--YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO

 …I just saw where Newsweek is no longer going to be in print, starting sometime in 2013.  That sort of makes me sad.  I guess I’m an old person.  That seems to be a harbinger for other magazines like Time and Rolling Stone.  Especially Rolling Stone, which has a whopping 82 pages in their last issue.

…I got my copy of “Lost In Thought” magazine.  What a terrific looking journal.  The photography is outstanding.  Even my son said so.  I have a short piece in it called, “New Skin.”

Here it is:

                                                                    New Skin

 

            He did not say I was pretty.  Instead he said, “I can make you forget.”

            No one had ever uttered anything so bold.

            He said, “Let me see.”

            So I showed him everything.  I unbuttoned, unhinged and uncovered all of my layers. 

            I let him touch me—there and there, and even there.  I figured it was part of the healing process, that scars were really just wounds on the way to new skin.

            He never bought me gifts.  He didn’t believe in them.  He said, “This is so much better,” and he touched me again.

            He was hard to satisfy.  He made me feel rabid, incomplete instead of sutured.  He kept me hoping, guessing, on edge.  And in that way he made me forget the other thing.

            His hands had fingers, of course they did, but these felt like velvet pulleys.  I enjoyed them and then I didn’t.  Then it was different and he said, “Hey,” and I said, “Not that way.  Love me.  Me,” and he said, “We had a deal, didn’t we?”

 

            I saw him again, for the first time in months.  We were in a crowded coffee shop.  A girl was giggling.  He had foam on his nose and top fang.  I wasn’t sure if he’d done it on purpose.

            I reached inside my sweater and fingered one long mark that dropped to my waist.  The scars of men might linger, I decided then, but I would move on, I would live.