Slip

Pressed into my hands without consolation, already hemmed and labelled, size only guessed at. I

learned its limits the way you know the seams of a borrowed coat: the stabbing pinch high in the

underarm when I reach too far, the sudden gape when I bend, the slow drag across my back when I

turn away. It comes with me regardless, clinging along my shoulders, cupping the base of my skull,

settling over me with the dull inevitability of weather. Some days it is almost indifferent; other days it

grips as if afraid of being slipped off.

It alters, but never in my favour. The edges thicken, angles blur, and a fine new layer creeps across the

surface, tightening year by year. One day, I realise it has sealed itself completely: closing down the

spine with the blind precision of teeth, sinking into the hollow base of my throat, pooling warm and

deliberate hips. It moves when I move, a heavy half-second behind, spilling where I sit, soaking into

chairs and mattresses. I start to court small violence against it: cloth that raps it raw, seams that saw

into the underarm and bite along the fold of the hip, as if enough daily abrasion might finally wear it

thin and show what, if anything, is left underneath.

Some nights, it moves on its own. I feel it shiver under me of its own accord, easing itself against the

mattress in a slow, tidal shrug. The knowledge of it thickens until it’s unbearable: the drag of its

weight, the damp warmth caught in its folds, the way it grips the undersides of my knees and the soft

bowl of my stomach, tugging when I try to turn away. In the dark, I begin to hunt for an edge, at the

base of the skull, under the breastbone, a place where the seal has not reasonably held. My fingers

find the idea of a seam; I imagine the first lift, that thin slackening of glue and then the peel. There is

a small, obscene pop as it gives. The surface comes away in one shuddering sheet, sticky, reluctant,

mild treachery in every inch of release. Underneath is a layer I have no name for, tender as the inside

of the cheek, raw and shining, flinching from contact.

In that version of the room, he is simply there. I pass it to him, and it folds into his hands with a slow,

wet sound, still warm from where it held me. He tests the weight once, then starts to work his thumbs

into it, patient, practised: kneading the low swell of the belly, the slack underside of the arm, the

tender strip along the ribs. The stuff of it rises and sinks around his fingers; where he pinches, it thins

to a pale membrane, almost see-through. Held up between his hands, it hangs in two long tongues,

faintly luminous in the light. When his mouth drops, his tongue follows the seam from collar to hem

in one slow pass, the way you might draw a line down a back, catching on the slight ridge as if there

were something to be found there. His breath pushes inside in regular pulls, filling the hollow I

stepped out of, clouding it with heat. The room sharpens, edges clicking into place. Somewhere just

offstage, my own lungs miscount; the rest of me jerks in small, stupid shocks, as though whatever he is working between his fingers is still wired to the meat of my throat. I have never lived entirely outside this dream, and I suspect, though I cannot say it without a particular sick, private shame, that I have never truly wanted to.

Words by Christelle Al Abbasi, she/her