Skin

Maggie's skin is magnolia white, bright in the summer sun, shimmering like the heat as it rises through the leaves in the trees.  She is as soft as the petals that have fallen, the spring snow, the bone china broken into hundreds of pieces on the green carpet of the north lawn.

Ernesto is burned by the long years of working in these gardens.  He is rusting and his skin is dappled brown and orange, a hundred subtle shades that smell of cinnamon and clove.  The freckles that sat awkwardly on his dark skin when he was a child are now more like scars, darkened blood that has dried there, defining the surface.

Liza is a pungent pink, pig skin that is peeled back to expose the shuddering folds of flesh and frustration. One looks at her.  It is as if she is made of grapefruit jello.  She is almost transparent, and she shakes and shivers; the secret history of her hungers--for love, for hope, for peace--sits around her in pink piles of tremulous pounds.

Vernel is a version of herself, asphalt black and shiny like unrefined oil.  When the sun subsides in its indignant stare, she smiles into twilight.  Her face reflects the whole of the world--the dark green of the greasy foliage, the lapis luster of the evening sky--and she is a warm light in dark corners.  Her skin glows like a candle teasing the night air.

Milo's skin is thin and through it one can see the miracle of his anatomy.  Wrapped in these brief layers, his inner workings--a kind of (impatient) elaborate clock--project unusual colors on the screens.  Is this his aura?  His skin is grinning, warm fortune; it is a kind of clean mint green infused with the  saffron light of this evolving hour.

Sea of Tranquility/Sea of Storms

His skin is the surface of the moon. It remembers adolescence in its altered geography. In this soft light of the only lamp in his bedroom, traces remain. Meteors whose devastation had done their best to shame him in his tender youth now rendered him shy in middle age. This damage made him a precarious lover, uncertain in sexual encounters. More than the pock marks themselves, he didn't like this effect. He had become one of those people who only undresses in semi-darkness, who fucks with their eyes closed, and who hurriedly departs the scene before his partner--now sated--can begin to perceive his many flaws through a lens of their regret.

So then, having returned to the temperate latitudes, my skin remembered our adventures in the crisp, red outline of my black speedos. As if I were an apple ripened in the sun, as if my flesh were gristle dipped in barbeque sauce, as if I were a snake dragging my body against the friction of the world, I first scalded the outer layers and then waited while they pealed. A Skin for Tomorrow: It was as if I had naively prophesied this critical moment, this time of change. And Jesus said (or Paul or Augustine) that you must become the new man; you must let the old Adam die. Again the snake, again the apple. All these souvenirs of Paradise.