GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23

PJ JOHNSON

‘Clean’ 

I USED TO THINK that the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever gone through was that break-up in my early twenties, but now, I imagined, it was probably this morning, running barefoot and naked down the road I used to live on, my skin trailing behind me like a cape.

I had a lot of time to contemplate as I ran. I wondered if my ex still thought about me. I thought about him as I masturbated last month and it felt pretty unfulfilling. He had a nice body when we dated, but he’d cheated on me with my friend and had gotten fat since then. I took this to mean he was suffering some kind of karma, or divine retribution, but honestly, he was probably just happier. It sucked to know that people did better without me.

I was getting out of breath and stones from the pavement had begun to lodge themselves between the bones in my feet. Most of them were exposed now from all the running. I wondered if people would still want to fuck me like this. I’d caught sight of myself in some windows of cars and houses as I went past and thought I looked quite beautiful – the lack of hair was unnerving, but because all my muscles were visible, I looked really strong, like a superhero, or a science textbook come to life. I’d never felt this powerful before. 

As I rounded the corner heading towards the park, my skin-cape snagged on a street sign and the whole thing ripped from about where my breasts were to where it was attached on my ankles. I stopped for the first time since leaving the house. Damn, I thought to myself. Now I couldn’t put my skin back on even if I wanted to. I still had some attached to my shins but it didn’t look nearly as cool as all of it sliding on the floor like a shadow or a cloak. I missed it already. I thought about gathering it up again, but the little bits of dirt it’d collected unnerved me.

I decided to stop running for a bit so I could think about how strange a day this was shaping up to be. If this were a couple of months ago, I’d go to the pub and sink a few pints and call people I used to sleep with. It never made me feel better but I pretended like it did. It was always a good distraction, in any case. Now that I had no skin and couldn’t go to the pub, I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t feel ready for exposure. I couldn’t touch anyone yet. I still couldn’t touch anything.

I met an old woman with a dog that barked at me as I walked past. I kept my head down and acted like it didn’t bother me, but it was a nice dog with a big white coat and I really wanted to stroke it. I had to keep walking because I was afraid that it’d make me too sad. If I tried to pet the dog and its white fur got stuck on the tissue and sinew left on my hands, I’d have to do the whole thing again. I didn’t think I could be bothered. The old woman didn’t look at me, anyway.

It hadn’t hurt or anything. It felt worth it, but it did take a long time and a fair amount of effort. Although I could see the muscles in my arms working now, I wasn’t that strong. It took almost an entire day to strip my legs. It took longer to do my back because I didn’t have anyone to help me reach around.

When I ran past my old house, I thought I’d seen someone looking out from the living room window, even though I knew it was empty. The lights weren’t on and I couldn’t see any furniture. I’d just imagined a pair of eyes underneath the half-lowered blinds.

When my body had everything in its right place, I wasn’t really much to look at. I’m tall for a woman and have broad shoulders. These, I was told at school, were not attractive qualities, and I should consider lesbianism. I had a sort of chest and good hips that I used to make boys fancy me, but until I left university, most of my romantic encounters were fumblings and most of them were in the dark. I had a few boyfriends and a few girls that I could sleep with when I really needed a good orgasm. My ex that cheated on me was probably the one I liked the most. I knew I’d sleep with him again if he asked. I considered getting the train, turning up at his flat in the city and asking if he wanted to fuck, but I worried I’d give him a heart attack. He always liked my hair a lot and he might not fancy me without it. He’d wrap it around his fists when we had sex like he was using it against me. It was hot.

I wondered what it would feel like to sleep with me, now I had no skin. I imagined how it would feel to go inside someone like that. It would feel closer than anything, I guessed, soft and warm and bloody. I imagined my organs flopping about if I went on top. Maybe I’d be nicer to hold now. If you really dug your fingers in, grabbing on to the smaller bones, inside my arms or legs, I could close wetly around them and whoever I’d be fucking would have a properly immersive experience.

I was getting to the park entrance, thinking about someone putting their penis inside my forearm, when I heard a voice from inside the dog waste bin.

‘Melanie,’ the voice said, ‘I’m in the dog waste bin.’

‘I know,’ I said, as if I hear voices from bins all the time.

‘Come here,’ said the voice, ‘and give me your skin.’

‘I’m not sure if you’re aware, but my skin isn’t attached to my body anymore.’ The voice didn’t reply. ‘It was dragging behind me for a bit, but it came off on the sign to Duffield Road.’

‘Don’t you have any left?’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Only a sprinkling of skin. And I was kind of hoping to keep it.’

