WHAT MY MOTHER LEFT ME ALYSSA WONG

The sky above Nag’s Head is stained an uneasy shade of gray by the time we pull up to my parents’ North Carolina beach house. Beyond the dunes and waving field of sea grass, the water is sharp and choppy, the color of slate.

“Shit,” says Gina, climbing out of the Range Rover. She shades her eyes, her long, lavender-dyed hair flapping across her face. The wind slaps us both with the salty, thick smell of the ocean. “You brought the keys, right?”

Her eyeliner is perfect, as usual. I can’t believe she drew it on in the passenger seat while I was doing ninety on the I-40, eager to put as much distance between us and Duke University as possible.

“Way ahead of you,” I say, fishing the house keys out of my pocket. The key fob is a piece of driftwood, carved with the words HOME SWEET HOME and a pair of flip-flops. It’s about as tacky as the rest of the house’s decor. We trudge up the wooden stairs, wiping our feet on the faded welcome mat printed with migrating birds. There’s a thin film of salt on the lock.

I sort through the keys, looking for the right one. I don’t realize my hands are shaking until Gina drapes herself over me.

“Emma? Are you okay?”

“Too much coffee,” I say. The look on her face tells me she doesn’t believe me, but loves me too much to call me on my bullshit. “Just antsy. I gotta pee real bad.”

“Then open the damn door.” She leans close and blows in my ear. I can hear the sympathy in her voice. “Let’s get inside. Whatever’s in there… we can handle it.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You don’t have to be.” She squeezes my hand. It’s only been three weeks, she doesn’t say, but I hear anyway. Your mom is dead. You shouldn’t be okay.

“If I don’t get inside I’m gonna pee on your foot,” I say instead.

Gina bites my ear gently and I push open the door. The air inside the house smells musty, and the ugly, pseudo-rattan wallpaper is warping along the edge of the ceiling. Sure enough, the décor is still stuck in the seventies. The carpet is a matted riot of overbright geometric shapes. There are carved wooden birds sitting on every surface, decoys in the shape of sandpipers, ducks, and other local waterfowl. For a moment, a memory overlaps what I’m looking at, and I can almost see my family arranged in the living room. My dad reading a paperback thriller on the couch, my mom gazing out the window and turning a shell over and over in her hand. I blink, and their phantom bodies evaporate.

A thick layer of dust coats everything, and the first thing I do is flip on all the fans. Gina flips them off immediately.

“Dude, do you want all this stuff in your lungs? We should wipe everything down first.” She wrinkles her nose, shouldering her backpack. “Why are there so many dead horseflies? It’s like someone held a party and left behind the worst confetti.”

“Someone might have left a window open.” We trudge upstairs, checking all the rooms. Sure enough, one of the windows in an upstairs bedroom is slightly cracked, and water damage spreads all throughout the room and into the hall. I grimace and shut the window. “Goddammit. At least it’s not the master bedroom.”

“That’s where most of your mom’s stuff is, right?” Gina twines her fingers with mine. “We don’t have to go in right away. We could get dinner first, or unload the car.”

“I need to know if there’s water damage there, too,” I say, pulling my hand free and wiping my palms on my jeans. The knot of stress and nervousness in my stomach constricts. The beach house had been Mom’s haven. She’d always come alive at the beach, bright and vibrant the way she wasn’t at home. As far as I knew, she hadn’t come up here alone in the ten years since then. “We can unload the car after I check.”

Walking the hallway dredges up more old memories. Lying on the carpet by the stairs, playing Pokémon on my Gameboy. My mom singing to herself when she thought she was alone, straightening the pictures on the wall. My dad pulling me aside, nodding at a photo on my phone. That boy’s a keeper. Don’t let him go.

The master bedroom lies at the end of the hall. My hands are cold as I reach for the door. All of the what-ifs spin through my head, constricting my thoughts like a lasso. Images of water damage, boxes of ruined possessions beneath the bed, sea-streaked clothing flash through my head. What if someone’s carelessness had ruined everything Mom had left behind? What if I couldn’t handle what I’d find?

