Five Stages of Shedding a Skin

by Audrey Zhou

 1.   Denial

The only reason anyone gets a new skin is to become someone else.

Ming’s skin—the one she was born with, the only one she’s ever known—fits fine, mostly. It’s a little tight, as if stretched taut, but that’s just what happens eventually, everyone says. Growing pains.

“Well,” Xuemei says, “I heard there’s this guy calling himself the Tailor. Granny told me before—you know.”

Ming and Xuemei do everything together: they grew up neighbors, learned to make their skins beautiful, mourned for every woman who disappeared from the village. Granny is the last in a long line of women gone elsewhere—the men are calling it kidnapping, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it is.

Elsewhere, Ming is realizing, could be anything.

“Granny said he’s the best around,” Xuemei says. “Too good to only make clothes.” She pulls meaningfully at the webbing between her fingers, where the subsurface scattering from the sunlight has rendered its translucence red.

Ming and Xuemei do everything together, so Xuemei asks, “Will you come find him with me?”

Ming weighs the good and bad of her life: her three little brothers, who wouldn’t have gone to school without the money her dowry brought; her husband, who wanted to marry her on sight but didn’t even notice the week Ming spent bedridden with a mystery illness.

“Life could be worse,” Ming says. “You don’t have to go.”

Xuemei laughs, not unkindly. “Worse is a low bar, Ming-jie. Haven’t you ever wanted better?”

After Xuemei leaves, Ming knows that everything she’s heard about the Tailor must be true. She doesn’t see Xuemei again, at least not a Xuemei in a form Ming recognizes. Xuemei is new-skinned now, severed from the past.

2.   Anger

When Ming turns up at the Tailor’s workshop a week later, he rejects all offers of payment.

“A skin is easy for me to help you with,” he says. “I just need you to be sure.”

He’s sweet, if strange. He keeps a snake that twines around his neck like a scarf—“For inspiration,” he says—and doesn’t tell her where Xuemei or any of the others went, though he reassures her that they’re alright.

Ming’s current skin, he explains, is unrecoverable after she gets the new one. The mind forgets, the body remembers, but what does it mean when the body forgets, too?

The Tailor asks, “Are you willing? Is this”—he means a new life, the possibilities for a new Ming—“worth it?”

Ming’s skin remembers how she was a large baby, but grew up small, lithe. After Ming married, her mother was always asking how Ming could expect to give her husband a child with hips like that. As if Ming wanted that. As if Ming didn’t get her hips from her mother.

Ming didn’t want to accept when her father received her marriage proposal, but Ming’s skin remembered the first time she held her youngest brother, tufts of hair slicked to his head with afterbirth, hands smaller than she’d thought hands could be. She loves him enough to ignore how every family favors sons, but it isn’t fair that a whole string of Ming’s choices were decided because she wasn’t born son-shaped.

The choice she’s about to make doesn’t have to be.

“Yes,” Ming says.

3.   Bargaining

Ming expects the process of getting a new skin to be like a mix of surgery and getting fitted for a new dress, but the Tailor walks her past the person-sized table in his workshop and the shears by the mannequin. Then, he takes her to a room with a privacy screen and a bathtub.

“You have to let go of the old to prepare for the new,” the Tailor explains. “Baths help—they loosen you up.”

Ming feels better already when she gets in the water: the steam does wonders for where her skin chafes at the joints. She does feel looser. She imagines her skin ballooning until she slips out of it, skinned-fish-slippery, and into something new.

She asks through the privacy screen, just to check, “You never keep anything of the old skin? The old memories?”

Ming has cared for her brothers ever since they were born. Ming cannot help loving her parents, even if she only likes them some of the time. Even though Xuemei is gone, she’s not really, so long as Ming remembers the shape of her face or how they used to catch cicadas in the summer.

The Tailor sighs. “No, I don’t. That’s how it works. But you came to me for a reason, right?”

4.     Depression

The Ming who loves her brothers is the same as the Ming with the life she doesn’t want.

There is no way to be one and not the other.

But Ming gets it now, why Granny left, why Xuemei followed. It’s impossible to unlearn a thing like that, to unknow the shape of desire once it’s started to emerge.

5.     Acceptance

Ming emerges from the bath to find the Tailor by the person-sized table, holding his shears.

She gets on the table and lies flat with her face up to the ceiling. “It’s already done?” She hasn’t seen him sewing anything. He hasn’t even taken her measurements.

The Tailor’s brows furrow, then his face clears as he laughs. “I can’t actually make skins. I don’t know how that rumor started.” He pats the snake, still looped around his neck. “You make your own—I just help you get to it.”

The first cut doesn’t hurt—the scissors split the skin down Ming’s chest to her navel, smoother than water. Cuts two and three free her arms; four and five open up her legs. Old skin falls away like scraped scales. New baby-pink skin blooms underneath.

Ming unfolds.

She remembers all over again how to be in a skin that fits—the new melds like the old one was supposed to and flexes as if it could take any shape Ming wants, anything at all. Ming doesn’t have to be Ming anymore. She doesn’t have to be a daughter. She could become a son if she wanted to; a snake, even, shedding its skin.

Ming might not know who she is now, or even who she wants to be, but won’t it be nice to finally find out?

Audrey Zhou is a Chinese American writer from North Carolina, where she is currently studying computer science and statistics at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her short fiction has been published at Strange Horizons. She can be found on Twitter @aud_zhou.