A genderqueer hillbilly and a haunted woman must break a generational curse that has entwined their lives in the abandoned coal-stripped mountains of the Pennsylvania Wilds.
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Desperate to flee a dark past, Finley drives off a cliff and prays to...
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06. || unlucky skin.
Finley hadn't intended to venture back outside the cabin that evening.
But the longer she sat huddled close to the wood stove, staring down at the mud stains that sprayed her floral dress, the more those stains took on a rusty hue. But rust colored mud wasn't so uncommon around here due to the iron runoff still seeping from the old coal mines. Or so she tried to convince herself. And the longer she tried to convince herself, picking at that dark rusty mud that'd also found its way beneath her fingernails, the more she was sure it was never mud. And that only made her skin crawl and itch so she picked and tore til her cuticles dripped red, but at least then she was sure it was blood. And her own.
The stains on her dress though, no, that mud-that-wasn't-mud had to go.
And first she tried to scrub it out. She pulled down the old tin wash tub that Gram had hung on the back wall as a hillbilly shelf, dumping the picture frames and knicknacks off to the side. Then, pitcher after pitcher, she filled the tub with ice cold spring water that now flowed from the kitchen spigot thanks to River Hawthorne. And as if speaking of the devil themself, the click click click of an old beater came creeping down the dark dirt road with one dim headlight just outside the paneled window frame.
It almost sounded like they were gonna stop so Finley paused at the third button of her dress, waiting to hear a car door before she undressed any further, but instead the engine revved and the tires squelched to grip the muddy road and the single yellow beam of light sped off down the hill.
She continued to undress, half tempted to dunk herself in the tub to cleanse any lingering evidence, but the last thing she needed was hypothermia. She at least knew that much. So instead, she just splashed some of that ice cold water on her face and wrapped the least rodent-chewed towel from the bathroom around her body as her dress soaked in the tub. But after an hour of scrubbing, not even a bar of Irish Spring soap could rid the stains from the fabric.
Eyeing up the dying flame in the wood stove, she knew better than to try and burn the dress inside the cabin, but outside in the fire pit would be just fine. She could let it burn to ash, then maybe she would be just fine too.
And wasn't that cruelly ironic, now needing to burn the dress because no matter how many times she had washed it over these last few months, she could still smell gasoline in its fibers. Everytime she wore it, the fumes found their way into the back of her skull.
But the virtual advocate had insisted that the gas was in her head, just like the putrid smell of the old bullet hole through her foot—some kind of trauma brain response, and she'd have to get away from the source before she could heal.
And maybe that all was true, but she was still pretty sure she could smell gasoline.
Wringing out the dress, she stretched it across the hearth to dry. Its translucent fabric clung to the stone edges like the shed of snakeskin she found with Grandad in the quarry years ago. He told her then that snakes shed when they outgrow their skin every couple months, but sometimes it's to rid themselves of parasites as well. And he assured her humans do this too. Millions of skin cells flake away every day and body cells completely replace themselves every seven years. Turning twenty-eight this winter, Finley was near the end of her body's fourth cycle. As she readjusted the towel around herself, the rough terry cloth scratched against her skin.