But when I push the door open, I breathe a sigh of relief. Just like the rest of the rooms, everything is faded and covered in dust, but all the windows are locked tight. Mom’s ugly rose-pink bedspread is still there, along with the lace-lined pillows and the painting of gulls coasting above the surf. It looks just like she left it.

“Emma?” Gina’s voice breaks through my head, and the knot in me eases. I turn and hug her tight, ignoring her surprised noise. Her body is soft against mine.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m so glad.”

Gina hums and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Me too,” she says. “Let’s get the beer out of the trunk and sit down for a bit. You look like you could use a drink.”

That night, we drink too much and curl up together on the couch. Gina runs her fingers through my hair as I listen to her heartbeat, slow and steady. “I can’t believe you wanted to do this alone,” she murmurs. “You can rely on me a little more, okay?”

I’m not good at relying on people, but Gina insists. I press my cheek against her chest. “I’ll try,” I say.

The bad weather persists, and we spend most of the next day excavating the house. Gina finds the vacuum cleaner and makes sure we have livable conditions to work in, and I haul giant bag after giant bag of trash out to the dumpster down the cul-de-sac. The worst part, though, is the smell of rotten fish that wafts in halfway through the day.

Gina shuts off the vacuum cleaner and gags, holding her throat. “Em, if you don’t open a window, I will actually die.”

She’s being dramatic, but she’s right. Even turning the AC on high doesn’t dispel it, and the stench chases us out of the house by afternoon.

The wind kicks sand up around us, and it stings my exposed legs as we walk toward the boardwalk. Gina’s got a pair of giant bedazzled sunglasses on, and it’s never seemed like a smarter fashion choice. My phone keeps buzzing in my back pocket, and after twenty minutes of notifications, it’s starting to make my butt go numb. Gina frowns at it.

“Em, you should’ve left that back at the house.”

“What if we get lost? I need to make sure we can find our way back.” My fingers itch toward my phone and she grabs my wrist. Her eyes are clear and serious.

“Don’t text him back,” Gina says. “You said you were done with him.”

I drop my hand and let my thoughts slide away from the barrage of texts from my boyfriend. Clayton hadn’t taken the breakup well. He punched a hole in my apartment wall right next to the refrigerator. I’d headed over to Gina’s after that, and Clayton’s been blowing up my phone since then, trying to apologize. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”

She laces her fingers with mine possessively. “Why haven’t you deleted his number? He doesn’t love you, Em. He wants to own you; that’s different.”

I wince. Even when we were just friends, Gina never passed up a chance to shit on Clayton. She’s usually right, and she only does it because she cares about me. But it still leaves an uneasy taste in my mouth. “I broke up with him yesterday, give me a break.”

“I love you, Em,” says Gina. Her grip on my hand is tight. “And what you had with him isn’t love. Don’t let him occupy your head and ruin this trip for us.”

That makes me bristle. “It’s not a vacation, Gina. Jesus. I’m sorry, but is sorting through my dead mom’s effects your idea of fun? Because it sure as hell isn’t mine.”

Her mouth drops open. “I didn’t mean—”

My phone buzzes again, and I swear, grabbing it and shutting it off. Clayton’s latest text—EM, WHERE ARE YOU? I’M CALLING YOUR DAD—flashes across the screen before it goes dark. When I look back at Gina, the naked hurt on her face is visible even behind her sunglasses. Shit. “Look,” I say, guilt gentling my voice. “I just… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. That was really unfair.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It was.”

I rub my face. My eyes sting from the salty air. “Can we just get lunch?”

Her mouth sets in a thin line. “Fine.” We walk the rest of the way side by side, not looking at each other.

By the time we make it to the beach, Gina’s shoulders have lost some of their tension, and I reach for her hand. She starts to tuck it into the pocket of her jeans shorts, but then she sighs and takes it. “You better be sorry, you bitch.”

