School had started when Grandpa passed away. Mama wouldn’t let me attend the funeral since I had school, but I skipped anyway, while Mama flew back to visit her mama. I called Grandma to tell her that I had wanted to come. She said I should celebrate Grandpa’s life the best way I knew how, and that I didn’t understand the heartbreak Mama and Grandpa had caused one another, and would probably never know. Then she had a catch in her throat and couldn’t talk. She said she’d talk later.

  I climbed into the attic and got down the piano and soul paper. I set them on my bed in front of the floor-length mirror. My bedroom was on a corner, so I had two windows on both sides open, letting in air and light. I pulled Grandpa’s song out and put it aside. On the first sheet, I wrote “I love you, Grandpa!” Nothing happened. I didn’t know what to expect. I drew a butterfly in a riot of colors and maybe it looked three-dimensional, or maybe it shimmered with colors I didn’t use, but it was hard to tell what was happening from what I wanted to believe. Maybe I’d just wasted a part of my soul, or a sheet of rare paper, or maybe I was delusional.

  I put Grandpa’s song on my lap and was about to file it away when I decided to play the song to celebrate his life. I’d only had a year of lessons, so I wasn’t very good, but I had a notion of how it should be played since he’d played it. I played until it sounded pretty good. I was about to put the piano away when I noticed an iridescent blue butterfly resting on the outside window screen to my left. Morpho peleides, I’d learn later. I played the song again and another butterfly was on the right. A Monarch, but too vividly golden.

  I recalled Grandpa saying, “Play it like you mean it.” So I closed my eyes, and lyrics popped into my head, and I sang of the loss of love. I banged on the keyboard until the music and words sounded right. When I opened my eyes, the window screens of both windows were packed with butterflies—all kinds, all sizes, all colors: Nymphalidae, Swallowtail, Pearl crescent, Vanessa atalanta.

  Illustration by Mariah Salinas

  I couldn’t breathe. Something in my belly rose, and it wanted out, and I wanted it out. And I sang again, playing for the person in the mirror. At the high point, a butterfly in riotous colors emerged from my throat. It rested on my outthrust tongue, testing its wings. It flew down to the paper and looked uncannily similar to the butterfly I’d just drawn except the color in its wings shimmered.

  Grandpa’s song was my first hit, updated a bit. Almost no one pays attention to songwriters, so you won’t recognize my name. I don’t mind not being famous, but I do want a paycheck.

  My songs were largely earworms, so if I’ve written ones you hate, it may be that the song wasn’t played right or maybe our souls weren’t connecting. Death metal bands redo my songs—sometimes as a joke, but other times with real heart.

  I finally know why Grandpa lived in an asylum. It’s like you set your soul out there, and you know how easy it is to break others and be broken, so you hide in the strongest fortress you can find—to protect yourself and others.

  I still have the airline ticket stubs from when I visited my grandparents. I also have Grandpa’s death certificate. He’d died the day I left. Grandma somehow put off the funeral, perhaps to keep me from knowing.

  I’ve had children and grandchildren but haven’t told any of them about the soul. Mostly because I don’t want them to experience a lifetime of torment, of sensing everything wrong behind every human interaction. But I suspect I will, if any of them ever asks about the soul. What will I do if my kids try to put me in an asylum? I’ll probably let them. No electrodes, though. Just a warm bed and striped pajamas surrounded by grandkids whose hair will tickle my chin as I tell them:

  “If you look into the spackled ceiling stars, you can see your great, great Grandpa smiling down.”

  The Skin of My Mother

  written by

  Erik Lynd

  illustrated by

  Shiyi Yu

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Erik Lynd writes novels and short stories primarily in the horror, dark fantasy, and urban fantasy genres, with the occasional science fiction story thrown in. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and kids where, yes, it does rain a lot and, no, he does not mind it. When not writing prose, he can be found writing songs and producing music.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Shiyi Yu was born in Ningbo, China. At the age of eleven she and her family moved to America. As a child, she often found chances to analyze all kinds of species of living creatures. Thus, being an illustrator/painter/jewelry designer, she has been greatly influenced by nature.

  Shiyi is currently pursuing a degree in illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

  To see more of her work, go to shiyiart.artstation.com.

  The Skin of My Mother

  The best part of that first cigarette in the quiet of morning was that sizzling sound. The sound of tobacco and paper flaring and crackling in the stillness. It was like you were the only one alive in the world, the only one that mattered, and that sound, fizzing through the silence, was the proof. Then a little piece of ash, paper or tobacco or both, would break off and flutter back against your lips. Then you do this half sputtering sound with your lips to blow it off, like a fart in the silence. Then the moment would be over. You are no longer special in the world, nothing is sacred. It’s all just a fart sound.

  This is how most mornings started for Elise and that was how this morning started. Only she hadn’t been alone, her world was not empty. She watched the woman across the street.

  The corner of Wilburn and Main was a barren and weedy patch of land surrounded by buildings of peeling paint and shacks of tenuous structural integrity. There was a gas station near where she parked. Small and not a name brand, at least not a name she recognized.

