Note that the overall numbers might include some authors twice in some circumstances. This can happen if an author withdraws before any of the first readers read it, they are allowed to submit another story in its place. Also, if a submission becomes a rewrite request, if the author submits the rewrite while the window is still open then the rewrite would become a second submission to the window. Or a combination of these could make several submissions for a single author.
This is not quite the highest number of submissions we have recorded in a single window, that honor goes to to the January 2021 window with 1938 submissions. But in that previous window we allowed two submissions per author, so there were only 1397 distinct writers who submitted. So this window is a new record for number of authors submitting.
For the previous submission window we added language to the guidelines and submission form to ask writers to declare that they did not use generative AI to write the stories. This year we added to the guidelines and submission form a commitment from the publisher to likewise not use generative AI for any part of our processes: slushreading, editing, translating, audio narration, correspondence, or anything else. We have no interest in using generative AI for any part of our publication work anyway, so it just made sense to commit to it in so many words.
Although The Submission Grinder is generally a distinct effort from Diabolical Plots magazine for all but promotion, this year we did roll out a new joint feature between the two. All the other publication listings on The Submission Grinder have statistics and graphs that are based on self-reported data entered by users. The Diabolical Plots listing has that and now also has a similarly formatted section of data reported directly from the Diabolical Plots submission system, so that you can compare the user-reported data with the market reported-data. This is very interesting to me as a data geek! The overall shape of the graphs looks very similar which seems to suggest that the self-reported segment is fairly representative as a whole even though it appears to capture only about 1/3 of the overall dataset.
We would not still be here reading submissions if it weren’t for our amazing team of First Readers who help give initial opinions on first round submissions, and our team of Editors without whom I would never be able to keep up. Check out our staff page for a partial list of our first readers if you want to learn more about them!
If you have any comments or questions feel free to comment here or to send us a message through our contact form.
Since the last lineup announcement we made on September 30, 2024, we made one additional acceptance that came in from a rewrite request, that was finalized after the announcement. We didn’t make a separate announcement post for it, so we wanted to announce that one here as well, that I’ll list first.
Bonus Acceptance From July 2024 Window
This Is Not a Space Kidnapping Fantasy by Priya Sridhar
Acceptances From July 2025 Window
The House Knows by Meghan Arcuri
The Sharp Cry of the Winterlarks by Arden Baker
Everyone Wants to Be a Part of Sasha by J.N. Bilse
One Heart by Annika Browne
The Last Optician by Ann Calandro
9 Truths About the Yrsul by Imogen Crowe
Under the Lights by E.N. Dauvin
Five Accounts of the Story-Woman by Diana Dima
Well Tester by E.M. Faulds
The History of Coming Out To Your Parents Any% Speedrunning by Jubilee Finnigan
Jefferson Dines Alone by S.L. Harris
What Haunts the Plant by Jeff Hewitt
Euthanasia Influx by Rowan Hill
Njiran Folk Beliefs, Volume II by Claire Jia-Wen
The Book of Fading Gods by E.M. Linden
Who Can Hold a Princess by Vivian M. Liu
Davy Jones, Lobsterman by Daire McNally
We Burst Across the Theoretical Gore by Sara S. Messenger and Simo Srinivas
The Peace Found in the Balloon Hole by Lyra Meurer
Content note (click for details) non-consensual medical treatment; suicide and references to suicide attempts; terminal illness; body horror; references harm to children
edited by Amanda Helms
I ease the corpse of my beloved into the depths of the temple, clutching tightly at the shrouds that cocoon her, descending ancient stone stairs worn smooth and soft, down into the blood-drenched womb of the world where the ishetim await.
It is a betrayal to bring her here.
I descend by feel into the darkness, one hand trailing along the chisel-scarred stone wall; the other, with its handful of rough-woven linen pressed tightly against my thigh, bearing the burden of her. The stairs are slick with moisture. There is the sound of water dripping, rhythmic and steady. I clench bare toes into the chilled stone and try not to fall. A mineral stench, acrid and sharp, rises from below. My shoulder and arm ache with the weight. The shrouds whisper along the stone and her skull beats a cadence as it slips down each step.
It is difficult for me not to recall her empty, vacant eyes, unblinking, when I wrapped the shrouds around her. I try, instead, to remember her eyes shining and vibrant with life. With love.
The ishetim will return her to me. We are each allowed one resurrection.
I set her down, bracing her so she does not slip into the darkness without me, and sit on the damp stairs, wiping sweat from my forehead and neck. My fingertips graze the resurrection scar which runs along my collarbone, braided ropes of scar tissue, twisted upon themselves, hard and solid, like bone.