“Yeah, I am,” I say.

“A bitch, or sorry?”

“Both,” I say. When I lean in to bump her shoulder with mine, she laughs.

“That’s for sure.”

“You don’t have to worry about him,” I tell her quietly. “I love you. So don’t be insecure, okay?”

Clayton would have dragged the fight out for days, guilt-tripping and giving me the cold shoulder. And maybe it’s what I deserve. But Gina nods. She forgives me more than she should, and when I’m around her, I want to do better. I want to be a better person than I am, for her.

I’m leaning in to kiss her when she stops walking abruptly, and I miss her face by a full inch. “What the hell is that?”

A few feet away, a dead fish lies on the damp sand, stranded by the receding tide. Sandflies swirl around it in wild clouds. Its bottom half looks normal, but something has split its top half all the way down its spine. White bones poke out of its back, fanning out like a house centipede’s legs.

Then the fish gives a weak twitch, and I realize it’s not dead. Its gills flap as it strains for air. As it moves, its flesh catches and bubbles. Its exposed bones dig into the sand.

The tide rushes back in and swirls around it. But instead of bearing the fish back into the ocean, the water tugs gently at its body, and then, in one fluid moment, the fish’s skin rips like a soggy piece of toilet paper, parting along the dorsal fin and peeling away in a single ugly, awful curl. Its scales flash and then it’s gone, dragged away by the waves, leaving the fish’s raw, naked body flopping weakly on the sand.

“What the fuck,” breathes Gina. Her hold is so tight that my fingers hurt. The fish’s sides flutter frantically, and its eyes roll in its head. The white spines poking out of its flesh shiver delicately. “Em, there are a bunch of them, look!”

She points up the beach. The sand is littered with bodies, half-decomposed fish being dragged in and out by the tide. Some have lost their skin, and others are having theirs torn off in messy segments. All of them have spines peeling out of their bodies.

The rotten smell is so strong that it makes my eyes water. It smells, I realize, like my mother in the weeks before she died. I take a step back from the water, and then another. “We should go,” I say.

We run, stumbling through the sand. We don’t let go of each other until the beach house is in sight and we’re stumbling through the door.

The first thing we do when we get back is Google “silver fish peeling,” “ocean fish dissolving,” and “coastal fish of nag’s head.” We learn it’s a butterfish, and that no, that isn’t something butterfish are supposed to do.

“Please tell me there’s a liquor cabinet here,” says Gina. When I point it out, she raids it and scours the kitchen for shot glasses.

Even with the AC running while we were out, the salty, rotten smell lingers. This time, it seems to be coming from a specific direction. “Hey, Gina?”

“What?” Gina raises her head, emerging with a hidden bottle of Fireball whiskey.

“I’m gonna go check upstairs,” I say. “I wanna know where that smell is coming from.” The rotten scent grows stronger the further I go into the house. Sure enough, I find that the window in the water-damaged bedroom has creaked open again. But as I turn toward the master bedroom, the scent becomes suffocating again. When I open the door, a tidal wave of rot-sea-stink hits me in the face. I choke, eyes watering.

The room is completely fucked up. The wallpaper has long rents in it, and Mom’s pink duvet lies in a shredded heap at the foot of the bed. The mattress on Dad’s side is gutted, from the headboard down. Pieces of foam spill out of its carcass. The pillows are an explosion of feathers. Even the seagull painting is a mess, peeling out of its broken frame. The carpet is soaked in seawater. It squelches underfoot as I tread inside, my heart sinking to my feet.

“No,” I whisper. Mom’s room. It’s ruined. But who could have—

There’s a dry skittering noise behind me. I whip around just in time to see a thin, flesh-colored thing launch itself at me. I shriek and stumble back, caught off guard. The creature—not a person, no, some alien thing—is light, but when it slams into my chest, it does so with enough force to knock me to the carpet. It raises its humanoid head, its eyeless face swiveling to meet me.

