He looked at the next postcard, a picture of a cactus wearing a serape. "Bienvenidos Arizona". He turned it over, and saw to his chagrin the text was written in Spanish.
LA PIEL VIVO AFUERA DE
Atención cercana de la paga. Este cuento puede cambio día su vida, quizás excepto él. Es realmente una cuestión de perspectiva.
Derrick looked at his dog in exasperation. "¡Pero no sé español!" he exclaimed. Riley didn't even bother to raise his head during his reply.
"¿Está usted seguro sobre ése?"
Derrick exhaled noisily, and returned his attention to the postcard. He realized that the text was slowly changing into English- no- it was still Spanish but now he could understand what he was
THE SKIN I LIVE OUTSIDE OF
Pay close attention. This tale may one day change your life, perhaps save it. It’s really a matter of perspective.
The Poison Women often talk amongst themselves. They talk of their adventures, of their skins, of the men (and sometimes women) they love- and lose. Because they are Poison Women. They must live with the curse that is theirs: desire unattained or satisfaction lethal. Their blood runs hot with venom, and so should any of this venom find its way into a lover’s body, the lover will not survive the night. Then the dawn illuminates the Poison Women leaking tears that hiss and smoke as they fall.
The Poison Women therefore also talk of desire and sorrow, of love and loss. But they also talk of one Poison Woman. A Rattlesnake Woman, from the Arizona desert. They talk about her in voices of anger. They talk about her in voices of repugnance. They whisper about her with wistfulness.
The story of the Rattlesnake woman begins with the man who stole her skin. The man did not know he was a skin thief, but thief he was nevertheless.
The Poison Women weave their own skins. Their skins are power made into clothing; clothing that gives them vitality, long life, and protection. Each one creates her own skin from her surroundings.
The Asp Women of Egypt imbue their skins with honey, flakes of gold, dried heart meat, and starlight.
The death-dancing Cobra weaves her hooded sheath from the cries of a newborn babe, fresh cram, the tail of a mongoose, and nutmeg shells.
Desert-born, Rattlesnakes need nettles, rainwater, bits of sun-bleached bones and the wind spawned by the desert; dust devils.
No one knows how the Black Mamba fabricates her skin but the Black Mamba herself. The Amazon rainforests contain thousands of possible ingredients, and so the ebony secret of the Mamba’s skin remains an enigma.
When a Poison Woman wears her skin, she is in the shape of a serpent, but when she removes the skin, she is in human form. This is how the story of this particular Rattlesnake woman came to be-
In 1956, or thereabouts, the man came to the desert looking for land to develop. When he arrived, he saw the land was already developed. Blue sky, dusty green cacti, crimson stone, and sunsets that blended flaming hues with cloud-formed canopies of indigo.
He took drives out into the desert, and sat on the hood of his car in his shirt, jacket off but hat on still to protect his head from sunburn. He would eat sandwiches and name the scorpions that made their proud passage across the sand. Occasionally, he would spend the night out in the open, smoking a cigarette as he lay upon his back. He would stare through the ghostly haze of the Milky Way at the glittering stars; stars mirrored below in the gleaming silica strewn throughout the desertscape.
The company that employed the man began to suspect that he was no longer actively surveying for purchasable land. The company sent him a telegram at his hotel, informing him to begin the drive back to the city in the East where he worked and lived, immediately.
The next morning before sunrise, the man drove out for one last look at the desert. When the sun flung out its first rosy tendrils out over the horizon, the man noticed a large glistening mound next to his feet. He crouched down to investigate: it was a large snake skin, apparently in one piece. The skin was split neatly down a single seam. He picked it up by one end and stood, lifting the skin. When his hand reached the same level as his shoulder, he heard the bony castanet noise. Shaking the skin (which was still quite supple) the man realized he held the skin of an enormous rattlesnake, just over five feet in length.
He decided this would make a suitable memento of his visit to this sandy sanctuary. That is why there is a tale to tell, the tale the other Poison women repeat to each other with anger, repugnance, and also longing.
He returned to his car, unlocked the trunk, and laid the skin down carefully on top of his luggage. When he closed the lid, the sun hit his eyes. While raising his hand to shade his eyes, his gaze came to rest upon a curious silhouette. At first he thought it to be a mirage, an afterimage of the sun stamped upon his field of vision. But then the silhouette moved.
Sluggishly it moved, for the morning was still cool. Poison Women do not have hot blood in their veins, but rather icy venom that burns just as fiercely.
The man stared enrapt at the naked woman as she sat upright on the rock she had been reclining upon and scratched her slender back. Her flesh was luminous in the sunlight, it shone like burnished copper. Copper softened by a dusting of the brick-red boulders and rock formations that rose out of the desertscape. Her hair was obsidian, glossy blackness that flowed.
When she suddenly turned to stare back at the man he could see, even with the several dozen paces between them, that her eyes were a brilliant gold-flecked green. These eyes darted swiftly around, for she sought her skin, the very same skin that the man had secreted in his car. This she did not know, since a chill-deepened slumber had kept her oblivious to the preceding events.
Finally, the man found his voice despite the miasma of surprise, confusion, curiosity, and lust swirling within his mind. “Miss,” he called out to the woman as she regarded him warily, “may I be of assistance? Are you alright?”
If the man had not already removed her skin from sight, the Rattlesnake Woman would have struck him dead on the spot to recover her most precious possession. Yet she did not know of his culpability then. She drew back, her being suffused with a feeling new to her; desire.
Desire for companionship or desire for sexual intimacy, who is to say which she felt? Perhaps for a Poison Woman, they are the one and the same.