  It hadn’t changed. The peeling paint, the rundown buildings, the nondescript gas station. The same town Elise had left fifteen years ago.

  She sat in her car, a miracle of duct tape, filler, and rust, near the gas station. There were a handful of cars along the street. Early comers to the farmers’ market. Booths were still opening, customers flittered about.

  The customers squeezed the fruit, inspected the vegetables, laughed along with the owners. Craft booths were off to the side, second-class citizens in a farming community.

  Elise didn’t care about that. She cared about the woman. Just the one. The woman whose hair started as silver at the scalp and ended as a dirty gray mop just past her waist. The woman in a billowing brown dress light enough for summer, but long and covering most of her sagging and sallow skin.

  Elise knew the portions of her skin not covered were slathered with sunscreen. Homemade and smelling like roses and slightly rancid grease. She knew that smell well.

  The woman strode from booth to booth with purpose, grabbing up produce, inspecting it with a “Hrmph” that Elise was sure she could hear from her car seat. She sorted through the veggies, the fruit, the herbs, selecting just the right ones.

  Picky bitch.

  Elise saw her talking to the vendors. Whatever words the woman was saying, they were never kind, never thoughtful. Elise didn’t have to hear, didn’t have to see the slowly fading smiles. She knew the woman’s words too well. They were curt, to the point, at best. Hurtful and mean at worst.

  And still, the people of this town trusted her. Needed her. It pissed Elise off. The great con. It had always been a con between the woman and the town. Between the woman and Elise.

  Her mother was the problem, had always been the problem. Elise felt pretty sure she would be able to kill her.

  Again in the car, again with the cigarette. This time she sat outside the house. The one she had grown up in, but it would never be home. The garden, if that controlled chaos of nature could be called a garden, had grown up around the porch. It stretched its leafy green tentacles up the sides and across the latticework along the bottom. It grew onto the porch itself. Vegetation gripping it like the hand of a jolly green giant.

  But that was the way her mother liked it. This overgrown mess had a shape to it, one her mother guided.

  Elise could name every plant in the garden, every plant in the back garden—that one made this small front yard look like a container garden on a city balcony—even the trees and weeds. It had been drilled into her head from an early age. Mercilessly.

  She should go in. Her mother knew she was here. The old woman knew everything that invaded her property, and her property extended far beyond the lines the plot maps tried to contain her in.

  As Elise walked from the car to the porch, she could feel the garden. It reached out to brush against her. Common herbs and flowers, ferns, cursed crowfoot, jewelweed, and such all seemed to vie for her attention. But she knew plants did not move, did not think. It was all an illusion and brainwashing delivered by the loving mother. The con artist of redneck idiots and backwoods fools.

  And the killer of children.

  On the porch, Elise lifted her hand to knock against the wood side of the screen door. But then she saw her mother through the wire mesh, tightly knitted, making anything beyond dark, shadowed. Her mother stared back at her. Coldness in the deep-set eyes, sunken. Her whole face writhed with wrinkles. She had aged much since Elise had last seen her. Less like her mother and more like her grandmother, even great grandmother.

  That gave Elise some satisfaction.

  Her mother’s lips pursed for a moment like she was thinking. It made her look even older.

  “Well,” her mother said. “Come on in. I’ll make tea.”

  She turned and walked to the back of the house, not waiting for a response. Elise’s mother moved slowly, with a small limp. A knee that acted up perhaps?

  Good. Maybe she would fall, break a hip, suffer.

  Elise went inside, letting the creaking screen door slam shut behind her. She gripped her purse, a small one, just big enough to hold the gun.

  The inside was almost unchanged since her childhood. The same barely used furniture, a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, a lamp. The walls covered in shelves that stored books, knickknacks of some indiscernible uses—but Elise knew their uses, that too had been drilled into her—and jars and vials full of dried herbs, plants, and other more fleshy ingredients.

  It smelled of dryness and earth, like dust and powdered plants. The scents of many different dried flowers combined, blurring together into an olfactory offense.

  Her mother continued through the living room and into the hall beyond, and beyond that the kitchen. Her real domain, her mad-scientist laboratory. Elise had grown to hate that room more than any other in the house. In her own home, thousands of miles away, she rarely spent time in the kitchen. Just to grab food, then flee to the couch and TV.

  In the kitchen you measured, you cut, you poured, you boiled—No, no. All wrong—you ground, mixed, blended just the right—No, no, you are a fool, child. You will never learn—you learn to hate.

  Elise sucked in hard, then followed. She didn’t glance into any of the rooms she passed. She wondered if her mother had any “patients” here today. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care if there were any witnesses.

  The kitchen was clean, neat. No experiments or concoctions.

  “Sit. I’ve had a kettle ready since I saw you at the market this morning,” her mother said. “You took your own sweet time making it out here. Sun’s low, almost time for dinner.”

  Elise sat without thinking and she felt ashamed, following her mother’s command without question. Automatic. Just like when she was a child. The old habits die hard.

  The kitchen was filled with jars, vials, and drying plants hanging from rough twine. But nothing boiled on the stove. The laboratory was silent. Elise didn’t think she had ever been in here when her mother wasn’t mixing up some new ointment or potion.