It’s a fucking skin. An empty human skin. Its body is floppy and it lurches forward, dragging its empty flaps across me. It’s tough, grayed, and scrapes like sandpaper. Almost like there are endless rows of tiny teeth trying to slough off my skin. As it paws at my face, I catch a glimpse of the way its awful, hollow hands are fused partway into fins, each finger tipped with a crumbling acrylic nail.

“Gina!” I scream, beating at it. It wraps its flat legs around me and opens its mouth, its awful empty mouth. I can see all the way down its dry, ragged throat. “Help! Gina!”

The skin bends its face toward mine, and its non-breath ghosts over my mouth. Its curly black hair tumbles around us.

Gina bursts in, bottle of Fireball in hand. She screams when she sees the creature, and immediately smashes the bottle into its head like she’s hitting a home run. The bottle doesn’t break, but it does send the skin spinning into the wall with a soft whump. I stagger upright as Gina seizes the wicker chair parked in front of the vanity and beats the skin until one of the chair’s legs splinters.

“It was behind the door,” I wheeze.

She pants, red with exertion. The skin lies still, and I don’t know if it’s stunned or dead, but I’m taking no chances. Together we use the broken chair to prod the skin into the walk-in closet. It scrapes against the chair, but it rolls obediently and lifelessly across the carpet. There are some minor tears here and there from Gina’s beating, but it looks mostly intact.

Before I close the door, I poke the skin until it’s lying flat on its back. It’s the shape of a small woman, with small, sagging breasts. Long, withered gills run down each side of its ribs. Its black curls sprawl on the floor, lit by the flickering closet overhead light. Swallowing, I crouch over it, ignoring Gina’s hiss.

There’s a familiar birthmark on its right forearm.

“Gina,” I say hoarsely. “It’s my mom.”

The skin twitches as if it’s heard me, and I leap back and slam the closet door shut so hard that my ears ring.

After Gina pukes—after we both do, if I’m being honest—we regroup in the kitchen and polish off a third of the Fireball. It helps a little, but neither of us can shake what we saw in the bedroom.

“Your dad had her cremated,” says Gina. She wipes her mouth, and I smell the sharp scent of vomit on her jacket. “We saw that. We fucking saw it.”

“I know!” Back at my parents’ house, I’d placed her urn on the mantle myself, and then gone upstairs and cried for hours. “I don’t know what that thing is. But it looks exactly like her. It’s even got her birthmark.”

My earliest memories of my mom involve sitting on the beach house porch, watching her whittle sandpipers out of driftwood. I remember watching that birthmark rise and fall with each deft movement of her knife. I’d recognize it anywhere.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” says Gina. She heads into the living room and throws her clothes and iPhone charger into her duffel bag. “Did you leave anything upstairs?”

My phone pings from where it’s charging on the kitchen table. It’s a text from my dad that reads: CLAYTON SAYS YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM?

I flip the phone face down. Not now. “I’m not leaving,” I say. “Not until I know why she’s here.”

Gina stares at me in disbelief, her hair falling in front of her face. “Are you serious, Em? That thing just tried to kill us!”

“I noticed! But why is it here?” I rub my eyes. “Her skin should have been on her when she was cremated, not hiding in the beach house like a fucking horror movie monster. How is it even alive?”

“If it’s still alive, it’s going to come after us. So let’s get moving.”

My phone vibrates on the tabletop. Another text from Dad: EM, ANSWER ME.

Gina seizes my shoulders. “Emma,” she says, low and urgent. “We can figure this out when we’re on the road. I’m not staying in the house any longer, not with that thing. I’ve watched enough horror movies to know that if we sleep here, it’s going to murder the fuck out of us.”

“Then you go,” I say, surprising us both. “I need to stay and find answers.” Mom’s death is raw, and I know, with utmost certainty, that I need to know why she’s here. If I back out now and let other people deal with the skin creature, I never will.