There is a hard knot of grief and anger under my heart. I push aside the grief and stoke the anger, compressing it like stone under earth: harder, sharper, heavier. The absence of her is too much for me to bear. The grief too razored. She can return to me. She should.
And then, I am reminded of my beloved touching my resurrection scar the first time, fearful, tentative, the only part of my body which repelled her.
“Do you remember?” she had asked, carving at the scar with her finger.
The moment was long ago, when we were first lovers. We were drunk with each other’s touch, satiated, heavy with pleasure; limbs sprawled and tangled, sweat drying on her breasts, on mine. She held my hand in hers.
I shook my head. I didn’t remember. Not the dying. Not the return. Not the space between.
“Don’t ever do this to me,” she said, insistent, stabbing at the scar to emphasize her words. She had thought, even then, that we would be together until the end of our days. “Don’t. It is very dark magic.”
I disconnected my hand from hers, sat upright on the bed, crossed-legged, facing her. “I’m alive. I’m here with you.” I said, staring at her, bewildered. “How is that not the most wonderful magic?”
“How did you die?” Her voice caught on the last word.
“Plague. The most uninteresting of stories.” I laughed, leaning over the bed and snatching a pillow which had fallen to the floor. I curled myself around her, settling blankets over us as the room grew chilly with the descent of the sun.
“It is said that they were human once.” Her face fell into shadow. “The ishetim.”
I heard her quiet, cold voice.
“Never let the ishetim touch me.”
I dismissed her words and took her into my arms and I loved her for a time, then slept tangled with her, and allowed the conversation to be lost.
“Don’t ever have me resurrected,” she said, again, decades later, after we had wed, loved, lived most of a lifetime in each other’s days. After her illness had begun to devour her. “When I am dead, I am gone and lost to you, and you have to accept this.”
We argued for days, for weeks, for months. “Why would you refuse life-saving treatment?” My voice was hoarse with repeating the same words to her, with screaming, with choking on tears.
She was bed-ridden, only able to lift her hands. Her touch was gentle and insistent, both. “Because it is not life-saving. It is only life-prolonging.” Her voice was calm to my storm. “It is a darkness that I do not want to hold in me.”
I wrenched myself from her touch. “Have you loved me this long believing there is darkness in me?” I was incandescent with rage at the revelation. “The resurrection gave me my life! I would have been dead as a child, buried in a mass grave with thousands of others. We wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have had this love.”
She said, very quietly, “I have been grateful for this love.” She didn’t speak much after that.
I watched while she grew frail, until her breath came in long, shattered gasps, until all that was left of her was an empty, hollow husk, with eyes that stared at something I could not see.
My hands cupped her face, my forehead pressed to hers. I did not know if she could hear me. “I can’t be without you.”
I scrub at my tears and clench my fist again around a handful of shrouds. I drag her down. She will forgive me.
The stairs end with a faint, warm luminescence. There is a small iron gate. The pickets are straight and slender, unadorned, sharp. There is neither lock nor latch.
There is movement in the dark beyond the gate. Shadows shift. I can hear the whisper of heavy fabric, soft footfalls, breath, the gentle rattle of chain sliding along stone.
My beloved’s fear was irrational. I tell myself this as I wait for the ishetim to attend us. I kneel and lay a hand against her brow, as though to reassure her.
A long, pale-fingered hand wraps around one of the gate spikes and pushes the gate open. The creature is bent double, stepping through. It is hairless, long-limbed, smooth-skinned, with large, round eyes black as the night sky. It is wrapped in a loose robe woven from a cream-colored, thick, fibrous material, stitched through with iridescent flecks of flaked stone. There is the scent of something sour and earthy, like fermented mushrooms; and the scent of something mineral, sharp, fresh-cut.
The isheti ignores me, its attention on the corpse. It pulls the thick folds of fabric back from its hands and forearms. It slices the shroud over my beloved’s eyes, deliberately, intentionally, with its elongated fingernails, sharp and knife-like. The act is precise. The shroud parts. The isheti uses the back of its hand to ease open my beloved’s eyes.
The isheti slides its hands under the corpse at shoulders and thigh, and lifts her, cradling her against its chest. It turns towards the gate and bends to crouch through. There is movement in the shadows at the base of its skull. I see it as it turns away from me. Something shifts there. I can’t see what it is. The isheti arches its neck and glances back at me. It beckons. It gestures ‘halt’. It shrugs. The choice is mine. Its eyes are wide and welcoming in the faint light. I am invited to witness. It is also permitted for me to wait here, outside the gate. She will need me there, when she understands I have done this against her will.
I follow the isheti and my beloved through the gate, reaching behind me to close it as I pass. Iron snicks on stone.
