A Girl Experiments with Being Human, by Ruth Joffre
New skins always take some getting used to. Each one comes with its own creases, crackles, and discomforts. Once, she pulled the skin of a bear over herself and was shocked by how quickly the bugs burrowed into her fur, their comically small bodies unbearably heavy on her new, hyper-sensitive flesh. Usually, those heightened senses were part of the allure, the reason she once slithered into the skin of a snake and draped herself over the shoulders of a woman with a necklace fashioned from the coolest silver and a full sleeve of tattoos featuring Bette Midler in Hocus Pocus. In what now feels like another life, she slipped inside a fish skin and wriggled up the river to where its mouth met the ocean, then she allowed herself to be eaten over and over by progressively larger sea creatures until finally, she was cruising a coral reef in the skin of a thresher shark, which is not really skin at all, she discovered, but teeth, those rough denticles formed of hunger and minerals that make predators all the more dangerous.
When she wriggled into the skin of the girl abandoned on the side of the dirt road, her first impressions were of pain: the lingering pressure of a man’s hand tightening on her wrist; the distant reverberation of a smack to her thighs; the echoing hollow between her legs, where everything but love rushed to be felt. Her first experience as a human girl, and already she hated it. Her fingernails were wiggly and crusted with dirt. Her clothes, a second, filthier skin, smeared with grime like the afterbirth of a wild animal. While she trudged through the forest, she raked her new fingers through her hair, untangling the knots, depositing loose strands of hair amid the groundcover, like evidence. At the combination gas station and gift shop near the edge of the forest, she thumbed the crumpled dollar bills in her back pocket and asked the cashier, “How much for the grizzly t-shirt?”
From where he sat, his body hunched over a graphic novel, she must have looked like more trouble than the shirt was worth. His hand flicked out. “Take it. I don’t care.”
“You sure?”
“Does it matter? Not like I own the place,” he said, returning to his book.
In the bathroom, she peeled off her girl’s skin and washed it in the sink, lathering soap into unnatural folds and creases until she could see the bruises previously hidden by the dirt and grime. What a distinct pattern, she thought, of the star-shaped indent on the back of its neck. She imagined slotting a precious gem there, unlocking a hidden power that would burst in a kaleidoscope of light visible in the crack under the bathroom door. When she donned the cleaned skin, she was surprised by how itchy it still was under her arms, behind her knees, on the soles of her feet. Was this life as a girl, she wondered—constant discomfort, perpetual indignity?
On the side of the road, she imitated something she had seen on television once, years ago, while masquerading as a pet Schnauzer: hitchhiking. In her dog form, she had been attracted to the idea of not having to chase after cars and instead just waiting for one to stop for her, climbing into the backseat, and sticking her head out a window without a care in the world. None of that was possible as a human girl, she found, not without negotiating, boundary setting. On her first attempt, the man tried to slide a hand behind her neck, touch the indented star of her power, so she had to warn him, “I’ll eat your kidneys if you try that again.” He protested, at first, but then she peeled back the skin of her jaw, and he almost crashed the car staring into the black pit of her maw, with its millions of perfectly spiraled teeth.
Perhaps the only thing she liked to do as a girl was eat.
With the gift of the driver’s credit card, she treated herself to dessert in the city, where with a little money she could sample every flavor and texture available: half-melted strawberry balsamic ice cream dripping over her new fingers, ube cheesecake sticking to her human tongue, blackberry buckle spotted like bruises, mashed bananas, fried mint on top of a miso crème brûlée, so crisp, so nonchalant, tossed away like the lives left behind in her travels, the names she could not remember, and now this, a kiss under the twinkling lights of a food truck, as she wonders, “Is this what humans do with mouths? Where do I rest my hands? Why does she smell like lemons?” Of all her memories of being a human, this is the only one that makes her think maybe—just maybe—this species might be worth exploring. It’s currently 536 on her list of species to revisit. In another fifty or sixty years, she will cycle back and try again.
In the meantime, she would much rather be a tree.
Ruth Joffre is a Bolivian-American writer and the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards, longlisted for The Story Prize, and supported by residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lighthouse Works, and The Arctic Circle. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 50 publications, including Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, Kenyon Review, Reckoning, Wigleaf, and the anthologies We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022 and 2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ruth served as the 2020 - 2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. She was a Visiting Writer at University of Washington Bothell and George Mason University in 2023.