Mother first noticed it on Daughter’s feet. A dark stain, rustbrown, growing a patchy hard skin on the rise of the left foot. Mother had felt something unusual when her hand grazed the sole of the foot. Firmly, she took hold and wouldn’t let go. Daughter struggled. Mother said, “Hold still.” The sole was covered with these patches, some maroon-colored, some almost turning black, irregularly-shaped. Roundish. Oval. Hard in texture. Mother reacted in alarm, “What’s this?” Daughter did not blink. “How long has this been happening?” “I don’t know.” She was eloquent with shrugs, Daughter was. “You didn’t notice these patches?” Daughter fingered the future pages of her comic book. “I thought they were normal. A normal part of growing up.” “There is nothing normal about these patches. Have you looked at them?” Mother turned the foot over again. “You’re always pointing out how I’m not normal in some way. Are we going to have that talk again about hair and skin and zits?” “You don’t take care of yourself, I’m constantly doing it for you. One day I won’t be here.” “Ow!” Daughter pulled her foot away and stood up. She snapped her book shut. “So are you leaving?” Mother’s anger was a dappled flush on her cheeks, a precipitate swell of feeling that challenged control and made her feel helpless, which was something Mother couldn’t tolerate where Daughter was concerned. “Well, if you’re not leaving, then I am.” Daughter slapped her book down. She pulled her slim calf encased in leggings off the bed. So elegant a gesture, yet so much reflected anger. Contained anger. Like an animal on a leash pouncing back at a mirror. “We need to get that seen to. It’s not normal.” Mother clenched her teeth. The bite of enamel on enamel. “Bleeding every month is not normal. Leave me alone.” *** Daughter knew how to fight with words. Her words were like flying knives, so sharp and wounding and accurate. Mother watched with alarm as the patches grew, in number, in shapes, in texture. Daughter’s left leg was covered with these stony patches up past her ankle. Daughter now wore long socks. Mother came across the words ‘sunspot’ and ‘lesions’ and melanoma’ in an article. She booked an appointment at the County Hospital. The fight on the bus was so bad that the bus driver stopped the bus and threw them out. The visit was aborted. A friend who was a nurse advised that it was unlikely to be cancer. Not if it was growing that rapidly. Probably an allergy or rash. Mother clutched her fists together and wished there was such a thing as God. *** It was no rash. Mother wasn’t a doctor, but she could tell it wasn’t a rash. The patches were raised welts when they first bloomed, then hardened into solid mass, and the colors would congeal into slate, charcoal, swirls of lucite browns and greys. They crawled up one leg, spreading to the pelvis, the torso, then snaked down the other leg, laid out in a mosaic pattern. In slumbering panic, but also with a tinge of wonder, Mother thought: it resembled the pebbled walkway in her garden at home. That garden was a refuge in her childhood, and when she skipped down that pebbled walkway, Mother had felt happy. Mother was tense at work, snappish and curt. Her co-worker told her that she must learn to let go, daughters must grow up. “Not when she’s becoming abnormal like this. There’s something wrong.” “In our wisdom, we think age helps us tell what’s right from wrong, but what if we are wrong?” Mother wasn’t so easily placated with platitudes. Finally, after much wrangling and cajoling, Daughter agreed to be examined. The doctor, a nice lady with a professional no nonsense demeanor at the County Hospital, said, “This is likely just a hormonal imbalance. It’ll go away.” *** But it didn’t go away. Meanwhile, Mother discovered that Daughter had a stash of pornography material under the bed. Dirty, filthy magazines that men bought and did nasty things to themselves with. “What else are you keeping from me!” Daughter shouted that she would run away if this campaign of terror continued. What irony. Campaign of terror. These were words Mother used to throw at her own mom, her mother who had called her a slut. The patches continued to grow. Daughter now wore hoodies and gloves and scarves. “If these scales of yours are normal, why won’t you show them!” “Just leave me alone. LEAVE ME ALONE!” Mother found out from a text message she accidentally read on Daughter’s phone that Daughter’s boyfriend wanted to break up with her. The message had been presaged with, “Those patches aren’t alluring. You misunderstood me.” Mother turned her face to look at the birds