My skin had been peeled away, scraped off with the scalpel, little by little, black flakes settling on the ground like soot. As I was scraped, my legs grew shorter and I had to scramble to safety.  His skin remained.  Black and safe. As my limbs grew shorter, he grew more.  Three arms to hold me secure.  My flesh stung under his touch, red raw and hot, my back like a furnace scorched his fingers.  One hand supported the back of  my head, I was a baby again, exposed. Without my black skin I was nothing, just ready to be eaten alive.

 

One pair of his arms raised up in horror, he needed to hold me, be burned by my arms against his chest, my shin against his thigh.  His lips were too big for mine, he daren’t kiss them. Such a tiny space, so little air.  He couldn’t search my eyes for the answer, I hid them from him, ashamed because i had allowed this to be done.

 

 

Absolute silence. The water is as still and smooth as ice and I am a small tree, a sapling caught in the ice, held there by the shoulders. It isn’t cold like ice, of course, it’s hot, not too hot, but warm enough to be comfortable. My feet are planted on the bottom, if I move my toes, I can feel the shiny surface of the tiles. But I don’t want to move. I want to stay still and grounded as if the water and my body were one, not solid, but not liquid either, somewhere in between, somewhere I have not been before. My arms are weightless and float at shoulder level. I am very aware of my lower back which is gently arched and of my buttocks pushing back, balancing the weight of my head. It feels effortless to hold my head up. It feels as if I could stand here like this all day, parcelled securely in my criss-cross costume.

There is nothing to look at, only white light and a distant horizon, but I am not looking. I am scarcely breathing. I am just being. There is a clarity, a near-death experience perhaps.

 

And in it I was a sooty-faced creature with hair or fur or horns, tending towards a wolfish animal, black arms and legs, a cloak of red and gloves, one blue, one netted.  I held my own eye on a stalk and looked sideways at it suspiciously.  Beneath my cloak is my dwelling, my three-storey town house.  Cartoon animals dance at my feet, rabbit or mouse-eared.  A crude monkey boy gazes up at me in alarm.  I’m on a blue road and there seems to be a tiny town beside it.  I try to work out the meaning.  I’m big and frightening – I could crush the little creatures, no problem, but looking into my own eye is alarming. 

 

Am I afraid of myself, of what I’ve become?

 

Last night I dreamt that I had to go and pose for some photographs but when I got there there was no one in the studio. There were lights and a plain backdrop and I had the feeling that I was supposed to know what to do but I didn’t. There were some bits and pieces of costumes so I put on some stripy stockings but they were dripping wet and I was trying to wring them out. I had a dog on a lead only it wasn’t a dog, it was like a tribal mask or something. Then it went down this hole and disappeared. I knew the photographer would come in any minute and ask me where the dog was and why I wasn’t ready in my costume but I didn’t know what I was expected to wear.

Then I looked out the window and there was this building on fire and then I was on fire and I tried to telephone 999 but the telephone turned into one of my feet. I had two telephones instead of feet. And I tried to run but I couldn’t because my feet were telephones.