by Megan Toth, San Francisco
image by Lucas Childress

Do you ever have those days where you’re just sick of being in your
own skin? We all have them. When your hair is doing the same old thing
that it always does, and the peeling flesh on your shoulders reminds
you that death is just around the bend, that this body of yours is
just a bunch of rotting cellular material? I was having one of those
days. I was eating my soggy oatmeal, and staring at run-of-the-mill
photos and just feeling god damn sick of the skin I was in. Why
couldn’t I have skin like his? Not skin, you know, but the whole
works: the bone structure, the haunted eyes, the mass appeal? I’m a
girl, but still, I wanted to be in his skin, to be an attractive
gentleman who could make all that he desired come to him, who could
make all those who swooned over him whither in his path, to be a
vessel of passively pretty power.

The image of his dark, narrowed eyes burned into my soul. I was
deprived. Ahh, how the flames of unsatisfied yearnings do turn
steadily to the black ashes of festering hatred. And here I wallowed;
biding my time in the black snowy aftermath of envy turned to rage
turned to despair. A barren landscape if ever there was one. But then
I saw it. What was this here? Growing, peeking out of the
desolate, papery ground? Poking forth from the dry, whirling ashes.
Why, it appeared to my eyes to be a hint of green. Why, yes! A lovely
little sprout! It was real, and it was here, and it was inside me, a
green shoot of hope. And I felt it, and then I felt an idea, a little
sapling of an idea, green and tender and small. If I wasn’t made the
way I ought to have been, I thought, then perhaps… yes! Perhaps I
could become it. The moth could become the butterfly, so long as the
butterfly was willing to trade up his wings. And slowly the hatred and
anger and rage, turned to deliberation. And planning. And
action. At last, a path to action. If you don’t like
the skin you’re in, slip out, slip out, and then back in.

My uncle has told of a trailer out back,
And when it turns on, its carvers go whack,
With thin little blades that easily hack,
The wheat and the hay and the skin off your back.