‘What for?’

‘It’s the last I have left. And it’s only a little bit. I was going to grow it back.’

‘If you’ve already taken off your skin,’ said the voice, rudely, ‘why ever would you grow it back again?’

‘I’m not sure you’d understand,’ I said. ‘And I don’t like your tone.’

The truth was, I thought I knew why I’d done all of this. It was getting to the point in the day where I was tired and probably making bad decisions. The running had really taken it out of me, and now I was hearing voices from dog waste bins. I wondered if I was going mad or if I was becoming some kind of god. As I looked at the now-silent bin, I imagined standing in front of a crowd, my disciples, skinless and awestruck. I was beautiful and powerful and inspiring. A father and son walked past, the dad covering his child’s eyes with both hands. 

It was probably time to go home, I decided. It wasn’t something I was particularly excited for. The piles of skin that awaited me, covering every surface in strips like torn fabric, looked grey and nuclear in my imagination, and thinking about cleaning it made me feel sick. I saw it lurking on my countertops, forming into something else entirely, a big pink ribbony blob with eyes and bad memories of me tearing it off myself with my nails and a hard sponge. I was glad I’d left the house dark and messy. In the event that my piles of skin became sentient, at least they wouldn’t be able to find their way out.

The streets were pretty deserted, more so than usual, and I found myself wishing everyone would come out of their houses so they could see me. I wanted their reactions. A homeless man asked me for change, to which I gestured to my lack of pockets, and someone catcalled me from a van. It took me twenty minutes to get home. It always did.

I’d left my front door open because I didn’t have anywhere to put my keys. I wiped my feet on the welcome mat out of habit and stones and bits of gravel fell out of them. The house was shadowy and depressing, as ever, and as I peeped around the door to my bedroom, my skin sat in little mounds, like discarded clothes glistening on the floor. There was no monster, just a lot of dust. I sat down on the edge of my bed, my organs shifting, the morning light blurring into afternoon under the blinds. I was tired, I realised. I felt a bit awkward getting under the covers and the sheets were rough and sticky on my muscles. Shutting my eyes, the blinking heavier without eyelashes, I heard coughing from my bathroom and the same voice from before.

‘Grown anything back yet?’

‘It’s only been, like, an hour.’

The voice grumbled. ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought you’d be better at this.’

I sat up. ‘Are you in my bathroom bin?’

‘There’s so many tampons in here,’ said the voice, rustling. ‘You should clean this out more.’

‘I wasn’t really expecting guests,’ I said. ‘Especially not in my bathroom bin.’

‘That’s not very welcoming of you,’ said the voice.

I couldn’t disagree.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s lots of skin about here. Dust is old skin, isn’t it? Couldn’t you, I don’t know, lick the floor?’

‘I have dietary restrictions,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not licking your floor. Especially not after seeing how you treat your bins.’

‘I could feed you this old stuff,’ I said, gesturing to the skin in my bedroom, and feeling a bit silly about gesturing to a voice in the bin that probably couldn’t see me. ‘I did want to keep it, but, you know. If you’re desperate.’

‘I’ve already had what you left in the bathroom,’ it said, ‘and it wasn’t very nice. You’d left it sitting there for too long. Fresh skin, that’s what I need.’

‘You took my skin without asking?’

The bathroom bin kept quiet.

‘I don’t feel good about that,’ I said. ‘You should have asked. It is my skin, after all.’

‘Well, it wasn’t good,’ the voice said, sullenly.

‘How does a voice move?’ I asked. ‘How do you pick things up?’

I waited a while for an answer but I was too sleepy to stay awake. I had a dream about a toilet talking to me and a rabbit I had as a child. I woke up a few hours later, forgetting, in the late afternoon, and it took ages to peel off the sheets.

*

On a usual day, a day in which I had skin and less dramatic emotional crises, I’d be leaving the office around this time, likely with stolen teabags and sugar from the work cupboard up my sleeves. I’d been told in no uncertain terms to take some time off. I hadn’t had a holiday in years, my manager told me, and I kept crying loudly at my desk. ‘This is for you more than it is for the team, Melanie,’ she told me, and although she was obviously fucking lying, I pretended that I felt good about it all. I took my plant home because I knew nobody would water it.

I always left just before four and got home after five, with sweat patches, because I couldn’t drive and lived up a hill. I’d put the teabags and sugar in my cupboard where I kept all the things I stole from work and cafés. I had a little pile of pocket lint taking up a corner.