“If you’re staying, I’ll stay too.” She glances at my buzzing phone and narrows her eyes. “People who love each other don’t leave them behind.”

We exhaust Google after a couple hours, and all that comes up are a bunch of Wikipedia articles about various mythologies. None are particularly helpful. I lean across the table and glance around the living room, lingering on the bookshelves against the walls. “Maybe there’s something in here that will tell us about… whatever that thing is.”

“Like what? All I’ve seen here are birding guides and encyclopedias about different kinds of shells. Your parents don’t have a copy of the Necronomicon.”

“Gina, my mom’s empty skin just tried to take my face off. At this point, anything’s possible.” I stand up, pushing my chair back. “We should go look. If there’s anything, it’ll be in their bedroom. They kept all their important shit there.”

Gina reluctantly follows me upstairs. The rotting fish smell lingers in the hallway, but when I push the door open, the master bedroom is dark and still. The closet door remains closed.

I remember that the skin has human hands. What if it knows how to work doorknobs?

I flick on the lights and advance slowly. We fan out and check under the bed, behind furniture, and inside drawers. We find nothing but empty cardboard boxes and stacks of old photos of my parents. There are more recent ones too, and Gina pointedly shuffles the ones that include Clayton posing with my family, his arm around my waist, to the back of the pile.

There’s one photo that catches my attention. It’s of Mom sitting on the wooden steps, gazing wistfully into the distance. The wind sweeps her hair out of her face, and I know she’s looking at the ocean. She loved the beach, but Dad never let Mom go swimming. I asked him why, once, and he told me that it was too dangerous. It would damage her skin.

I tuck the photo into my pocket.

“Em, look at this.” Gina holds up my dad’s old hunting knife. It’s the same model as his normal, current hunting knife, from the black blade to the serrated edge by the hilt. But this one is bent out of shape, wildly crooked. It looks like it was dragged hard across asphalt.

There’s a faint but steady scraping coming from the closet. I freeze, all the hair on my body standing on end. Gina hisses.

It’s the sound of acrylic nails raking against wood.

My eyes meet Gina’s. “Let’s sleep in the car tonight,” I whisper.

She grips the knife tighter. “Sounds like a plan.”

The scraping grows more frantic than ever, right before we shut the bedroom door.

That night, I dream that I’m standing on the porch in front of the beach house, and my mom’s skin is sitting next to me, carving a wooden bird out of a piece of driftwood. It turns its head, and there’s nothing inside it but empty space. I can see the pale flipside of the skin, shining like the moon on the water, through the empty eyeholes of her almost-face.

“Watch,” it says, and points its hollow arm at the ocean. I follow the glint of its knife down the long white expanse of sand. Two figures splash in the surf, a tall man with blond hair and a surfer’s build, and a woman whose curly black hair swings around her in a long, thick braid. In the distance, dark, sharp-finned creatures glide through the water, each as long as a whale, their massive, long-necked animal heads breaching the surface. I know, somehow, that these are my mom’s family. “See what he did to me.”

My parents look young, maybe about as old as Gina and I are. My dad’s swimming trunks have his fraternity’s symbols on them, the same as the ones on all of Clayton’s clothes. As I watch, my mom kisses my dad and then turns to face the ocean. Her pod, her family, waits many yards away, just close enough to see. She takes a breath and arcs toward the waves, and her skin ripples, growing gray and rough, her body expanding into a large, powerful shape.

He pulls his hunting knife from the back of his shorts and stabs her between the shoulder blades. He grips the hilt with both hands, and his shoulders flex with effort as he drags the knife down, sawing through her skin. She screams, and her skin ripples again, but he shoves the knife in harder, and as she thrashes it goes in deeper.

Her family howls from the water, surging closer, but Dad drags her onto the sand. Black blood surges from her wounds, fountaining over his hands, but he keeps going. As she struggles, he plants a foot on her back and drags his blade down her spine.

