by Ellen Datlow
He pulls his hunting knife from the back of his shorts and stabs her between the shoulder blades. He grips the hilt with both hands, and his shoulders flex with effort as he drags the knife down, sawing through her skin. She screams, and her skin ripples again, but he shoves the knife in harder, and as she thrashes it goes in deeper.
Her family howls from the water, surging closer, but Dad drags her onto the sand. Black blood surges from her wounds, fountaining over his hands, but he keeps going. As she struggles, he plants a foot on her back and drags his blade down her spine.
He saws all the way down her spine, tearing away her white bikini, and then he begins to peel her.
I can’t look away, and I can’t block out the sounds. I watch it all. I see everything.
When he’s done, he pulls a pale, wet-skinned thing from her carcass. It’s shaped like a human being, like a girl. She looks like the fish that Gina and I saw on the beach earlier, pulled open and exposed. Her naked flesh trembles. Each breath sounds agonizing. Even from this distance, I can see the fine, sharp ridges of her bones against the outline of her body.
He drops her on the sand and bends to pick up the gray, almost-person-shaped skin lying on the beach. It’s caught partway between beast and woman, with halfway fins and long, fluttery gills. A few acrylic nails cling stubbornly to each of its partially transformed hands.
He slings the skin over his shoulder. Its flat, sightless face stares at the sky. Once he has it, he lifts her up, too, like she weighs nothing.
Dad walks up the beach house’s wooden steps and past me without acknowledging me. My mom sags in his grip, her body dangling in his arms like a deboned fish. Her skin flaps behind him like an empty sock, slapping wetly against his back with each step. Her family wails, and the smell of ocean rot crashes over us like a wave.
I turn back toward the house and find myself looking into my own face. My skin stands empty, sand on its feet, hollow around the phantom shape of my body. It doesn’t have eyes, or teeth, or a tongue, but when it speaks I hear its words clearly.
Run away, Emma.
I wake in the backseat of the Range Rover, cold sweat pouring down my back. Gina’s arms wrap around me as she sleeps nestled against my side.
The texts from Dad keep pinging in, one after the other. The screen glows in the dark, through the pocket of my sweatpants. I swallow. I want to defend him, but I know him too well. My dad loved my mom the way Clayton loves me, which is to say, the way a man loves his favorite sports car. I can see him wanting to keep her with him, even after death. Just not … actually keep her empty skin.
But he had her cremated, whispers a part of me. Didn’t he?
But which parts? asks another.
My skin aches, strangely tender.
I ease out of Gina’s grip, and when she blinks up at me sleepily, I tell her to go back to sleep. “I’m just going to pee,” I say. She nods and her head droops.
Lightning crackles overhead, and the wind is fiercer than ever. I have to fight my way into the house. The master bedroom is quiet again, and I sit on her side of the mattress, my back to the wall. I look at the carnage on Dad’s side of the bed, and I wonder if she did that on purpose. Beside me, the skin creature scrapes at the closed closet door.
“Mom?” I whisper. “I want to talk to you. I need to know—what did Dad do to you?”
Mom’s skin moves behind the door, making a whispering sound against the wood. I slide past her ruined favorite bedspread and kneel on the damp carpet, pressing my forehead against the closet door.
“I miss you,” I tell her. “I wish I’d known. I wish I could have helped you.”
There’s a gentle rasp, like she’s drawing her nails in circles beside my cheek. It makes me smile, and tears well up in my eyes. When I cried as a kid, my mom used to cradle my face in her hands and trace shapes on my cheeks. Could that have been what she was trying to do when I walked into the bedroom that first time?
“I’m sorry I let Gina hit you with the chair,” I tell her. “She didn’t know. I didn’t know it was you, either.”
Thunder rumbles outside the window, and it begins to rain hard. I glance out at the ocean below. The waves are rough, high. I remember the dream, and the image of her family crying and thrashing in the water.
