In the morning, she wakes up, gets out of bed, washes her hair, brushes her teeth. She fixes bran flakes with almond milk, leaves some biscuits out for the neighbour’s cat, puts on her skin and leaves for work. On her way out of the front door, she closes it then checks the handle three times. One, two, three. She nods, pulls her hood close around her head against the misting rain, and walks to the bus stop, which takes her about three minutes, or more precisely two-hundred and seventy-six steps.

Today her skin is made of paper.

When the bus arrives, she scans her travel-pass, the driver waves her through. He no doubt notices the rips around her fingers and the shredded edges curling above her eyebrows, but she wears a patterned mask and a bright yellow raincoat and hopes this distracts from the worst of the accumulated damage.

A few rips and wrinkles are the signs of a life well lived, her Nana used to say between knitting dolls filled with strangers’ hair, and telling fortunes in stained laundry.

Taking a seat which looks mostly dry, she puts a hand briefly to her belly. Hidden inside, the bean pulsates. Throbs, hot and angry. A belch rumbles through her throat but she doesn’t open her mouth, clamps her lips shut behind her mask, holds the acrid burn tight behind her tonsils. When she breathes out the air inside her mask turns to twang.

None of the other passengers seem to notice, wrapped up as they are in their own invisible bubbles. There’s a child with headphones on, friends laughing about crushes across the backseats, an old boy mumbling to himself with more hair coming out of his ears than sound going in. She can hear the wet clack as he chews on his dentures.

She does not recall when she first noticed the bean inside her. She feels like it must have had a day, a day when it started. And yet she can’t think of the date, she can’t honour it with a birthday each year. Perhaps that is why it has blackened, growing into an angry pit roiling inside her, a little larger, a little hotter every day. Surely it was from something she ate? Or maybe from something she said, or didn’t say. Or from something someone said to her? Perhaps a colleague’s backhanded compliment, or an ex-lover’s bitter words had squirmed inside and taken root to fester and grow.

Or maybe it was just a dodgy omelette. There was the scare about the eggs a few years back.

Something moist has malfunctioned inside her—from error or input is perhaps a moot point. Sometimes she attempts eye contact with people in the street, in the office, in restaurants and bars, wonders if those faces too hide something similar, the same. But they are either blank or contain the glimmer of sparkle, neither of which she sees in herself when she returns her own gaze from the mirror.

Arriving at work, the day passes for her as it always does—enter building, avoid eye contact on route to anonymous desk in vast-yet-cutting-edge open-space vacuum. Sit, stay, good dog. The exact nature of the work is irrelevant, although if you were to be curious about it then you would find that much of it is redacted in the interests of national security. For you she is a blank screen, faceless, wordless. At most, she is black lines between a motley collection of conjunctions. Some days she has a similar impression of herself, grasping for her own soul between unreadable, untouchable spaces. She stares out from behind these black lines, and wonders where the lines stop and the bars begin.

+

In the morning, she wakes up, gets out of bed, washes her hair, brushes her teeth. She fixes bran flakes with almond milk, leaves some biscuits out for the neighbour’s cat, puts on her skin and leaves for work. On her way out of the front door, she closes it then checks the handle three times. One, two, three. She nods, tightens her scarf against the morning’s chill, and walks to the bus stop, which takes her about three minutes, or more precisely two-hundred and seventy-six steps.

Today her skin is made of cloth.

When the driver waves her onto the bus she catches him scowling at her. Not the sort of scowl that creases the forehead, curls the lips, but the sort that sits behind the eyeballs, darkens the gaze. As she finds herself a seat halfway down the length of the bus, she worries at a thread coming loose from her wrist, fraying her palm and sending a ladder wriggling up her forearm. Underneath there is redness but no pain. A mild itch, only. She pulls the sleeve of her jumper down to better cover the open wound, but on her cuff is a brown stain and she wonders which looks worse.

As the bus pulls into the station, dark squalls of sleet rush between the high-rise buildings. She filters onto the street, treads one foot in front of the other, stepping in the puddle gaps made by those in front of her. Nobody looks up but everybody bustles forwards. The rain causes a sheen across their coats and the tops of their heads reflects red-green flashes from the traffic lights and the shop fronts. In the gloom it makes them shine, lit up like festive baubles. 

She sits at her desk for two hours, her damp feet gradually drying, their smell brewing. She completes tasks and marks others as pending, sends off emails. At a time that feels long enough after arriving she makes coffee in the staff breakout area, bitter skank that rushes down her throat so quickly it’s a blessing she barely tastes it. In the afternoon, there is a meeting of the board in which she sits opposite men with faces blurred into dirty smudges. 

The bean lurches in time with the drone of their voices. She feels it squirm, almost as if it’s excited, and a wave of nausea threatens to gush through her. But she keeps the smile on her face just wide enough to show that she is listening and attentive, and that the things they are saying are certainly important and incredibly intelligent. At one point congratulations are in order for the man at the head of the table, and she nods her head slightly and hears herself litter the table with lightly spoken words that bounce and shatter but catch the light in a curious but pleasing way. She does not think that anyone notices, and if they do then they do not care to mention it.

Later, while she lies alone in bed, she speaks quietly to herself, to see if the words glint and sparkle again. But they fall from her mouth as deflated sacs that plop flatly on her mattress then burst on the floor.

+

In the morning, she wakes up, gets out of bed, washes her hair, brushes her teeth. She fixes bran flakes with almond milk, leaves some biscuits out for the neighbour’s cat, puts on her skin and leaves for work. On her way out of the front door, she closes it then checks the handle three times. One, two, three. She nods, brushes some threads from the cuffs of her coat, and walks to the bus stop, which takes her about three minutes, or more precisely two-hundred and seventy-six steps.

