten well for a month and not cleaned out the pantry. Whenever Patricia asked her mother about this, the excuse was always along the lines of:

  "We eat it, don't we? It's not like it's going to waste."

  Her mother had learned hard lessons from growing up poor. The Janislaski household saved everything. This practice was brought into the Swaine household when she married Patricia's father.

  No, she never cried in front of them. It was sullen silence all the way.

  She always ate in silence. Her computer time was spent in silence, during which she would clench her jaw and feel her throat begin to tighten, despite the Cheetos or potato chips or brownies by her side. Patricia, who wished her name could be Jenna, drowned these things in food. It was there, she was there.

  The only one to see Patricia cry was her closet mirror. Or rather, the four full-length mirrors that made up her closet doors always watched her. She could not fit into just one of these, but it wasn't their fault. It was hers. They were dutiful; they only gave her the facts. The facts were thus: Patricia Swaine, or Piggy Swine if you were under eighteen, could not stop eating.

  "May God look upon you with favor, and give you peace." Her pastor sketched out the sign of the cross in the air. Just the motion made her want to vomit.

  Patricia didn't want to go to church anymore. She resolved to tell her parents how useless God was. If he could truly scrub cruelty from the world, he should start with the church. Her few friends went, but she just couldn't stomach the idea that God loved her. She couldn't fathom the idea that Jenna Hawkins and her prom date boyfriends came here every so often and prayed like good little Christians. That was a load of shit, to be honest.

  Her faith wilted.

  Watching Jenna sit there, with her blonde hair practically giving her a halo, made Patricia want to throw up again.

  She walked out in the middle of the service that day, quietly turning her back on God, on the pastor, and her friends, even her family.

  She left the church, swearing under her breath, and walked two miles home praying to Satan.

  Piggy stood shivering in the school bathroom again, silently crying. The world of high school moved on outside, beyond her, distant and removed. Chocolate sauce spelled out her nickname on her chest in ragged letters: PIGGY. She'd sat there and let the fullback, a guy just about her size, drizzle the letters on there.

  He took the dare, and she stared into his eyes the entire time, until his cheeks burned with shame. He'd never forget this day, for damn sure. His hands shook so bad by the time he finished that the Y was just a wonky scribble. It did the trick though. Somebody else had smeared a cupcake in her hair, then down her face.

  Instead of lowering herself, she'd silently gotten up and left to the sounds of roaring laughter, and even applause.

  Her chin crinkled, her bottom lip convulsed, and tears ate away at the frosting on her face. She held herself and cried, not caring to miss Physics with the rotten old bag that taught the class. Physics or Suicide 101, either one was okay by Patricia.

  Once again she tried to steel herself against the pain. Failed. Instead, her stomach burned with hate and shame.

  It was a battle, hating herself. Her fingers dug into her fleshy arms again. The pain was good, and she watched the little blood droplets form. Pain almost let you forget for a few minutes.

  The pain disappeared, and the wounds closed, before her eyes. Patricia gasped, then looked outside the stall. No one.

  She dug her fingers into her arms again. This time when she pulled, her flesh came with it, in big clumps of skin and fat. She opened her hands and found her body in her hands, on the tips of her fingers. She was too stunned to scream. Instead she looked down at her arms and found deep finger markings, where the skin and fat used to be. But no blood.

  A tiny croaking sound came from her throat and escaped. It startled her. She held the fat out away from her, and shook it off her hands like it was manure. Gobs of it splattered onto the stall walls and on the floor. Mushy skin slid down with exaggerated slowness.

  With her hands on her arms again, she poked at the marks in her arms. Then, feeling bolder, she rubbed over the reddish runnels and crevices. Her skin smoothed over like clay. A little more smoothing and she looked just like normal again. Yet there, spattered around the stall, were little pieces of her, blobs here and there stuck to the floor, the door, the walls, the toilet.

  "Oh God," she moaned, and a stone fell into the center of her guts. It glowed hot and disgusting, and painful in her middle.

  That afternoon, Patricia stripped off about a hundred pounds of fat in her bedroom, scooping and remodeling her skin as if she were a piece of art. It was actually kind of fun, once you got outside the butcher shop idea of what she was doing. She found that underneath it all, she had a surprising amount of smooth, strong muscle.

  She kept her breasts just the size they were; only now they seemed huge on her.

  She worked in a daze of satisfaction and determination, scooping off this or that disproportion and smoothing it here. She worked herself down sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds, until she the scale read one twenty three. A massive lump of ruddy pink flesh sat in the corner, a strange snow that seemed would soon melt.

  She even worked on her face, smoothing it down and scooping skin off until it was Jenna Hawkins-delicate and prom queen haughty. Now she looked herself over in the mirror, completely naked, a
nd marveled.

  For almost two hours she stared at it, the Piggy Swaine hill. And stared. And stared. Eventually the ability to think came back to her, and then plans began to form.

  It wouldn't work, not for a few weeks at least, but she would end up back here. Like this.

  She slapped most of her body back into place, making this and that adjustment until she was back to mostly normal. She left off ten pounds, which seemed pitiful in comparison to the behemoth she'd shed earlier.

  But that was okay. She could scrape off a pound of flesh every day and be perfect in two months.

  Patricia went out that night and bought a small postal scale, one that weighed up to two pounds. She hid it in her closet and fawned over it.

  Patricia and her mother went out to buy her a new wardrobe two months later. She was a little awkward at it, as she'd never had to try on clothes to fit tightly before. They always had, whether she liked it or not. Whoever it was that made clothes for large people (plus sized, is what you would call the old Patricia) must have been a sadist of the worst kind. Every scrap of clothing produced by these fuckers was too tight in places she had no intention of showing, and loose elsewhere. She looked like a circus tent because of them.

  No longer. They went into Saks and Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Forever 21, and finally Victoria's Secret.

  "Are you sure about this?" her mother asked, on several occasions, in a small voice. Patricia (Jenna Swaine, Jenna Swaine, she kept repeating) looked at her mother and held herself from rolling her eyes. In her reduced sized hands she held a pink tank top with the words 'Saturday Night Skinny Dip Club' in darker pink, with little bits of silver drop shadow.

  "There are plenty of things at JC Penney that look perfectly respectable," her mother hinted. "Are you sure–"

  "There are plenty of things at JC Penney that would get me laughed at," Jenna Swaine replied.