Issue Three

JESSICA BOWERS
shapes. Here she was wider than a
semi-truck; there she was but a sliver of
white skin, thinner than a sheet of
paper. Cassie spun round and round in
a daze, for all the mirrors reflected upon
each other into infinity, and in every
direction she looked there was the
disgusting dichotomy of fat Cassie and
skinny Cassie, repeating and repeating
forever. The whole paranoid obsession
over her self-image was wrapped
around her, and just when she thought it
would pierce right through her, the lights
went out again with a sound like a
bowling ball hitting a concrete floor.
They came on with a whine of energy so
high that Cassie could hardly hear it,
and the lights were so unnaturally bright
that she was temporarily
blinded. Agony lanced through every
square inch of her body as if she’d been
ripped right out of her skin, and when
the blue splotches faded from her eyes
she saw that she really had been. The
Uglylights had snatched her skin right
off as if she could be unzipped, and
what Cassie saw portrayed in the single
mirror was the revelation of what’d been
hiding underneath.
She was no longer Cassie May of 34
Orchid Street, but the free and exposed
essence of that human being, the
essence liberated by the
Uglylights. She hadn’t been this aware
of anything since she’d put her head in
the toilet earlier that evening, and when
the world snapped back to her in
stunning clarity she was overwhelmed
with the need to scream, stopping short
only because she realized she was
looking at herself.
Her hands were level with her abdomen
but they were hidden, thrust inside the
red, viscous tangle of entrails that’d
been gouged out of her body but were
still connected to the inside. They were
boiling hot in her hands and she could
feel them still thrumming with life, could
feel something like tiny rodents
squirming inside the slimy tubes of her
intestines. She was slathered up to the
shoulders in her own warm blood and
there were speckles of it on her chest
and cheeks. Her skin was but wrinkly
parchment stretched over a wire frame,
her face was puckered like an aged
corpse and a dark, acrid fluid leaked
from her rheumy eyes. Her hair fell out
in brittle pieces like dried leaves.
What was almost worse was that she
could see the empty sack of her old skin
hanging on a hook like a coat, a
ghoulish and hairless thing that gaped
with black holes where her eyes and
mouth and nose had been. A moment
later the elastic suit crumbled into black
dust as if it were a thousand years old.
This was the real Cassie May: a
skeleton offering up her innards to
anything that would relieve her of them
and all their sordidness; a blighted
victim of the Ultimate purge.
The room lit up with a sound like thunder,
and the cantankerous old Kurt Dailey was
flailing his cane like mad, so livid that he
really thought the hard objects he was
smiting were the misbehaved knees and
skulls of Those