She used to look at the waves with such longing. When I was little, she’d hold me on her lap and sing to me in a language I didn’t know. It was a song, she told me, about where she’d come from. The flowers that grew beneath the water, the volcanoes, the canyons she’d grown up exploring. Whenever Dad walked into the room, though, she would stop singing. He told me he didn’t want her speaking Korean, which he couldn’t understand, around me. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that her ocean songs hadn’t been in Korean at all. I couldn’t find a language for them, and when I asked her, she refused to let me record them for my professors to hear.
“I’m going to bring you home,” I say, and she stills behind the door. “Just stay still and trust me.”
The door handle is cold, and when I open it, a sliver of moonlight falls into the closet. Mom’s skin crouches with her knees drawn up against her chest, gazing up at me. Her flat body and eyeless face make me shiver, even though I’ve braced myself. She smells awful. I hold my hand out, and she places one of hers, delicate, red-tipped, in mine.
There’s a sudden banging on the downstairs door, and we both freeze. “Emma!” shouts a man’s voice. It’s Clayton. “Emma, it’s me! Let me in!”
Mom’s skin swivels her head toward the sound, and her back arches. Her hands twist into claws. I glance at the window, thinking fast.
There’s a back door on the ground floor, but it’s a sliding glass door and Clayton might be heading there right now. And—Gina, fuck. Hopefully she’s safe, hiding in the car, and he missed her entirely.
“Come on,” I say in a low voice and drag Mom to the window. It’s not hard because she’s so light. I crank it open and crawl out onto the lower segment of the roof, helping her out. The beach stretches out before us, and the wind whips the sea grass violently. No sign of Clayton.
I pull Mom onto my back and ease down the edge of the roof, sliding my legs over the edge and hanging on with my arms. Luckily, the stories aren’t too high, and it’s not too bad of a drop. Steep, but doable.
“Emma!”
Clayton’s voice startles me and I let go too early. The fall knocks the wind out of me, and sand gets in my mouth. Clayton’s footsteps hurry close, and I fight to catch my breath, my heart beating so fast that I can feel my pulse hammering in my hands. Where’s Mom?
“There you are,” he says. He looks just like I remember, but in my dazed state, he’s overlaid with the dream image of my young father. “I couldn’t get ahold of you, but your dad said I’d find you here. Why aren’t you picking up your phone?”
A glint of light in his hand makes me realize he’s holding a knife. Dread curls in my stomach. “Clayton,” I wheeze. “Put that down.”
“Emma,” he says, and I recognize the wild look in his eyes. It’s the same look he wore when I told him I was breaking up with him before I left. “I love you. I’ve been talking with your dad, and he said that there was a way to keep you with me forever. A way to make you understand.”
I struggle up on my forearms and knees. My ankle’s fucked. I don’t have a weapon; I scan the area for a rock, or a stick, but there’s nothing.
“Your dad told me,” he says hoarsely, “that I have to cut you out of your skin. I don’t know if I can do it. But I will.” He steps toward me, his hands shaking. “For you, Emma. For our future together.”
A flesh-colored blur darts past me and tears at his face. He screams, slashing at Mom with the knife. I cry out as he stabs several new holes in Mom’s skin.
And then there’s an awful crunching sound, and Clayton crumples onto the sand, dark blood spreading beneath his head. Gina stands over him with the tire iron from my Rover, a look of madness on her face.
>
“Run, Emma!” screams Gina. She swings the tire iron again, bashing Clayton’s skull. Down, again and again, her shoulders and chest heaving.
I run, seizing Mom and stumbling down the beach as fast as I can on my messed-up ankle. The rain pelts us, making it hard to see. The water approaches, and as it does, the stench grows. The tide is out, and it’s left behind lines of fish bones, running along the beach like veins of quartz. The sand is slippery, sticky with clear, smelly residue. Peeled, deboned fish float to the water’s surface in the hundreds, staring up, unseeing, at the stormy sky. Their bodies bump against my legs as I wade into the surf.