  Her mother set a cup and saucer down in front of her. Elise just stared at it, watching the liquid slowly stop spinning. Her mother sighed and took a sip.

  “If I had wanted to dose you girl, I wouldn’t be so obvious about it.”

  Then she sat across from Elise, drinking from her own cup. Elise made no move to drink.

  “Her name was Elizabeth,” Elise said. Her voice was rough, as though she hadn’t spoken in a long time. And she hadn’t. It had been a long time since she had someone to talk to. Her mother said nothing. “And you killed her.”

  “No girl. I did not, you did.”

  Elise slammed her hand down on the table. “I tried to save her,” she yelled. Elise had tried. The beautiful little girl who made life perfect. “You killed her with the lies you told, that you still tell. When it came, when the cancer was on her, I took her to the doctors and did everything they said. But then when that didn’t seem like it was working, I was desperate. I turned to what you had taught me, I turned to the old magics.”

  Her mother nodded as though she knew the story and just needed confirmation. And maybe, somehow, she did know something, though Elise had no idea how. Sometimes her mother just knew.

  “None of it worked. I knew all the tricks, all the ways that you had taught me. The hours, the years following your instructions. Nothing. None of it worked, none of it mattered.”

  At some point the tears had come, anger slipping away, replaced by the empty.

  “But that’s not true,” Elise continued. “Time mattered. Time that could have been used on more treatments, scientific treatments. Time that could have been used to find a real way to treat it. But I pissed it away on … on …” Elise gestured at the room around them. “This. All this nonsense. All these lies. The lies you taught me.”

  “It was destiny, fate,” her mother said. “You were never meant to have a child.”

  Elise winced. Those words hurt. She lifted her purse and set it on the table. It made a clunk sound, the gun heavy inside.

  “Fate, destiny. More magic words from the crazy old witch. Tell me, do they still believe? Your patients? The people of this screwed-up community?”

  “They do,” her mother said. “Some anyway, but every year there are less and less. I practice a dying art. Less and less take this path. They all want to run off to the shiny cities.”

  Elise laughed, loud, hard, no mirth. “That’s a much better adventure than staying here.”

  “How was your adventure, Elise? Was it worth it?”

  “Yes,” Elise rasped, sounding more desperate than she meant to. “To have those five years with Elizabeth, no matter how horrible the last one was. That would be worth anything.”

  Suddenly her mother seemed to deflate a little, and was that softness that crept into her hardened eyes? “I might have been a little harsh when I said you killed your daughter. I do not doubt you tried the right things, and I don’t doubt your skill. After all, I taught you. No, no matter what you did, she would never have survived. As I said, it was destined. You were not meant to be the mother of that child.”

  Elise smiled slightly. She felt stupid. What had she thought she could gain from telling her mother all this? Tell her it was all a lie she told herself? Her mother was no witch. Just a crazy old woman who was so lost in her own delusions she could not be pulled back. She was too far down the path of crazy, and she pulled those in the community willing to follow down with her. Her delusion had killed her own granddaughter. How many others had died because of her false hopes, her con?

  It was time to end this.

  She put her hand in her purse. Her fingers wrapped around the cold steel. The fear hit her hard, the metal of the gun seemed to grow colder. But she could do it, had to do it.

  Then her mother’s hand was on top of the purse, making Elise hesitate.

  “Just one night. Have dinner, sleep here in your old room. In the morning if you still wish to, you can kill me.”

  Elise froze, her fingers numb against the gunmetal.

  Sometimes she just knew.

  Elise nodded slowly. She needed more time. Time to stoke the hate, work up the nerve. Killing was an event, a happening. It changed everything. There was nothing wrong with being cautious. “Yes, I haven’t eaten, really eaten, in days.”

  “I can see, girl. You are weak, your eyes sunken. You need a home-cooked meal.”

  Elise sat numb at the table as her mother started dinner. Her mother was right, she needed food. She shook, she felt dizzy. She had been running on caffeine and cigarettes, boosted by an undercurrent of adrenaline. Now she was crashing.

  The smell of food soon woke her from her stupor. Her mother was a sometimes witch, full-time crazy, but all-around amazing cook. She was a master with herbs, vegetables, and a hunk of meat.

  Her mother roasted a chicken, which should have taken an hour or more, but seemed like only minutes. Elise must have dozed. She shook her head to clear the haze when the plate was put in front of her. But she didn’t need to. Her gut took over and she started eating. Shoveling food in.

  Her mother spoke, Elise listened, but only half aware, she was focused on staying awake and eating. Her mother talked of the plants and how they prospered a little less this season. Each season they seemed to grow weaker, dying quicker, their potency less. It might have been her, her mother said, she was old and it was harder to nurture the ground, to give the toil, the sacrifice necessary. As she had said before, new blood was needed.

  Elise nodded as she ate, mumbled comments when she could. Then her mother was standing over her.

  “You’re tired, girl. Your head almost in your food. Let me take you to your room. I haven’t aired it out, but it should be clean. And just as you left it.”

  Elise allowed herself to be guided up from the seat, but she snatched her purse off the table and clutched it close. She was tired, not stupid.