He saws all the way down her spine, tearing away her white bikini, and then he begins to peel her.

I can’t look away, and I can’t block out the sounds. I watch it all. I see everything.

When he’s done, he pulls a pale, wet-skinned thing from her carcass. It’s shaped like a human being, like a girl. She looks like the fish that Gina and I saw on the beach earlier, pulled open and exposed. Her naked flesh trembles. Each breath sounds agonizing. Even from this distance, I can see the fine, sharp ridges of her bones against the outline of her body.

He drops her on the sand and bends to pick up the gray, almost-person-shaped skin lying on the beach. It’s caught partway between beast and woman, with halfway fins and long, fluttery gills. A few acrylic nails cling stubbornly to each of its partially transformed hands.

He slings the skin over his shoulder. Its flat, sightless face stares at the sky. Once he has it, he lifts her up, too, like she weighs nothing.

Dad walks up the beach house’s wooden steps and past me without acknowledging me. My mom sags in his grip, her body dangling in his arms like a deboned fish. Her skin flaps behind him like an empty sock, slapping wetly against his back with each step. Her family wails, and the smell of ocean rot crashes over us like a wave.

I turn back toward the house and find myself looking into my own face. My skin stands empty, sand on its feet, hollow around the phantom shape of my body. It doesn’t have eyes, or teeth, or a tongue, but when it speaks I hear its words clearly.

Run away, Emma.

I wake in the backseat of the Range Rover, cold sweat pouring down my back. Gina’s arms wrap around me as she sleeps nestled against my side.

The texts from Dad keep pinging in, one after the other. The screen glows in the dark, through the pocket of my sweatpants. I swallow. I want to defend him, but I know him too well. My dad loved my mom the way Clayton loves me, which is to say, the way a man loves his favorite sports car. I can see him wanting to keep her with him, even after death. Just not… actually keep her empty skin.

But he had her cremated, whispers a part of me. Didn’t he?

But which parts? asks another.

My skin aches, strangely tender.

I ease out of Gina’s grip, and when she blinks up at me sleepily, I tell her to go back to sleep. “I’m just going to pee,” I say. She nods and her head droops.

Lightning crackles overhead, and the wind is fiercer than ever. I have to fight my way into the house. The master bedroom is quiet again, and I sit on her side of the mattress, my back to the wall. I look at the carnage on Dad’s side of the bed, and I wonder if she did that on purpose. Beside me, the skin creature scrapes at the closed closet door.

“Mom?” I whisper. “I want to talk to you. I need to know—what did Dad do to you?”

Mom’s skin moves behind the door, making a whispering sound against the wood. I slide past her ruined favorite bedspread and kneel on the damp carpet, pressing my forehead against the closet door.

“I miss you,” I tell her. “I wish I’d known. I wish I could have helped you.”

There’s a gentle rasp, like she’s drawing her nails in circles beside my cheek. It makes me smile, and tears well up in my eyes. When I cried as a kid, my mom used to cradle my face in her hands and trace shapes on my cheeks. Could that have been what she was trying to do when I walked into the bedroom that first time?

“I’m sorry I let Gina hit you with the chair,” I tell her. “She didn’t know. I didn’t know it was you, either.”

Thunder rumbles outside the window, and it begins to rain hard. I glance out at the ocean below. The waves are rough, high. I remember the dream, and the image of her family crying and thrashing in the water.

She used to look at the waves with such longing. When I was little, she’d hold me on her lap and sing to me in a language I didn’t know. It was a song, she told me, about where she’d come from. The flowers that grew beneath the water, the volcanoes, the canyons she’d grown up exploring. Whenever Dad walked into the room, though, she would stop singing. He told me he didn’t want her speaking Korean, which he couldn’t understand, around me. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that her ocean songs hadn’t been in Korean at all. I couldn’t find a language for them, and when I asked her, she refused to let me record them for my professors to hear.

