Her Skin by Lucy Palmer

She sleeps the sleep of the drugged, body furled in a comma, breath steady: in, out, in, out, my own personal metronome. The scar snakes silver on her arm, a beacon in creeping moonlight. I trace it with my finger like a surgeon with a knife. She doesn’t stir.

When it happened, it was ugly; red and angry and accusing. Now, it’s perfect. I imagine opening it with just my touch, my tongue, imagine etching my name, nestling it small between sinew and bone. She’d never know, but her bones would always remember.

Lately, in the pause between where words end and where words begin, I hear she’s leaving me. Of course, she denies it, but she doesn’t know that her skin can’t lie. I see the quarter turn from cream to blush.

The other night I watched her dance with a friend, their bodies close, slope of her skull flush with her partner’s, an hourglass on the dancefloor. She didn’t seem to care who watched, but I saw her wary eyes on mine, checking.

I’m losing me, too. At night, I dream of bees. They sting my pores, steal language from me as they pack tight in the hollow of my throat.

Lucy Palmer is an English writer and poet living in California. Her poetry has appeared in By&By Poetry, The Pickled Body, Unbroken, and others. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Radvocate and is forthcoming in Cherry Tree and the OWS Ink Anthology Mirrors and Thorns. Lucy can be found @LucyPRich.