The passage beyond the gate opens to a vast, enormous cavern. The cavern is illuminated with a soft, warm light emanating from tangled, organic growths suspended from the arched ceiling. There is a block of polished stone, the color of cream, in the center of the cavern.
The isheti lays my beloved on it, removing the remains of her shroud, arranging her limbs. She is naked now, cold, stiff. Her eyes remain open and staring toward the tangled light above.
As it bends over her, its hands floating lightly over her body, in intimate gestures, as though to know her, the object at the back of the isheti’s skull is illuminated by the light overhead. The sight of it reverberates through my bones, across my skin. The hair on my neck stands. A shard of iron is pierced through the isheti’s skull, just at the occiput. The shard is curved into a closed circle. The bone clings tight to the iron ring, as though it has grown around it. The children are chained as soon as they learn to walk. They scream as the spike is driven through bone, and brain, and spine. They die. They are ishetim. Resurrection is easily done. A chain flows from the iron ring down the isheti’s back, onto the floor, and snakes away into the darkness.
Other isheti come from the shadows. Each is chained.
My beloved fears them. And yet I have brought her here. I am not afraid. I am angry. I am writhing with anger that she has not listened to reason. I am blistered, torn open, with anger that she has chosen to leave me, when she could stay. That I have been abandoned.
The ishetim begin to chant, weaving threads of wordless vocalizations together, as they move towards my beloved’s corpse, their robes rustling softly as harmony to their voices. They are no longer capable of speech, I am told. Speech sacrificed to obtain their unspeakable potent magic.
The ishetim remove their robes and fold them carefully on the floor. They gather around her, bearing bowls of stone and woven baskets, and the sharp implements of their magic. She is cleansed with water, and with smoke, and with marrow scooped from long, cracked bones. She is scrubbed with sand and with sharp, broken splinters of rock. She is anointed with oil, and with a pungent fermented liquid covered in a pale blue down, and with blood pulsing from the long, slender neck of one of the isheti.
Then they begin to cut.
The work is terrible. The ishetim use blades of stone and iron for the long, deep cuts across the collar bone, chest and thigh, and their own fingernails for the finer work along hands and fingers, through cheekbones, and nose, and chin. They cut out her blood vessels, removing them whole and entire. It is painstaking, delicate work, separating arteries and veins, and capillaries as fine as the hairs on her cheeks. When they have finished, she is unrecognizable. No longer human. Ribbons of flesh. Bones showing through. The blood, jellied in the vessels, now discarded on the floor, glistening and weeping.
They press something into the parted flesh. It is impossible to know what it is. It is soft, pliable, the color of milk. It fuses with parted flesh. I run my fingers over my arms up to the collarbone, imagining this alien substance inserted into my own flesh. I don’t care. I live. What else would matter?
They thread long, impossibly delicate needles with a substance as fine and translucent as spider silk and begin to sew.
I wait and witness. And then.
My beloved is no longer a corpse. Her skin is lush with life. Her breasts rise and fall with breath. Her skin is smooth and unmarked, save for the single wound along her collarbone, deliberately left. I yearn to kiss her, to feel the warmth of her skin, to lie with her again, and listen to her voice. I cannot regret the choice I have made. I do not. Instead, I feel the hard, cold anger in my chest begin to loosen and unwind, replaced with relief, with love.
She opens her eyes. She smiles and reaches for me. My heart lifts. Then, she frowns as she sees the roof of the cavern above and the faces of the ishetim surrounding her. She scrambles upright. A small, startled sound escapes her lips. She glances down at her naked body, the congealed blood, the bits of flesh, the newly sewn resurrection wound left deliberately across her collarbone. She scratches at it frantically, tearing the stitches. It does not bleed. There is no blood left in her.
“What have you done?” Her voice is wretched, newly stitched. She strangles on it.
There is no undoing this.
“Oh, my love,” I say. I exhale suddenly, as though I was not aware I had been holding my breath since her passing.
“You’ve betrayed me,” she says, astonished. She is sidling backwards on the stone table, away from the ishetim, away from me. She places her palms flat on the stone, and reaches down with one foot towards the floor, finds her balance, places the other foot. The floor is wet and slippery with her blood. She looks down, still clutching the table. She retches.
“You’re alive,” I say.
She takes a step away from the table. Away from me. She touches a hand to her chest. Her heart no longer beats. There is nothing for it to do without the blood. I know this. I place a hand to my own unbeating heart to show her that I know.
“I’m ruined,” she says, her voice very still, very quiet. But she is whole and perfect and everything she has been.
I feel my anger compressing again. I reach a hand to her, to bring her back.