My evenings were taken up by dating apps. Even if I didn’t sleep with anyone, it was a game to me, and one that I was always winning. There was a healthy sense of danger (sex trafficking, spiking enthusiasts, men who fish for fun, etc.) and it kept my mind busy. I liked lying about different interests that I had and making a challenge for myself by seeing how far I could go. I convinced the last person I went on a date with that I was a beekeeper. I stopped talking to them when they kept asking questions I couldn’t easily Google the answers to.

My usual days ended with a bath or a long walk. I couldn’t do both because it’d make me too sweaty and I liked to shower in the mornings after my run. I wanted a bath now, especially because some fibres from my bedsheets had stuck on my chest, making me look kind of furry, but I was nervous about the bathroom bin demanding something from me.

I stretched out, groaning, the noise from my chest louder without much to muffle it, and when my shoulder popped some liquid flew across the room. It made a little red mark on the wall that looked like Italy.

My favourite dinner, and the one I had most regularly during my usual weeks, was a tuna pasta bake ready meal from M&S, and it tasted different now I could see it going through me. I ate in front of the mirror, and could only just make out my teeth, chomping, greyish, and the way my jaw moved was disconcerting up close. The lump my pasta bake made moved slowly down my throat like an Adam’s apple. I thought I could see the steam from it through my neck but I might have been imagining it. I watched the lump as it travelled down my oesophagus but couldn’t look through to my stomach. This was disappointing – I’d been excited to see my gastric juices in action. I thought about my pasta bake swimming about in there, all soupy, bits of sweetcorn floating on the acid surface. I couldn’t see through my small intestine either, nor my large intestine, but I could watch them wiggling about. I’d be so helpful to biologists now, I thought. If I were a more generous person, I’d volunteer myself to science.

I wanted to watch the whole process, watch my pasta bake turn to shit inside me, and bring my mirror into the bathroom to see what it looked like coming out, but I got bored. Digestion took a long time, it seemed. I washed up the plastic tray from my ready meal and my recycling bin shouted at me when I opened the lid.

‘I almost understand the dog waste bin,’ I told it, ‘and I kind of get my bathroom bin, in a pervy way.’ The voice grumbled. ‘But why my recycling bin? What’s fun in there?’

‘Nothing’s fun,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t think half of this is even recyclable.’

‘I’m a bad person,’ I said. I shut the lid and went back to bed.

*

The first thing I realised when I woke up was that I was horny. It was strange, feeling normal bodily functions in the state I was in. It almost felt like everything should stop. I didn’t want to be hungry or thirsty or need to pee or throw up when I looked like an angel. The only stuff I should be able to do, I thought, was sleep and have a nice time.

It was the morning so I needed to go for my run. My body clock was amazing, predictable, and I woke up at the same time every day. Yesterday was foggy when I went outside, the air close and warm, and I was glad that it was cooler today. If I hadn’t torn my nipples off they’d definitely be hard. I did my warm-up exercises outside, so everyone could see how muscley and toned I looked without skin, but there wasn’t anybody there. I started by swinging my arms around and I knew my shoulders looked astounding. I stood in my doorway to do my lunges and stretching my legs to my chest so nobody would see up my vagina if they drove past. I didn’t feel conscious otherwise about my public nakedness; there was something professional about it all. When I set off, I felt better than I’d felt in a long time.

When I got to the bottom of the hill I lived on, I turned right. I ran past the little shop where I buy tampons and loo roll and bread. I ran past the green bit in front of the flats that people called a playground even though it had nothing in there to play with. I ran past the school and I ran past my old house on my old road and I stopped without meaning to because I never stop here.

The building made me shy in a childish sort of way. I suddenly felt very exposed. It wasn’t right for the house to see me like this, all the red brick blinking, the letterbox bared like a mouth. I was twelve. I was seven, I was nine. Someone inside, shaking their head. Someone telling me to stop playing with my food. Someone, just a shadow, not really there, when I was meant to be sleeping. I didn’t see them but I thought I did. I started running again and stood in dog shit at the end of the road. I felt it shift inside my foot, forming into a little ball as my bones moved it around.

My skin-cape had gone from the street sign on the corner. Either someone had taken it or it had been thrown away. I imagined a dog eating it and getting a taste for human flesh. Would it get traced back to me, I wondered, if eating my skin made a dog kill its owner? What if I had caused a homicidal canine rebellion? Maybe it would be for the best, I thought, running through the park. I wouldn’t like wearing a collar or a lead, either.