“I’m going to bring you home,” I say, and she stills behind the door. “Just stay still and trust me.”

The door handle is cold, and when I open it, a sliver of moonlight falls into the closet. Mom’s skin crouches with her knees drawn up against her chest, gazing up at me. Her flat body and eyeless face make me shiver, even though I’ve braced myself. She smells awful. I hold my hand out, and she places one of hers, delicate, red-tipped, in mine.

There’s a sudden banging on the downstairs door, and we both freeze. “Emma!” shouts a man’s voice. It’s Clayton. “Emma, it’s me! Let me in!”

Mom’s skin swivels her head toward the sound, and her back arches. Her hands twist into claws. I glance at the window, thinking fast.

There’s a back door on the ground floor, but it’s a sliding glass door and Clayton might be heading there right now. And—Gina, fuck. Hopefully she’s safe, hiding in the car, and he missed her entirely.

“Come on,” I say in a low voice and drag Mom to the window. It’s not hard because she’s so light. I crank it open and crawl out onto the lower segment of the roof, helping her out. The beach stretches out before us, and the wind whips the sea grass violently. No sign of Clayton.

I pull Mom onto my back and ease down the edge of the roof, sliding my legs over the edge and hanging on with my arms. Luckily, the stories aren’t too high, and it’s not too bad of a drop. Steep, but doable.

“Emma!”

Clayton’s voice startles me and I let go too early. The fall knocks the wind out of me, and sand gets in my mouth. Clayton’s footsteps hurry close, and I fight to catch my breath, my heart beating so fast that I can feel my pulse hammering in my hands. Where’s Mom?

“There you are,” he says. He looks just like I remember, but in my dazed state, he’s overlaid with the dream image of my young father. “I couldn’t get ahold of you, but your dad said I’d find you here. Why aren’t you picking up your phone?”

A glint of light in his hand makes me realize he’s holding a knife. Dread curls in my stomach. “Clayton,” I wheeze. “Put that down.”

“Emma,” he says, and I recognize the wild look in his eyes. It’s the same look he wore when I told him I was breaking up with him before I left. “I love you. I’ve been talking with your dad, and he said that there was a way to keep you with me forever. A way to make you understand.”

I struggle up on my forearms and knees. My ankle’s fucked. I don’t have a weapon; I scan the area for a rock, or a stick, but there’s nothing.

“Your dad told me,” he says hoarsely, “that I have to cut you out of your skin. I don’t know if I can do it. But I will.” He steps toward me, his hands shaking. “For you, Emma. For our future together.”

A flesh-colored blur darts past me and tears at his face. He screams, slashing at Mom with the knife. I cry out as he stabs several new holes in Mom’s skin.

And then there’s an awful crunching sound, and Clayton crumples onto the sand, dark blood spreading beneath his head. Gina stands over him with the tire iron from my Rover, a look of madness on her face.

“Run, Emma!” screams Gina. She swings the tire iron again, bashing Clayton’s skull. Down, again and again, her shoulders and chest heaving.

I run, seizing Mom and stumbling down the beach as fast as I can on my messed-up ankle. The rain pelts us, making it hard to see. The water approaches, and as it does, the stench grows. The tide is out, and it’s left behind lines of fish bones, running along the beach like veins of quartz. The sand is slippery, sticky with clear, smelly residue. Peeled, deboned fish float to the water’s surface in the hundreds, staring up, unseeing, at the stormy sky. Their bodies bump against my legs as I wade into the surf.

The image of Clayton on the ground, blood leaking from his head, flashes through my mind. I struggle through it, biting my lip so hard that it begins to bleed, too.

Clayton—

Gina—

I have to stay focused. I wade into the water up to my waist, cradling Mom so she doesn’t get swept away. She rests in my arms, like the stingrays I’ve seen in those big fish hunting shows, gathering their strength before swimming away. Overhead, thunder roars, deafening.

“It’s time to go,” I say. A lump rises in my throat, and I don’t know if it’s fear or despair. I don’t want her to leave me again. But I know I have to let her go.