She flinches away from me, slipping in her own blood. “It is very dark magic,” she gasps, still moving away.
The gate is behind her. Shadows of the gate spikes are stark and black against the cream-colored stone floor. The ishetim begin to move away, deeper into their shadows. Their chains rustle softly.
“It is wonderful magic,” I counter, echoing the words I spoke to her so many years ago.
“I don’t want it.” Her voice becomes shrill. She trembles. She claws at her body as though trying to tear it apart. Her eyes are wide in the soft glow of the cavern’s light. “I am… wrong.” She looks towards me, accusing. “How could you betray me like this?” she says, bitterly. Her gaze searches the cavern, as though trying to find an escape from the cavern, from me.
Now my anger sinks to the pit of my stomach, like a rock in water. “I betrayed you?” My fingers clench and my voice rises. “We are together. How, oh how, is this a betrayal?”
I take another step towards her, hands reaching out.
She snatches one of the isheti’s knives from the bloody altar. She holds it between our bodies, menacing, keeping me at bay. She pauses, staring at the blade. There are bits of her flesh on it, her blood. She turns the knife, pointing the blade towards her unbeating heart. She looks up at me. She tightens the fingers of one hand around the hilt, presses the palm of her other hand flat against the butt.
“No!” My voice tears from me. I lunge at her, frantic. I catch one of her arms, tighten my grip on it, try to wrest the knife from her. We struggle. My hand slips and catches on the blade. I try to hold on to it. She pulls it from my grasp. A shriek of pain slides over my palm. I rush forward, grasping for control of the blade, of her hands, of her life. And the knife, soaked in her blood, and in the milky white fluid from my sliced palms, the knife plunges under my ribs, deep, to the hilt, to the bones of her fingers. Her skin touches mine, and it is warm and alive. I clutch her hands. It wasn’t intentional.
“I did not want this.” Her voice is shaking now. She looks down, gasps. She pulls her hands away from mine.
She retreats quickly. She looks behind her, for an escape, for a way out.
“Don’t leave me.” I hurl the words at her. The pain in my belly takes my breath from me. I pull the knife out. It clatters to the floor.
“This is my decision to make, only mine.” She is nearly at the gate now. She is half in and half out of shadow where the gate separates the ishetim’s world from the long, long ascent back into ours.
“I don’t have to lose you.” My voice is soft now, as though the anger leaks from me along with the fluid that drips between my fingers where they press against my wound. There is despair, and a loss of hope. I had held the hope all these many days since she died in arms, and now it cascades away from me.
Her fingers reach out towards one of the iron gate spikes. She is suddenly calm. She stands straight. “You have already lost me.” She turns. She grasps one of the iron gate spikes, curling her fingers around it with both hands. She plunges herself upon it. It pierces her under her jaw, up and through. She hangs there. Trembles. Is still.
The ritual can only be performed once. There is no undoing this.
The ishetim wail. They are agitated, restless.
My beloved’s body hangs on the inside of the gate, in the shadows. She remains in their world, has not crossed the threshold. They take her down. Her head falls askew. Broken. Bloodless. They do not put her on the stone altar. The resurrection cannot be done again. One last chance. Instead, they take her by the limbs and drag her back, further into the dark, into the shadows. They make ugly, terrible sounds in their mouths.
A hard sharp sound, like a hammer on stone.
I hear something like a scream.
I am alone in the cavern under the world. The pain of lost hope is as encompassing as the cavern that surrounds me. The pain of the wound has narrowed to a small, sharp hole inside me. My limbs are numb and my face cold. I know that I am dying. The ishetim have retreated into their darkness. I am alive, and once dead already, and there is no need for them to attend me. I wonder, if I die here, will the ishetim take me and drag me into the darkness in the belly of the world? Will they bury me alongside my beloved?
I cannot bear for us to be parted.
I do not want to die.
Even without my beloved, I do not want to die. I tear a strip from my dress and bind it around the bottom edge of my ribs, tying it as tightly as I can manage with my unresponsive fingers. I pass through the gate. My fingers reach up to touch the spike where my beloved betrayed our future together. I stumble, on a loose stone, on grief, on anger. The spike bites into me. My body jerks in reaction, and I am bent double by the searing pain in my belly. I collapse against the gate, hearing the iron on stone as it closes. I drag myself upright and begin the long ascent back into the light.
***
My body is frail and shaking as I descend in the darkness. I stop and sleep on the stone stairs when exhaustion overtakes me. There is no hope to keep track of time, but I am dehydrated and stumbling when I reach the gate. It is difficult not to see her body hanging from it in my memory. I sit and wait.