The image of Clayton on the ground, blood leaking from his head, flashes through my mind. I struggle through it, biting my lip so hard that it begins to bleed, too.
Clayton—
Gina—
I have to stay focused. I wade into the water up to my waist, cradling Mom so she doesn’t get swept away. She rests in my arms, like the stingrays I’ve seen in those big fish hunting shows, gathering their strength before swimming away. Overhead, thunder roars, deafening.
“It’s time to go,” I say. A lump rises in my throat, and I don’t know if it’s fear or despair. I don’t want her to leave me again. But I know I have to let her go.
Bright pain stabs through my back, and I gasp, lurching forward and dropping Mom. With a quick twist, Mom’s skin slithers out of my grip, darting into the water. The ocean floods into my mouth, and I choke.
The pain drags down my spine, sawing an uneven path down my body. It’s excruciating, and I want to scream, but I can’t breathe. Agony curls my body in half. I claw at the water, fighting for air.
“Stay still,” says Gina. I know what’s buried in my back; it’s my dad’s old hunting knife. Gina sounds like she’s crying. “Em, please. I had the dream too. I know what we have to do.”
She cuts me open, and I can’t stop her. The waves batter me and my arms and legs ache, flooded with adrenaline and panic. I can feel everything, and I can’t feel anything; my mind’s shutting down, pushing me out of my own body.
Then she begins to peel me, and I black out.
Wake up, Emma, commands a voice that isn’t mine or Gina’s, or even my mom’s. It’s something older than that. Its myriad voices, joined together as one. An image of a pod of strange, animal bodies moving in a single sinuous shape jolts through my mind.
When I open my eyes, Gina’s arms are wrapped around my chest from behind, hauling me toward the shore. My body feels raw. I can’t feel my legs. Something wet slaps my face; when I look up, I find myself staring into my own eyeless face, the bloody backside of my skin showing through its open mouth.
No, I think frantically, trying to struggle. My skin face looks back at me, empty. No, no, no—
My mom rears up out of the water, lashing out at Gina with a giant, flat tail. It knocks us over, and Gina and I sprawl in different directions. The bottom half of Mom’s body is like a giant fish’s, half-transformed; the rest of her body is slowly morphing to match it. It still looks flat, wrong, like there’s no meat inside of it.
I end up on my stomach, a few yards from Gina. My skin lies at the water’s edge and I drag myself on my elbows toward it. As the tide washes in, a skinned fish bumps into my mouth. I spit it out and crawl through the surf, dragging my body over the rows of fine bones. My fingers brush my skin.
Yes, says the voice in my head, exultant.
I tug it over my head, and it settles over my face like a mask. The eyeholes are crooked, and I yank with all of my waning strength. Mom’s hands, paper-thin and incongruously strong, latch onto my skin’s flapping legs. Acrylic nails scrape my raw body as they guide my legs back into the skin.
Once, when I was very young, Mom and I snuck out of the beach house while Dad was asleep. That night, she taught me how to swim. She held me up in the shallows, letting me practice kicking and different ways to pull my body through the waves. Her movements in the ocean felt natural the way they never did on land. And then, when she thought I was ready, she pushed gently on my back, releasing me into the water.
Mom’s hollow hand presses on my raw, naked back, and this time, I feel a rush of power. The open flaps of skin fold gently over my spine, sealing me inside.
Now swim.
My fingers and legs snap together, and my body explodes into a giant shape, arcing out of the water. My neck arcs in a column of thick muscle, and my face pushes outward, mouth stretching wide. I see my reflection in the surf, all rough gray skin and rows of serrated teeth. I’m monstrous, beautiful.
For the first time in my life, I feel whole.
Gina’s staggering to her feet, the hunting knife still clutched in her hand. She looks up as I lunge for her, just in time for me to catch the look of terror and awe on her face. I snap my jaws closed around her, and her body slides under my teeth, small and strangely soft. Blood blossoms on my tongue, and I swallow around her body. She must be screaming, but the roar of the ocean around me, the roar of my own blood in my ears, is so loud I can barely hear.