Bright pain stabs through my back, and I gasp, lurching forward and dropping Mom. With a quick twist, Mom’s skin slithers out of my grip, darting into the water. The ocean floods into my mouth, and I choke.

The pain drags down my spine, sawing an uneven path down my body. It’s excruciating, and I want to scream, but I can’t breathe. Agony curls my body in half. I claw at the water, fighting for air.

“Stay still,” says Gina. I know what’s buried in my back; it’s my dad’s old hunting knife. Gina sounds like she’s crying. “Em, please. I had the dream too. I know what we have to do.”

She cuts me open, and I can’t stop her. The waves batter me and my arms and legs ache, flooded with adrenaline and panic. I can feel everything, and I can’t feel anything; my mind’s shutting down, pushing me out of my own body.

Then she begins to peel me, and I black out.

Wake up, Emma, commands a voice that isn’t mine or Gina’s, or even my mom’s. It’s something older than that. Its myriad voices, joined together as one. An image of a pod of strange, animal bodies moving in a single sinuous shape jolts through my mind.

When I open my eyes, Gina’s arms are wrapped around my chest from behind, hauling me toward the shore. My body feels raw. I can’t feel my legs. Something wet slaps my face; when I look up, I find myself staring into my own eyeless face, the bloody backside of my skin showing through its open mouth.

No, I think frantically, trying to struggle. My skin face looks back at me, empty. No, no, no—

My mom rears up out of the water, lashing out at Gina with a giant, flat tail. It knocks us over, and Gina and I sprawl in different directions. The bottom half of Mom’s body is like a giant fish’s, half-transformed; the rest of her body is slowly morphing to match it. It still looks flat, wrong, like there’s no meat inside of it.

I end up on my stomach, a few yards from Gina. My skin lies at the water’s edge and I drag myself on my elbows toward it. As the tide washes in, a skinned fish bumps into my mouth. I spit it out and crawl through the surf, dragging my body over the rows of fine bones. My fingers brush my skin.

Yes, says the voice in my head, exultant.

I tug it over my head, and it settles over my face like a mask. The eyeholes are crooked, and I yank with all of my waning strength. Mom’s hands, paper-thin and incongruously strong, latch onto my skin’s flapping legs. Acrylic nails scrape my raw body as they guide my legs back into the skin.

Once, when I was very young, Mom and I snuck out of the beach house while Dad was asleep. That night, she taught me how to swim. She held me up in the shallows, letting me practice kicking and different ways to pull my body through the waves. Her movements in the ocean felt natural the way they never did on land. And then, when she thought I was ready, she pushed gently on my back, releasing me into the water.

Mom’s hollow hand presses on my raw, naked back, and this time, I feel a rush of power. The open flaps of skin fold gently over my spine, sealing me inside.

Now swim.

My fingers and legs snap together, and my body explodes into a giant shape, arcing out of the water. My neck arcs in a column of thick muscle, and my face pushes outward, mouth stretching wide. I see my reflection in the surf, all rough gray skin and rows of serrated teeth. I’m monstrous, beautiful.

For the first time in my life, I feel whole.

Gina’s staggering to her feet, the hunting knife still clutched in her hand. She looks up as I lunge for her, just in time for me to catch the look of terror and awe on her face. I snap my jaws closed around her, and her body slides under my teeth, small and strangely soft. Blood blossoms on my tongue, and I swallow around her body. She must be screaming, but the roar of the ocean around me, the roar of my own blood in my ears, is so loud I can barely hear.

Maybe she’s calling my name. But so is something beneath the waves, that dark and lovely expanse that neither light nor human beings can touch. It thrills me, ringing through my body from teeth to tail. I see visions of a pod of creatures like us, a new family.

Mom’s skin flashes bright and swims away from shore, fast and beautiful. I turn and dive into the deep after her, bearing us down into the crushing cold.

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