The physicians have done their best for me. They stopped the milk leaking from my body, cleaned me with strong astringents and with flame, stitched my skin closed. But the hole is too deep, and the knife that cut me was not clean. An infection has taken hold. And the physicians say there is nothing more for them to do, save poppy or mandrake or henbane.
I do not know where else to go. I still yearn for my beloved. Maybe the ishetim will bury me alongside her. There is despair. And longing.
I hear the soft rattle of chains. A shadow interrupts the light emanating from the cavern. An isheti has come for me. I try to rise. I cannot. It crouches on the other side of the gate, inspecting me. It turns its face to allow the light to shine on it. There is a familiarity to it. It is isheti, hairless, and dark-eyed, and misshapen. It is my beloved. Was. There is a ring at the back of her skull, and a chain.
“You’re alive,” I gasp. There is radiant joy.
She tilts her head, listening. She doesn’t speak.
“The ishetim can resurrect more than once,” I whisper, astonished. “You become one.” I reach through the spires of the iron gate. My fingers caress the fabric of her robes, imagining her smooth warm skin against mine. “Oh, my love, let us be together for always.”
She stands and removes her robe. She is naked before me. She wants me to see. She is much changed. There are ligature marks at her neck. A long, flat, roped scar on one side of her throat. A handful of jagged puncture marks between her ribs. Burn scars covering part of her face, and down one arm. And a delicate blossom of pale scar tissue under her jaw where the iron spike of the gate went through.
“Resurrect me,” I say, pleading.
She looks at me for a very long while. Then she shakes her head, once, very strongly.
She leaves me lying on the stone, in the darkness, outside the gate, to die.
Sheila Massie is a speculative fiction writer of fantasy and horror, both dark and hopeful, (though not always in the same story). She enjoys a good sipping tequila, can’t live a day without cheese or tea, and doesn’t like mornings unless it’s of the still awake at 2am variety. She lives with her husband and her two dogs in Victoria, BC, Canada. Her fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Augur Magazine and elsewhere. Find out more at sheilamassie.com.
Content note (click for details)Death, grieving, medical abuse
edited by Ziv Wities
When Estelle Irby died (at the young age of 43), her Skin did not. When the last bit of breath left the lungs, when the heart and brain had gone quiet and the limbs still and stiff, a shudder went down the length of the body that was once Estelle Irby (though, according to her hospice doctor Carter Rannow, the shudder was a normal thing, not an indication of any imminent abnormality or strange occurrence, such as the Skin leaving the body, which it did within moments of the aforementioned shudder).
And so, in those quiet seconds after her death, Estelle Irby’s wife August and their teenage daughter Yumi and Dr. Rannow watched as a piece of Estelle Irby removed itself from the body, like an out-of-body experience might be demonstrated in a film (you know, the soul lifting up and out, toward the ceiling, toward the heavens, as it were), only this was a kind of body-out-of-body situation. They watched as Estelle Irby’s Skin lifted itself up and off what had been Estelle’s internal hidden bits and pieces, and detached its hypodermis from the muscle and bone beneath, leaving behind a few stray hair follicles, sweat glands, fat layers, and nerve endings (because we all lose a bit of ourselves in this kind of process, one supposes).
The Skin was gentle with the (dead) body, pulling each living cell slowly away from its (dead) counterparts, and the sound was like a billion tiny kisses. This sound distracted August enough that what she might have found a horrific spectacle became instead a tearful remembering (in grief, yes, even in the earliest moments of grief, the smallest things may trigger an onslaught of emotions, and so it was with August). The sounds peeled through layers of memories of August and Estelle lying in bed at the end of a long day, Estelle kissing August in all manner of silly places, sending August into tired giggles, Estelle smacking August’s stomach with her lips (each new move goofier than the next), both of them collapsing into exhausted laughter.
For their daughter Yumi, the sound of the Skin extracting itself from her (dead, from now on) mother’s body kindled memories of Estelle Irby’s (once alive) lips as she tried to open particularly stubborn jar lids. Or when she contemplated a project problem in her woodworking shop, sucking and biting at the insides of her cheeks until they were raw and her mouth was coated lightly with blood (a habit she had had since she was five years old, the cheek walls never quite healing in her lifetime). But mostly, the sound of the Skin reminded Yumi of how Estelle clicked her tongue whenever Yumi presented her latest painting, almost always a dramatic affair (if sparsely catered with last night’s leftovers) in the family living room. August would applaud and praise, but Estelle would put on a show of being The Critic, clicking and puckering her mouth in all sorts of strange sounds meant to withhold Estelle’s true (always proud, always warm) feelings for as long as she was able, which kept Yumi on edge (and was all in good fun, but Yumi still, always, worried that that next painting would be a true disappointment, and Estelle, in that moment, may not be able to mask such a thing).
