My Skin.

By Ash Landles

The skin fits better in the winter. The cold tightens everything—tendons, pores, seams. It makes the world quieter, and me harder to smell.

I walk to work just after six, when the frost is still clinging to the windshields and the street lamps haven’t quite surrendered to daylight. I pass dogs being walked by tired men with tired faces. I nod at them sometimes. They nod back. No one looks twice. I’ve learned that the trick to disappearing is not avoidance, but polite presence—just enough eye contact, just enough routine.

The library opens at seven. I’m there by half-past six to brew the first pot of coffee and switch the heating on in the back rooms. There’s something sacred about that hour when the lights flicker awake and the shelves exhale dust. It’s the only time I feel like I’m really in the world, not just moving through it.

There’s a girl who comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Clara. She never needs help finding books—just wanders through the aisles like she already knows what she’s forgotten. She wears gloves with a thumb hole in the left one, and once she smiled at me like I was a real person.

That was the beginning of the end, I think.

But that morning, the Tuesday when everything shifted, she came in carrying a canvas tote and smelling like cold air and oranges. I was stacking the returns cart, alphabetising by instinct, spine by spine, like muscle memory. I watched her walk past the biographies and hesitate at the poetry. She always did that—like the poets were asking for something she didn’t quite want to give.

I had started wearing the skin six years ago. It wasn’t planned. Nothing this permanent ever is. But it had lasted longer than the others. I’d kept it clean, conditioned, shaped around new habits. I had almost made it mine.

Almost.

Clara asked for a book that didn’t exist. The Quiet Inside. I told her I hadn’t heard of it, and she tilted her head like I was lying. Maybe I was. Maybe I’d read it once, long ago, in another body, another voice.

“Is it new?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I think it’s very old.”

She left not long after, but I kept the name in my mouth the rest of the day. The Quiet Inside. Like a bruise you press just to check if it still hurts.

That night, I took a longer route home, past the boarded-up diner and the old bus depot where no one waits anymore. I thought about her voice. The way it filled the space between us without demanding anything back. I thought about the book. About the title. About how sometimes the body I wear doesn’t feel like a body at all, but a silence I stepped into and never quite stepped out of.

And I thought—for the first time in years—that maybe I didn’t want to keep hiding.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I rarely do, but this was worse than usual. The seams itched. My hands didn’t feel like mine, though they never really did. I lay still and stared at the ceiling for hours, listening to the old pipes murmur in the walls and the creak of the radiator expanding.

Sometimes I forget there’s no one in here with me. The skin remembers, in its own way. When I first took it—when I first learned how to wear it—it felt like the house had two tenants. His weight, his voice, lingering. That faded over time. Now it’s just quiet. The kind that rings in your ears if you sit in it too long.

In the morning, I shaved, even though the stubble grows slowly now. I watched my reflection closely. The cheekbones didn’t belong to me. The nose was crooked in a way mine never was. The eyes…the eyes are the only thing that give me away, if anyone’s looking hard enough. But no one ever does.

The library was quieter than usual. That happens on Wednesdays—rainy ones especially. Retirees cancel their book clubs, and the mothers skip story hour. I didn’t mind. I prefer it that way. Less noise. Fewer people trying to reach into places I can’t afford to expose.

Around midday, Clara came in again. She wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t a Tuesday. It wasn’t a Thursday.

I didn’t say anything. Just watched from behind the desk as she shook off her coat and smiled at the children’s display like it had told her a private joke. She wandered, always without urgency. I’ve never seen anyone move like that—like time doesn’t quite apply to her.

Eventually, she approached the desk with a slip of paper. Her handwriting was crooked and sprawling. On it, a list of names—some real, some imaginary. I recognised a few.

“Can you help me find these?” she asked, voice low. Like she didn’t want to disturb the books.

I nodded. 

“Of course.”

 I rose from the desk and led her through the stacks, reciting half-remembered Dewey decimals like prayer beads.

“You’re quiet,” she said, after a while.

I paused.

“Is that a problem?”

She shook her head. “No. Just rare.”

We stood beside a shelf of memoirs, close enough I could smell the citrus again. Her glove had a new hole—this time at the wrist. I thought of asking her about it, but didn’t.

Instead, I handed her a misplaced copy of The Bell Jar.

“I think you’ll like this one,” I said.

She took it. “I already do.”

For a moment, I forgot myself. Forgot the weight beneath the skin. Forgot the things I’d done, the lives I’d shed. She was looking at me like I was something whole, something real.

And in that moment, I wanted to be.

By Ash Landles