Today her skin is made of stone.

She says nothing to the driver when she gets on the bus, even though she has some concern that he might not be well, as his skin has turned a strange shade of puce and his eyes are completely black. But she does not want him to see what might come out of her mouth, so she keeps her words to herself and the bean inside her pushes at her stomach lining and prods against her rib cage.

She does not go to the office today.

She doesn’t mean not to go, but all the same she gets to the front of her building and rather than follow her colleagues through the gleaming, rotating doors, she simply carries on along the pavement. So much easier than she would have expected. To not go.

She wonders if they will notice that her desk is empty, or if her colleagues, so used to seeing her day in and day out, will let the clockwork grind of their minds display a ghost where she should be. Let her ghost fill her own redacted space, she doesn’t want it today.

She smiles at the thought, but her face does not move because stone is not known for its pliability. Instead, a crack reverberates inside her skull.

The crowds thin around her, as she walks past coffee shops and boutique salons and estate agents. Cars clog the roads and belch fumes but she holds her breath until the worst of the clouds dissipate and then she takes great gulps of air forced through pursed lips. She is a whale of the pavements. If she were a real whale, she thinks she would be a grey whale. Taking up vast swathes of space but still disappearing into the background of black, a trail of air bubbles the only evidence of existence. Sinking down into the dark, quiet lands of extinction.

Her stomach jitters at the thought, and the bean feels like it must be almost as big as her insides, pulsing against her skin like she is merely some failing hog casing, stretching, ready to burst in a pan.

A person walks towards her. They are pushing a double seater pram, although one seat holds a grocery bag while the other holds a child screaming murder. Although the person’s body lacks solid form, appearing almost as if it’s melting, it is wrapped in a purple cashmere shawl that gives some impression of shoulders, of arms. They lean forward with every step, adjusting the child’s hood or checking the safety belt or offering the dummy then picking up the dummy. When they turn their attention towards her it is with a face filled with clouds and a puff of smoke where the mouth would be.

The bean vibrates, a sharp, shuddering motion. It scratches at the root of her tongue and makes her want to gag. Her mouth won’t open, and the bean oozes hotly against her teeth, swills around her gums, fills her up so completely that her eyes water and she can’t breathe.

The child stops crying as the pram rolls to a stop in front of her.

The three of them wait in silence by a pedestrian crossing. There are no cars in sight but none of them move to continue their journeys. She wonders where the person might be going, whether they might have the same destination in mind. In the pram, the child waves a rattle half-heartedly, then shimmies in its seat and drops it onto the pavement. It looks at her to assign blame and responsibility. In its eyes water starts to well up and its skin turns blotchy crimson around its cheeks and neck. The person waves its shawl arms in the air and spins around, dancing like a car dealership Tall Boy.  They undulate in the breeze and their liquid form shines like oil in the sun. They drift backwards.

The rattle rolls on the pavement, following the uneven cracks to come to a stop against her scuffed but reliable shoes. Her stomach gurgles and the bean hammers at the back of her teeth, fills her head with urgent percussion.

She picks the rattle up, admires how even though she knows the colours are bright, they seem dull and faded, as if tired of the constant pressure of providing entertainment. The child looks up at her, pupils wide, chubby hand reaching towards her. She leans over to place the rattle carefully into the pram, and as she does the boiling heat inside of her bubbles and gouges and bursts through her mouth. Chips of her lips fly in all directions, stone splinters littering the sky like tiny, marbled missiles. The bean, brewed for years inside of her, spews eagerly outwards. First it covers the child’s face. There are no tears and no cries of alarm, even as black liquid oozes over its arms, covers its body, reaches slimy fingers around the hood of the pram. As more liquid gushes out of her, it feels as if she is turning inside out. She wonders if her internal organs are mixed up in this mess spilling from her mouth, forever bound in the bitter mucus of the bean leaving her. Does she spy a piece of liver, a tangle of small intestine, a chunk of lung?

When it seems as though she might not breathe again, the deluge stops. In front of her the pram and the child and the bag of groceries are now just a mound of gently pulsing blackness. It bulges slightly, twists in the middle, strains slightly over the frame of the pram, then as the light signals that it is safe to cross the road it slithers away from her. She feels the strange emptiness inside her and is not sure if that means she has served her use, or if she has been judged useless.

In the distance a purple shawl lists on the currents of the breeze and drifts high enough to billow over the rooftops, before snagging on the fingers of a rusting aerial.

She puts a hand to her face and discovers a hole where her mouth used to be, jagged edges where her lips should be, spatters of something wet sprinkling her chin. Her throat is raw and she coughs. A word falls from her mouth and stretches its wings, a dragonfly hovering above her for a second before a bird pecks it straight from the sky.

+

In the morning, she wakes up, gets out of bed, washes her hair, brushes her teeth. She fixes bran flakes with almond milk, leaves some biscuits out for the neighbour’s cat.

She does not put on her skin today.

If it were made of stone she thought it might not rip. But it turns out, skin rips regardless.

+++

Tamara (Tam) Rogers is the author of the novel Grind Spark, longlisted for the Bath Novel Award. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Bureau Dispatch, The Molotov Cocktail, and other publications. Her most recent work explores themes of identity, family and grief.

She lives in Northamptonshire UK with her cat and dog, and can be found online on Bluesky as @tamj.bsky.social or at thedustlounge.com