The Skin removing itself was a long process, but a necessary one (so it seems) to keep the Skin intact, so that it could step away from the body as one full human-shaped skin suit, the hair that was once Estelle Irby’s salt-and-pepper mane (she had started going gray early, in her 20s) flowing down to the top of what was once the skin of her lowermost back. And while August and Yumi were lost in their memories, Dr. Rannow watched the process closely, and sent a quick text to his nurse, who was downstairs, to ready a sedative and a large roll of plastic wrap (the nurse’s name was Carol, but he never remembered this, always called her Kristy with a K or some such thing, and she’d stopped correcting him).
The nurse, oblivious to what was happening with the Skin (though knowing Estelle Irby was bound to expire any minute, and hoping it would be soon, as she had a pre-paid Zumba class to go to that evening and did not want to lose that $30), was a bit confused at Dr. Rannow’s text, but supposed that August would need something to calm her, and perhaps there was more cleanup than expected.
Once fully removed, the Skin turned its face to the body and considered the exposed muscle and bone, not with human eyes but with each cell in itself (they somehow knew this, this way of looking, all who were in the room), and sweat began to prick ever so slowly from the Skin’s pores. Yumi would later suggest that this dribbling made the Skin look like it was crying, though August would only half-heartedly agree with this sentiment, as the smell of Estelle’s sweat did not make her think of tears but of something else more intimate, a mix of sex and days on the beach, and the extraordinary work of dying (no one talks about the sheer muscle it takes, death), of carrying Estelle up the stairs, of hot flashes in the middle of the night, sheets soaked.
After many minutes of (damp but silent) grieving, the Skin turned to leave. August and Yumi didn’t move to stop it, too overcome with the shock of Estelle Irby really being gone, her exposed insides lying quietly on the hospice-provided bed (like the quiet aside within a parenthesis left suddenly bare and exposed, Yumi would later suggest, and indeed, several of her paintings would play with such a textual theme). August quietly felt grateful that the bed would be taken away, that they had not allowed Estelle Irby to die in their shared bed (especially now) when she would, she was sure, turn over in her sleep toward Estelle’s side of the bed and see a skinned version of her wife rather than the whole person she wanted to remember.
During all this, Dr. Rannow made a list of the many ways he could retire on this discovery (the whole business of dying was tedious, boring, and certainly he couldn’t spend another thirty years doing this). What would the Skin reveal about humanity, about health, about what comes after (good or bad)? And how much would people pay for such a thing (has to be a lot, right)? The quickest way (he finally concluded) was to just sell off the ingredient itself (i.e. the Skin) and let other people figure it out. He realized (and this was indeed an epiphany of self, in this moment) that he didn’t much care what people did or discovered with it (a potion for long-life or immortality, real proof of a heaven or hell, a special spice for a barbecue, whatever, it was no skin off his nose, hahaha) as long as he got paid.
The good doctor was doing math in his head as the Skin grieved and Estelle Irby’s wife remembered their giggling late-night kisses, and Estelle Irby’s daughter thought about how she wouldn’t be able to show her next painting to her dead mother and she didn’t know what that would feel like (and she didn’t want to know, in fact she was thinking maybe she’d never paint again).
Estelle Irby was worth more dead than alive, Dr. Rannow thought as the Skin turned and headed down the stairs (how it could see those stairs was not something that those in the room considered, but you cannot discount muscle memory, and there were a few slices of muscle clinging to the Skin’s underside that could very well be part of its navigation).
As the Skin landed at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the front door, glancing only momentarily toward the living room, the nurse (with the plastic and the sedative ready in a syringe) was struck cold for a moment (perhaps the only one who had such a reaction, or whose mind was blank enough to truly receive the shock of a walking human skin suit). The nurse looked instinctively into the Skin’s eyes (oh boy, it did not have eyes) and, finding only darkness, immediately thought of her husband, whose dark nature had only become obvious to her in the last few years, now that she was too old (she thought) to leave, especially when she was the breadwinner, when he would most assuredly get half of what she owned in a divorce and would give her no peace, anyway.