I sprinted past the dog waste bin so it wouldn’t talk to me. The ball of shit rattling around in my foot was getting really uncomfortable.

I was still horny when I got back but I needed to shower. I had a rule against masturbating in the shower because I didn’t feel properly clean if I did. When I turned the hot water on, I felt as if I needed to undress to get in, and thought about peeling off another layer. I decided against it when I looked at the bathroom bin, the lid slightly opened, my used tampons ominously dark through the crack.

The water went straight through me. I stayed in there for a long time. There was a little pouch in my stomach that collected a soapy pool, and if I moved my hips in a particular way, it swished about and made a sound. I could be a musical instrument, I thought, if I wanted. I could collect water or beans or metal in my little pouch and dance about to make nice noises. I could be anything.

Before I got out I washed my hands over and over. I liked watching the suds fall out the ends of my fingers.

I had five different dating apps on my phone. One of them was pretty dark and sordid and I only used it when I was really bored. The rest of them were okay, though, good for the game, good for what I needed. I hadn’t taken all my skin off for sexual enlightenment, but, I thought, it could be a solid benefit to this whole situation. I took some photos to update my profile. There was one pose I always used to do for dating apps (I’d have the camera angled high and kind of peep out from under my fringe) but without my hair, I wasn’t sure what looked good. With some trial and error and a few hundred new pictures on my camera roll, I found my favourite pose was when I stood with my back facing the mirror and stared prettily back over my shoulder towards the camera. It made my arse look enormous.

I usually hated updating my dating app profiles but I would have felt very deceptive if people didn’t realise I had no skin. I left the best picture up of me with skin – I was at the zoo, holding a soft toy of a sloth in front of a real sloth, looking cute and playful, and my hair was great that day – but changed the others to four new skinless pictures. My teeth looked very straight when I smiled now even though they weren’t. I was never allowed braces as a child.

I was lounging on my bed fingering myself when, to my mild surprise, I was inundated instantly with messages from all four dating apps. I knew I was sexy but I never usually got this much attention. ‘Mark’ said ‘hey babe x your fit’. He had a bad moustache. ‘Lukas’, a man I could tell was less than the 5ft11” he claimed to be, said ‘WOW!!!!!!!!! Love the legs.’ I didn’t reply to either of them but I replied to ‘Oliver’, 36, who said ‘you look like a lady who deserves a nice time ;)’.

Can you give it to me ;) I said.

Tonight????? He said.

Maybe, I said. Drinks? XX

Im so hard rn, he said. He sent me a picture that I didn’t open.

I suddenly felt a bit sick and really didn’t want to see anyone at all. I was thinking about things I didn’t want to think about. The guy from work and my old house and everything else that was meant to keep me safe. I felt an itch underneath my fingernails. The bathroom bin groaned.

*

Days passed. I woke up at the same time. I ran and didn’t stop. I ate and watched it come out of me. I cleaned myself and cleaned myself and still felt bad.

‘Melanie,’ said the dog waste bin, almost a week since the first time it spoke to me. ‘I’d really love some skin, please. If you can spare it. Anything at all.’

‘You sound pathetic,’ I said, and it did. The voice had gotten so weak I could hardly hear it. It was higher, stringy, familiar, like a friend, and I hated it for needing me.

‘I only exist because of you,’ it had told me, in the night, a few days before. I was throwing away an old tube of toothpaste. The voice had made me jump even though I was expecting it. ‘Please, Melanie,’ said the dog waste bin.

‘I’ll talk to you when I get back,’ I said, and ran home. I thought I heard the voice again on the way but it was just someone shouting at me from a van.

‘Okay,’ I said, still sweaty from the run, holding the bathroom bin open with my foot. ‘I’m willing to make some kind of deal.’

‘An arrangement,’ said the voice. ‘Alright.’

‘You should be pleased,’ I said. ‘I’m giving you my skin, just like you wanted.’

‘I am pleased,’ said the voice. It sounded flat.

‘I’ll give you my skin every other day,’ I said, ‘when I grow some back. It won’t be a lot but it’ll be something.’

‘That’s great,’ said the voice.

‘In return, you have to promise me not to take my skin without asking.’

‘Fine,’ said the voice. I still had piles of it around the house like laundry. It was starting to smell.

I’d grown almost a whole new layer over the past few days, and I had become dry and crispy to touch. I looked like I’d been dusted in sugar. I peeled it off, the little flakes transparent in my hand, and fed it gradually to the bathroom bin. The lid made smacking noises like a mouth. It took over an hour to get it all off and the house felt quieter when I was done.