She took a few tentative steps towards the man, and then held her arms out. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Several minutes later, she was wearing rumpled men’s clothing, hastily pulled out of the man’s valise. Several hours later, she was gazing out the window of his car, her heart beating wildly, fear and excitement surging through her veins. Excitement at this new experience, fear at the loss of her skin. She wondered when she would be able to weave a new one. (But there are no dust devil winds in the East.)
Several days later, she had learned enough English to lie. She told the man her name was Selena. It was not, of course, but no human tongue could pronounce her true name. She also told him she came of American Indian and Mexican heritage, which in terms of geography wasn’t that inaccurate. Her biggest lie was that she had gotten lost in the desert. An impossibility for her. How does one get lost in one’s own home?
Believing he had rescued her, the man cast himself as the hero in this tale and fell in love with this perceived damsel-formerly-in-distress.
By the time they had arrived in the man’s home state, he’d asked her to be his wife, and she had consented. She had done so, because to her private and profound grief, she’d realized the further East they went, the less likely she would be able to weave a new skin and find her way home.
Occasionally, Selena would scent a hint of sage or tarantula after the man retrieved something from the trunk of his car as she waited in the passenger seat. Yet she never dreamed that the man she felt affection and desire for was the thief of her skin.
Rather, she saw him as the provider of a new kind of skin; clothes. Dresses. Although she enjoyed how they felt and looked upon her body, she yearned for only one garment to wear. Lacking her skin, she preferred to be naked as often as possible. The man had no complaint with this, and every night she lay with him in the beds of hotels and carports and then the bed of his house, holding him close (for she needed his body warmth) without any covering. Always, she was also careful, to protect her lover’s life from her venomous blood. Because her desire was transforming into love.
After they wed, Selena bore her husband no children, for humans do not produce offspring with other species. Her husband ignored this at first, for he was young, and his wife filled his entire sphere of existence. Later, his friends and coworkers and family began to make comments and the man started to wonder about his legacy, his purpose.
The arguments started to occur, and then occur frequently. The man often referred to rescuing Selena from the desert. This became a cactus thorn in Selena’s heart- causing great irritation and all but impossible to remove.
Finally, during one confrontation, Selena cried out that she belonged in the desert, that she missed her home, and her skin. Her husband heard those words, and a faint memory tugged at the corners of his thoughts. That night, as Selena salted her pillow with silent tears, the man sat in the darkened living room thinking very hard and very thoroughly. Then he quietly left the house for a few hours, and upon his return, spent quite some time in the basement.
In the morning, he presented Selena with airline tickets to Arizona. “We need a vacation, and you can see your home again,” he told his wife.
She smiled her gratitude, but she did not tell him what she was thinking- Ah, but my home is in my skin. She did not tell him that she had spent the many years searching for all the ingredients to make a new skin, to return to her natural state of existence. She’d found nettles growing out of a crack in the dirty sidewalk. The sun- bleached bones she arranged by buying a chicken, and after cooking the meat for her husband, leaving the bones on the rooftop of their house for weeks. The rainwater was easy enough, but it was the last ingredient that had eluded her for so long, for there are no dust devils in the East. There are no desert winds to blow them through the streets of Eastern cities.
She packed her unfinished weaving in secret, not knowing that her original skin had also been packed in secret by her husband the previous night.
When they arrived at the desert, Selena was surprised to see the nostalgia brimming in her husband’s eyes and realized that he, too, felt at home here in the desert.
But he was human, and she was not. Poison Women are fated to live alone always.
Her husband suggested a picnic, and indeed, he’d packed one. They sat under the sun, eating sandwiches, and drinking root beer.
The man said to her, “My love, I have a surprise for you,” and reached deep inside the basket, under the folded cloth.
Just as he did so, a wind sprang up, a dry, hot wind smelling of time and heat and stillness. It spun nearer and nearer the couple Then Selena saw the dust devil dancing, the sand and dust whirling and bowing at her, one desert creature greeting another.
With a raw, throat-rending cry of joy, Selena jumped to her feet, and pulled out her unfinished labor. With speed only a Rattlesnake Woman could possess, she seized the wind and pulled it towards her to thread it into her work. She threw the skin over herself, just as she glanced at her husband and saw the skin he held in his own hands.
Selena’s heart caught and twisted and seethed as she realized she’d fallen in love with, slept with, married the thief of her skin. Already a snake falling towards the ground into coils, she hurled herself at her confounded husband, fangs bared to fill him full of punishing venom.
But-
Then the real magic happened. The husband in his confusion, clutched the older skin to himself, and with the scent of his wife, the memory of her touch, and the years of close interaction with her was just enough for the skin to enfold the man.
So when Selena struck, she struck empty air, for there now lay a male Rattlesnake where her husband had been. In wonder, in growing joy, the two Rattlesnakes tasted each other’s scent, pulsed their bodies closer, and stared into each other’s gold-flecked green eyes.
That is why they other Poison Women speak of this Rattlesnake Woman with anger, with repugnance, and with wistfulness. Because she is the only Poison Woman to have a mate for the rest of her long, long life; the first, and only Poison Man, created from Selena’s essence, desert magic, and love.
¿Usted prestó atención a esta historia? ¿Puede un día excepto su vida, porque cuál es valor de la vida sin la distribución de su corazón con otro? Derrick repeated the last line softly, "Because what is life worth without sharing your heart with another?" He glanced at the chipped digital clock next to the bed. There was plenty of time for another postcard before he went to sleep.
The Arkanas postcard simply read "Greetings from ARKANAS", and the state name's letters contained images of mostly parks and old buildings. When Derrick turned over the card, he immediately smelled gas fumes, exhaust smoke, and heard the roar of a semi.
The Arkanas postcard simply read "Greetings from ARKANAS", and the state name's letters contained images of mostly parks and old buildings. When Derrick turned over the card, he immediately smelled gas fumes, exhaust smoke, and heard the roar of a semi.
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