And so, rather than thoughts of awe or money or sweet memories, the nurse focused on the present moment and how the Skin was smooth (Estelle Irby was young but still—she had great skin care too! wow!) and the head and eyes so hollow and the heart most obviously gone, left upstairs to rot, and she felt an anger she didn’t know she could feel. And so when the Skin reached the front door, the nurse was already behind it, poking it in the neck with the needle, careful not to go as far as she would when muscle lived under the skin (and bone and organs and so on), knowing she would have to strike where she thought major veins might still exist in some way. The Skin did not react, did not stop, in fact, but kept on, leaving (lightly) bloody footprints (because the extraction had been as gentle as described) in its wake. The nurse followed close behind with the plastic (counting down the six to eight seconds she expected it would take the sedative to kick in) until the Skin stopped and lost its balance, falling still and sleepy just as it was taking its first steps down the driveway. The nurse wrapped the Skin in the plastic (it was relatively light though heavier than you might expect, and easy to fold) and shoved it into the back of Dr. Rannow’s car long before August or Yumi or Dr. Rannow came downstairs. And by the look of the footprints, they figured the Skin had kept going (the lightly-bloody footprints having dried and disappeared into the oil-stained cement of the driveway), and wandered off to hide, like a dog who knows its time is near.
Once Estelle Irby’s leftover body had been taken away by the funeral home, and the hospice materials cleaned from the house, the good (ha) doctor and the nurse brought the Skin back to the office. The nurse had forgotten all about her Zumba class that evening (she would eat that $30 if it meant getting to cut into the Skin), and the good doctor was eager to get the Skin doled out in pieces to the highest bidders (a full-size skin suit would certainly draw attention). In the hours between the shuddering and the arriving at the office, the good doctor had settled into this new understanding of himself, realizing that most all of his scientific curiosity had drained out of him after his fourth year of med school and he was convinced that there was no improving this world (no matter what the Skin decided to reveal about the universe, or what products it led to), and he was eager, desperately so, for comfortable retirement.
And so Dr. Rannow called his colleagues and the businessmen he knew, and the businessmen his colleagues knew, as the nurse tied the Skin to an exam table (she delighted in the way the Skin struggled but had no strength to push her away). The nurse had to flatten the wrists entirely to strap the arms securely, and even when the Skin tried to bunch itself up (like the dead skin of a snake, perhaps, or a slinky) it was not thin enough to wriggle away. As the nurse waited for the good doctor to finish his phone calls, she watched that contraction (the wriggling) and imagined the Skin screaming (in truth it made no sound except for that soft scraping that your hands might make when you rub them together to warm up). She imagined the screaming of a bearded male voice (even though she knew very well the Skin was from Estelle Irby, whose voice was not gruff and who had no beard) and let that imagined scream wash over her as the Skin twitched and jerked and she collected the sharpest instruments in the office, the ones that could cut most precisely (the good doctor hadn’t directed her to do this but was quite pleased when he’d seen it done).
And so throughout the night, Dr. Rannow and his nurse cut into the (wriggling, slinking, silently screaming) Skin. Small cleanly-sliced chunks (that fit neatly into specimen bottles); long strips (to be wrapped in gauze); a box of the odd shapes (the ears, the nose, the toenails, nipples); ragged cuts of the scalp and pubic area (a high price for the sections of Skin with tangible, coiled hair, so different from the peach fuzz of the arms); and two big flat sections of the back and stomach (flat enough to stretch and roll like a map, or a decree from a king). All the while the Skin stayed alive under their fingers, spurting blood and fat at them like the pores were little mouths (the nurse reveled in what she imagined they were saying to her). Dr. Rannow’s clients came and went, handing wads of cash to the good doctor (nothing traceable, you never heard of me, said his texts, tickled by being a black market salesman of some sort, a dangerous business to be sure, and he felt more alive now than he had since he started med school).
By 4am there were only the two big rolled up patches (the back and the stomach) and the eye sockets left, the latter of which were the last to be cut around, once the nose and forehead gave way, so that there were only these donuts of Skin, stitched together with eyebrows. The nurse stared into the holes in the Skin donuts for several minutes as Dr. Rannow argued with one of the last businessmen to visit, a crank doctor he knew who ran an apothecary down on Venice Beach (‘holistic’ was in the name, holistic healing something something). The crank doctor wanted one of the larger pieces, but had only brought enough cash for the eye sockets (on purpose) and a gun he’d traded some (“organic”) cocaine for (a gun he didn’t intend to use, and indeed didn’t know how to use).
The nurse’s thoughts were so lost in those eye sockets that she didn’t even notice that the good doctor had been shot through the neck, and the bullet had gone clean through him to hit her in the back of the brain and straight out her left eye (the shock of death is never easy to absorb, no matter how slow or quick it comes on). And so the nurse fell to the floor, her good eye watching as Dr. Rannow rammed into the crank doctor with the last of his strength, another gunshot (and another), the gun jamming and exploding in the crank doctor’s hand (it was not a great quality gun), hand bits exploding every which way as the crank doctor’s left temple slammed into the edge of the sink. And this was the nurse’s last view—the two doctors lying in their own blood, a box of cash threatening to tip from the exam bed and onto the floor (and then, of course, darkness, and whatever comes after, if anything—the nurse had somehow never given it much thought).
