Discarded Skins

Trigger Warning: This story contains vivid descriptions of physical and emotional distress, including unsettling body imagery, self-inflicted harm, and themes of identity and transformation. Reader discretion is advised.

I remember finding the first one in my closet.

I was grabbing a shirt, already late for work, when my hand brushed against it. Warm, rubbery, and yielding in a way that made my stomach churn. I yanked my hand back and stared at the thing draped across the hangers—a limp, hollow version of me, sagging—the husk of discarded scrap. Its face, my face, stared back, lips parted in a silent plea. The eyes were empty, gelatinous voids.

I stumbled backward, heart pounding. What the hell?

My first thought was a prank—maybe someone had broken in, made a grotesque model of me, and left it here. But no one had keys except me, and the precision was unnerving. The scar on my chin from a childhood fall, the crescent moon birthmark under my collarbone—it was all there, rendered in grotesque detail.

I grabbed it by the shoulder and shook it loose. The whole thing collapsed into a heap on the floor, as weightless as air but uncomfortably warm to the touch. The closet smelled faintly of salt and decay.

I shoved it into a trash bag and tossed it in the dumpster before driving to work, the image of its slack jaw burned into my memory. By noon, I’d convinced myself it was some sort of vivid hallucination brought on by stress. Too much caffeine, too little sleep.

But then another appeared.

This one turned up under my bed. I was searching for my phone charger, and there it was, sprawled in the shadows as if it had been waiting. The hollow replica of myself, limp and sagging, carried a new, unsettling alteration. The left hand was missing two fingers. When I examined my own hand, my stomach lurched. My pinky and ring finger felt cold, numb, almost alien.

I spent the rest of the night awake, pacing. The discarded skins weren’t hallucinations.

By the end of the week, I’d found four more. One in the passenger seat of my car, another hanging from the shower rod, dripping as if freshly peeled. Each time, they became less complete. The one on the couch had a gaping hole where the stomach should’ve been. The one in the garage? Its legs ended in frayed, uneven stumps. The air around them carried a faint static charge, buzzing against my skin.

Each discovery left me more hollow, more off. My reflection in the mirror didn’t feel right anymore. My movements lagged, mimicking a glitching video feed. And then there was the itching—deep beneath the skin, under muscles, along my spine. At night, I lay rigid in bed, clutching the sheets as my body writhed with an electric discomfort I couldn’t scratch away.

It came to a head when I decided to burn one.

The fifth skin had appeared in my kitchen, slumped in front of the fridge as though it had crawled there to die. I dragged it into the backyard, my hands shaking, the trash bag hissing against the grass. The lighter fluid splashed across its surface, glistening with an oily sheen. I lit a match, my breath hitching as the flame licked the edge.

The smell hit me first—a sharp, acrid reek that turned my stomach. Then came the pain. It began in my fingers and tore through my nerves, jagged and relentless as barbed wire. I dropped the match and crumpled to my knees, screaming. A creeping pressure surged beneath my skin, straining it to the point of tearing.

The fire hissed and died, the skin untouched. My hands trembled as I ran my fingers along my own arm, and that’s when I felt it: a seam, almost invisible, running along my wrist. I tugged at it instinctively, and a sliver of my own skin peeled back. Beneath it, I saw…something. Not muscle, not bone. A gleaming dark mass, rippling with a life of its own

By morning, the itching became a torment. My flesh crawled with a million tiny, unseen legs, gnawing from the inside out. I refused to look in the mirror. The reflection had grown wrong in ways I couldn’t articulate—bloated, pale, stretched over bones that no longer seemed mine. My skin hung loose and clammy, as if it had been boiled and left to cool.

The newest discarded skin sprawled across my bed, twisted and lifeless, a corpse dissected and abandoned. Its lips twisted into a leer that mocked every natural expression I’d ever made, teeth crooked and too large for its face. The jaw sagged open, dripping a viscous fluid onto my sheets, the stench acrid and metallic. Its hollow sockets bored into me, accusing, demanding.

I couldn’t bear it. Something inside snapped. I slammed the door, dragged the blinds down until the room was a darkened tomb, and staggered to the kitchen. My hands found the knife before my mind caught up. The cold steel trembled in my grip as I returned to the mirror, heart hammering.

The reflection stared back, and I almost didn’t recognize it. The eyes were sunken pits. My lips, cracked and scabbed, quivered against yellowed teeth. My skin—gray, translucent, and slick with sweat—clung to my frame, taut and unnatural, as if it might split at any moment. My fingers shook as I dragged the blade to the seam on my forearm, the line that had appeared days ago, mocking me with its symmetry.

I pressed and sliced.

Pain erupted, white-hot and electric, but it wasn’t what I expected. The sensation burrowed deep, raw and satisfying, scratching an itch buried beneath the skin. The blade slid through the flesh, parting it in a jagged, bloodless line. The skin didn’t bleed; it peeled, curling back in thick, mucous-slick layers that made my stomach churn. Beneath it, something pulsed—a living, glistening black mass. The surface shimmered as if oiled, twitching in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t mine. It smelled of iron and something sharper, something alive.

Breathing heavily, I dug my fingers under the edges of the peeling flesh and pulled. The old skin came away in long, rubbery sheets, each strip making a wet slap as it hit the floor. My jaw clenched against the growing agony, but I couldn’t stop. My muscles burned, my vision swam, but I ripped and tore until the ground was littered with fragments of my former self. The pile reeked—decay, sweat, and the tang of something chemical.

When I straightened, the thing in the mirror took my breath away.

It stood tall, its surface an obsidian ripple of sleek muscle and unearthly symmetry. Tendrils of faint light coursed beneath its surface, illuminating veins that pulsed with a rhythm that felt powerful, infinite. Its eyes glowed faintly, their intensity alien but familiar. They stared back at me—not with fear, but with hunger.

The itching was gone. The weight, the sickness, the exhaustion—all gone. What replaced it was sharper, stronger, undeniable. I flexed my fingers, now black and fluid, watching them ripple and contract, beautiful living shadows. The old skin on the floor quivered, lifeless and grotesque, a shed chrysalis.

These weren’t warnings. They weren’t signs of decay or disease. They were preparations. I hadn’t been dying. I’d been transforming.

The knife dangled in my hand, forgotten, as I gazed down at the heap of who I’d been. My lips curled into a smile, sharper and wider than it had ever been before.

I turned away from the old me, opened the door, and stepped out into the waiting night.