Maybe she’s calling my name. But so is something beneath the waves, that dark and lovely expanse that neither light nor human beings can touch. It thrills me, ringing through my body from teeth to tail. I see visions of a pod of creatures like us, a new family.
Mom’s skin flashes bright and swims away from shore, fast and beautiful. I turn and dive into the deep after her, bearing us down into the crushing cold.
BROKEN RECORD
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
DAY 1
What Jaden remembered of the wreck was screaming and water drops hanging in the air and the thin white mast at a diagonal and then breathing cold water deep into his chest, shrieky regret about too much stuff at once, and now he was here.
A desert island.
It was the kind people in single-panel cartoons are always living on. The only difference for Jaden was that there was no tall coconut tree drooping over him, casting a puddle of shadow for him to move with all day. The rest was the same, though: his vision failing before the flatness over the water did. In every direction.
Jaden sat back into the sand and chuckled. It wasn’t that he was amused to be alive. It was that he amused to be alive like this, with no cell, no watch, wearing the shorty-short jean shorts he’d packed as a joke, to swim in.
He rubbed his jaw, imagining the epic beard he was going to grow. Except he’d never been able to even get a goatee to come in full. His dad had always told him to wait until he was thirty-five, then he’d miss these babyface days, but, unless some tuna started beaching themselves for him every day or two, he was going to come in nine years short of that mountain man look, he guessed.
Not that this was going to go that long.
Maybe a century ago you could get marooned for months or years or ever, but not in the modern world, right? Not with satellites watching, not with ships crossing back and forth every hour. Not with there not being any more undiscovered islands. Not with Margo looking for him.
Surely she would be.
Jaden had felt guilty for going on the trip without her. Now, having left her there to call in the Coast Guard was going to be what saved him.
“Hello?” Jaden called up into the sky.
It would have been cool if a gull had wheeled around overhead, screeched a response.
There were no birds at all, though.
It was just Jaden.
DAY 2
Jaden woke the same as he had the day before: all at once, gasping on the beach. There was gritty white sand clinging to the right side of his face, and all over his chest.
He was hungry.
He stood, wobbled to what he was calling the down-water side of the little island, and peed into the ocean.
This wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He had about the same floorspace as he’d had in his efficiency apartment, the year he’d crapped out of grad school. Nearly four hundred square feet? He walked it off. It was eighteen heel-to-toe st
eps across one way, seventeen and a half the other. And the plumbing worked about the same as it had in his efficiency. The air conditioner was maybe even better.
He could do this. Maybe some sunburn, sure. But he was going to look rugged when he got rescued, wasn’t he? All tan and windblown and scraggly.
Well, tan and windblown and scraggly if a ship pulled up in the next two or three days, he figured.
That was about how long he figured he could go without water. Probably he should have dug a pit or something to pee in. Maybe the sand would filter it into water. Jaden didn’t really know how nature worked—he’d never watched the survival shows—but he remembered that from somewhere.
So, in serious lieu of anything else at all to do, he sat at the exact center of the island. It was maybe six inches higher than the rest of the island. He scraped a trench around him, just doing nothing, and then decided this circle he’d traced was the outline of a target. So he dug the bullseye out—the exact center of the island. This was where the coconut tree was supposed to have been.
About half of every scoop of sand sifted back in, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have time.
What he pictured uncovering was either a coconut or a skull. The skull would be the island’s former resident, and would fill him with despair and all that, but the coconut would just mean he’d washed up too early. If in fact a coconut was actually a seed. Jaden wasn’t really sure about that.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t find a skull, and he didn’t find a coconut.
He found water.
It was such a surprise that he pushed back, fell away. Looked around.
Still three hundred sixty degrees of unending ocean.
And, at the bottom of the little hole that was a little deeper than his forearm, a few handfuls of cold, mostly clean water.