It took until about 6am for the Eye Socket Skin to inch its way over to the nurse’s face and settle into place over her own eyes (one shot through with a bullet, one glazed and white with death). The Eye Socket Skin sent its little tendrils of nerves into the dead flesh of the nurse and shakily moved her head, and then her limbs, (finally) getting her body to move onto its knees, lift its arms, and grasp the rolls of the Back Skin and Stomach Skin, which shuddered with anticipation.
Slowly, the Eye Socket Skin steered the nurse’s body (clinging to the maps of Back Skin and Stomach Skin) out of the exam room door, into the hall, the waiting room, out the front and (stumbling) down the sidewalk in the dappled light of dawn. As the sun rose further into the sky, the nurse and the Skin shambled back in the direction of Estelle Irby’s home, though not directly there, instead stumbling (exhausted) toward a park a few miles from the house, to a small clearing among a thick collection of trees (a secret hiding spot where Yumi used to play with Estelle Irby, when Yumi was still little and still played with her mother). Yumi would make her sit in the clearing of sun in the thicket of trees and draw her using thick dull crayons, and Estelle Irby would pucker her lips and click her tongue before saying how beautiful this crayon drawing was, how absolutely perfect it all was (and it was).
So the Skin laid the nurse’s body in the shady grass, and the Eye Socket Skin watched in exhausted dryness as the Back Skin and Stomach Skin unfurled itself in the grass, as thin and flat as it could be, perfectly centered in the opening of sun among the trees, as if waiting to enter a portal of heaven (though the Skin did not know if it believed in heaven in this moment, at least not the kind so often spoken of). The Eye Socket Skin curled around itself and expired in a little heap of dust beside the nurse’s face, having expended all of its energy to get itself (all the leftover pieces of itself) here. And there the last of the Skin sat for a week or two (who knows exactly), some period of time after the bodies of the doctors were found, after a search party went out for the nurse, after the funeral of Estelle Irby (well-attended), and the funerals of the doctors (not so well-attended). During that time, the Back Skin and Stomach Skin stretched themselves in the sun, drying thin and pale and smooth like leather until they felt done, until they felt ready (which is hard to explain, this feeling, when you’re ready, and perhaps because the Stomach Skin had been a stomach once, it was used to the feeling of the gut, saying, now, it’s time).
And so the Skin rolled itself up and began the difficult journey of inching and rolling and scooting its way back to Estelle Irby’s house, which took a long while (after Yumi was sure she’d given up painting, after August finally had a good night’s sleep and no longer saw her skinless wife beside her in bed). But one evening the Skin rolled itself onto the front porch, where it rapped quietly on the door and then tucked its rolled-up self against the wall (like a special delivery) and fell asleep for the first time since it became Skin.
In the months following the black market events in the good doctor’s office, new life-extending products seemed to hit the shelves with gusto—skin creams and healing potions, research studies promising something just adjacent to immortality (linked with a new fad diet and book tie-in), skin grafts that became all the rage for beauty treatments. A new church that focused on consuming human skin popped up (a documentary was done quite quickly, and it was forced underground, but it still has its devotees). None of these were particularly successful (though plenty of money was made).
Yumi, however, found two rolls of handmade canvas on the porch one morning, a gift, she assumed from a friend (from her mother, Estelle Irby, is what she actually thought, though she wouldn’t admit it, as that was impossible, surely). And though she’d told herself she would never paint again after Estelle Irby’s death, the canvas was too good to waste and she painted once again (and indeed this was the start of her open or empty parentheses period, which she would be asked about in an interview later in her career, when she had reached Estelle Irby’s age).
Her explanation can be summarized not in so many words (as most things cannot) but in the spaces between them, and when forced to write this thought down, she expressed this idea by something to the tune of ((() ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )
Author’s Note: The image of a skin suit was the first thing that came to me—the idea of the Skin of a person living past the rest of the body, and the parallel that image has to grief, how it hollows you out, how you seem to be living on even though it feels unnatural to do so. Skin holds memories differently than other organs, and is also so tied to our own self image, vanity, and self-protection. Of course, once I had this image, I thought about how the most vain and greedy among us would ruin something as wondrous as skin walking around on its own. I do wonder—if I was ripped apart and sold off, would I still give freely of what I have left over? And I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m a better person than a skin suit.
Chelsea Sutton is a Los Angeles-based writer and director of what she likes to call gothic whimsy. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award-winner, a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine,CRAFT Literary, Bourbon Penn, Willow Springs, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing and her debut novella is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press in 2026. Find her at chelseasutton.com.