alighting on the tree branch outside the window. Spring was here. Birds had once meant freedom to her. But she had never felt so troubled. She hadn’t even known that Daughter had a boyfriend; now she was breaking up with one. Mother wanted to scream, but who would hear? *** The only time Mother could touch her was when Daughter was asleep. Then, Mother ran her hands up and down those hard, pebbly legs, the bumps and ruts and rounded stones, and she remembered a game that a magician had played with her at a children’s toy festival, where he’d made her put her hands into dark curtained boxes and feel around inside. She’d touched furry things; hard slabby things; soft, curvy, slinky things, and thought: how many unknown things there were to touch in the world. Where had that sense gone? That sense that the world was a carpet laid out for her to discover, not something fearful that would rob her of all that were precious to her. Spring wasn’t even half over, but Daughter was changing rapidly. She was morose and enervated. Her appearance and body shape flattened. She wasn’t eating. Her hoodie stayed cinched around her face even though it was getting hotter. Her features became indistinct. When they talked, if they talked, it would devolve into screeching, noises that sounded like words that sounded like they were meant to maim and disembowel. “When did you become such a stereotype, such a cliche! Don’t make me just like you.” The word Daughter should have used was ‘archetypal”; they were every mother daughter story there is. They were! They were! How Mother felt the deflation, even though she respected all her feelings, believed all feelings were to be felt, no right or wrong in that, believed feelings made everything worthwhile. She’d felt everything, questioned everything, but how come she’d come no closer to meaning? Now, every morning, Mother found Daughter outside, lying on the road, her arms thrown out, her legs splayed, making a cement angel. Mother went berserk. “What are you doing?” “I’m practicing.” Daughter was calm when she lay on the road. She gazed up at the sky, and a smile would tweak the corners of her mouth. But when Mother spoke, Daughter became entangled in rage. Tranquillity wisped away. Daughter wanted to quit school. Shouting back at her, Daughter’s face became mottled, depredated, spots overtaking flesh, and for a moment, she barely looked human. “All you care about is what the neighbours think. Well, I don’t give a fuck what the neighbours think. Don’t you know who I am? Haven’t you always said you know me best?” But Mother no longer felt she knew as much as she thought she did. Had she ever dreamed such a dream? To be roadkill? To be as flat as a road? To be no better nor worse than something people walked on, and all over? Mother harboured too many choked-up things inside her: intangibles to do with dreams, optimism, hope, love, happiness; intangibles that were also mirror opposites — loss, cynicism, faithlessness, hate, grief. She couldn’t say the thing uppermost in her mind in recent days: what made her relationship unique with Daughter; what made it different from the one Mother had with her mom? If Mother were to understand Daughter, who understood Mother? *** The transformation was now complete. And unique. If someone slit a knife, peeled off the daughter’s skin, and laid it out like a carpet, it would be a pebbled walkway. If someone asked Mother what she thought Daughter would grow up to be, she wouldn’t in a million years have guessed this. Her daughter a pebbled walkway, growing up to be a road.

Epidermis won the Elbow Room Prize 2015 and
was published in their anthology featuring the winning stories.

Artwork: Aktikompositsioon 19, Jaan Künnap (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Elaine Chiew is based in Singapore and London and is the editor/compiler of Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015). She won The Bridport Prize in 2008 and Elbow Room Prize (2015). She’s been named Wigleaf Top 50 Microfiction, nominated for Best of Small Fictions 2016 and shortlisted and long listed in other competitions and awards, including Baltic Residencies, Pushcart, Short Fiction, Mslexia, BBC Opening Lines, Fish International Short Stories, among others. Her most recent stories can be found in Potomac Review and Singapore Love Stories (Monsoon Books, 2016) which has been shortlisted for the Singapore Readers’ Popular Choice Awards.  She has recently completed an M.A. in Asian Art History from Lasalle College of the Arts (Goldsmiths accr.) and a writer’s residency at School of the Arts, Singapore.