In The Skin of A Matriarch
They buried their mother in April. The rain hadn’t stopped since. It remained cold and consistent and it soaked through the bones of the old farmhouse, as though the house itself were mourning too. Elin had barely spoken at the funeral. No one expected her to. She was seventeen, the youngest of three, and the only one still living on the farm when it happened.
Their father had passed years earlier, and the question of what to do with the house had remained suspended in silence, like so many things. She had died in the kitchen. A sudden hemorrhage. She’d cut herself, badly and the wound, paired with a grand mal seizure, had torn through her like lightning. She bled out on the floor, convulsing. The blood seeped through the floorboards and into the grain of the wood. They never quite got the stain out.
Elin had found her curled, stiff and glazed in her own red ruin. By May, the house had quieted. Except for Elin’s voice, drifting through the halls at night. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes singing lullabies in a trembling alto. Sometimes speaking softly, intoning recipes, warnings, bedtime prayers, all in their mother’s voice. The siblings let it be. Grief moves in strange shapes.
Marta, the eldest, drove up from the city. Neil came in from Duluth. They brought store-bought pastries and supermarket flowers, unsure whether they were arriving for mother’s day as celebration or a wake. Miriam had arrived late the night before, driven in by her husband, Mark, with their three children who now played in the backyard near the old pig pen.
“Where’s Elin?” Marta asked. Miriam nodded toward the stairs. “Still up in Mom’s room. I hear her talking, but she hasn’t come down yet.” Neil wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“A lot of candles,” Miriam said, “It didn’t smell too good when I showed up.” She shrugged and led them to the kitchen, where Mark was half-watching television in the family room down the steps. The children shrieked with laughter outside. Time passed. They knocked on Elin’s door more than once. Each time, she answered through tears. “Just a little longer,” she said. “I’m sorry, just getting ready. Trying to at least.”
So, they let her be. And though sorrow weighed on them, they laid the table on the back patio, just as Elin had said she would. The spring sun pressed gently upon their shoulders, warm and tender as the ghost of a hand no longer present. Tea steamed in chipped porcelain. The children laughed and played catch with their father among the tall grass.
Mark missed the catch. The ball struck his chest and fell to the ground. He did not move. He was staring at the door. The others turned to follow his gaze and there in the doorframe, stood Elin. She was hunched over slightly. She wore their mother’s favorite yellow dress, the one with the lace collar and the pearl buttons, though on Elin it sagged from her frame.
But it was not the dress that stopped their hearts. It was the thing beneath it. Elin herself. She had dressed herself in their mother’s own exhumed skin. It hung from her in long, sorrowful folds, withered and puckered. Loosened by rot, it clung to her petite frame in tatters of leather and lace, still damp in the creases, yet papery and yellowing at the edges. Where the flesh had dried, it cracked like porcelain; where it remained wet, it glistened obscenely. The scalp had been laid atop Elin’s own, the thinning hair combed and curled, pinned in place with rusted combs. The hairline did not quite fit either. Stray strands clung to Elin’s temples. The seams had been sutured with coarse thread drawn tight at the throat, looped crudely through the shoulder blades, cinched at the spine like the lacing of a corset too cruelly pulled. Here and there, the stitching failed. Skin sagged like a too large garment draped across a too small frame, drooping in deflated hollows meant for heavier breasts, longer arms and broader bones.
The face had been flayed and stretched to fit Elin’s contours. The forehead was too small, the jaw too slack. The lips had been tugged into a grotesque simulacrum of a smile, puckered and stitched at one corner where the tension had torn through. The eyes were ruin. One lid drooped, sealed by age and decay; the other hung open, bone-dry, ringed with a bruise that was not Elin’s. From the socket where her mother’s left eye had once blinked came Elin’s own eyebrow, arcing through the hollow like a weed growing from a grave. And beneath it all, the neck skin wobbled with each breath, folds of it shuddering with the rise and fall of Elin’s heavy breathing. It hung like a second throat below her own, as though both lives were struggling to speak at once.
From her wrists dangled the hands, limp and long, finger-flesh like rotted tulip stems, swaying with the slow, uncertain rhythm of her steps. They were lifeless, yes, but not still: the loosened skin flung wetly, left to right with each hand gesture she made. Beneath the hem of the yellow dress trailed the skin of their mother’s feet, flopping grotesquely with each staggered stride. Her mother’s skin hung from her like a child wearing their parent’s night gown. Elin lifted her arms. “Come here, children,” she said. “Don’t you want to hug your mother?”
The children screamed. Still, she stepped forward. The skin at her knees tore and one pinned shoulder slipped free. Beneath the flayed mask of their mother’s face, Elin’s own mouth pressed outward, smiling where the dead lips had no strength to follow. The borrowed flesh rippled with every shudder, clinging in some places, peeling in others. And yet she walked. She smiled, and where her teeth met the cheek of the corpse, the skin caved inward, like wet paper pressed against bone. “I want to see my grandchildren,” she said, in the best imitation of their mother’s voice, like velvet pulled tightly over broken stone.