We kept on like this for a while. Months, probably, although I wasn’t keeping track of the days. I didn’t go back to work and my manager didn’t ask me to. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew since taking off my skin but I wasn’t particularly lonely. Every other day I’d rip my body open with my fingernails and give myself in pieces to the bin, who didn’t speak to me anymore. We had a good system. I didn’t feel rushed or pressured. It was like feeding a particularly unobtrusive pet.

After some time I felt that I could stop. My bins had begun to bulge and because I hadn’t needed to take them out with my visitor living in them, I thought that the voice had gone, satiated finally, and that I’d successfully upheld my end of the deal. I was done, I believed. I began to grow myself back.

This didn’t take as long as I thought it would, and soon, I looked more like a person and less like meat. I had a small fuzzy amount of hair like a peach. I couldn’t really sit on public transport or on any seats with covers because my skin would flake off and I’d stain it, my body still flesh and juice. I was still beautiful, still strong. In August, I started to date again. I fucked a few people and it felt good to have someone else inside me. My organs didn’t fall out and I mostly didn’t ooze blood on them. I tried to ignore the way every bin looked about to burst. I kept them in the corner of my eye, tucked away in my peripheral vision, until one day I heard the voice again, coughing in the dog waste bin, as I walked by the park entrance.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Been a while.’

‘Have you missed me?’

‘Not much.’

‘Yeah,’ said the voice. ‘That checks out.’

‘I’m not giving you anything else,’ I said, crossing my arms over my chest. I was wearing clothes again and liked the way they rustled when I moved.

‘I don’t need it,’ said the voice. ‘I’m all done.’

‘With what?’ I said. I felt nervous. It was hot and I was clammy, sweat beading, and it felt a lot worse now the sweat didn’t just absorb back into me. ‘Done with what?’

The bin exploded instead of answering. Dog shit and little colourful bags flew over me like confetti, and it might have been beautiful had I not been met with an exact double of myself, naked and covered in crap.

‘Hi,’ she said, or I did.

‘What the fuck,’ I said, just me.

*

I wondered if this was what motherhood would be like. Melanie Two, as I’d named her, or as she’d named herself, wasn’t demanding necessarily, but took up all of my time and energy. Even though she’d made herself from my skin she didn’t have a single scar, mark, or blemish, not even a freckle or bruise. She didn’t have the strawberry birthmark I had on my arm – still there, surprisingly, after it all - or the dark patches under my armpits. She was perfect, scarily so.

Melanie Two didn’t talk that much and she didn’t have my memories. I felt bad that she’d spent so long living in bins but she didn’t seem damaged by it. She didn’t seem damaged at all, in fact; physically she was soft and unadulterated, and she didn’t have any of my emotional scars either. She was easy to live with, but as she’d only just been made, I considered her a baby, and I didn’t feel like I could leave her alone.

My usual days were different now. I stopped running. I made us breakfast. We slept in the same bed and woke both curled up the same way on opposite sides, like the womb, like twins. She showed an interest in romance and dating so I let her use my apps. She was sweet and excited about it all and didn’t open any pictures men sent her. She didn’t need to change anything on my profile because we looked exactly the same. I found that I didn’t care about that kind of thing anymore.

When we went on walks together I took her down my old road. The first time, I stopped in front of my old house. ‘What’s this,’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nowhere.’ I didn’t stop again.

When I decided to do what I did, I knew I hadn’t been so certain of anything before, not even of taking my skin off in the first place. Melanie Two was sat on the sofa. It was late, we were watching TV, and the room was static and blue. I watched the way her face shifted in the light, and she was peaceful, flawless. I realised I was biting my nails, and I’d gnawed down the sides so much it hurt, blood smudging on the sides of my mouth. I looked at Melanie Two and knew she didn’t have bitemarks in her skin. I didn’t think she ever felt the need to hurt herself or peel herself apart. She was already clean.

I left the house without locking the door behind me. I didn’t take my phone and I was naked. I walked down the hill, past the shops, the flats, the playground, down my old road, past my old house, I didn’t stop, I walked to the dog waste bin, replaced by someone, full of poo bags and moonlight, and I took myself apart and got inside. I’d never felt as safe or as warm as I did here.

PJ JOHNSON is a musician, artist, and writer based in Leeds, UK. They completed their MA in Prose Fiction at UEA in 2022, where they began work on their debut short story collection. As a trans writer, Johnson’s prose is preoccupied with navigating gender and sexual relationships outside of the binary. Otherwise, their interests include large bodies of water, insects, and ambient music.