Everything is Temporary by Danila Botha

Alice was always asking Paul to scratch her back. She’d ask reflexively almost immediately after he sat down beside her on the couch. Her voice would drop into her throat, and she’d say, “could you just,” and he’d sigh and tell her he’d made a point of not trimming his nails, just for her, and he was a musician, so this was obviously a great sacrifice and a sign of love. She’d smile and settle in, sprawling out on her stomach, her lean legs and arms splayed in all directions. Occasionally she’d let out something that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a purr, wry but full of pleasure. He’d lay down beside her on her lumpy but oddly comfortable bed, her sheets always slightly damp as if something was leaking from just above.

However much he scratched, it was never enough. Of course, she loved it when he ran his nails along her shoulder blades when she was on top of him, but even when they were just there, cuddling, his fingers had to be busy, piercing Alice’s soft skin until she sighed with relief.  Paul bought her body oils and lotions, shea butter, organic coconut oil, convinced it was the dry winter air, and her sauna-like, overheated apartment but she shrugged him off and when she finally looked at him, her gaze was disconcertingly blank.

After a few months, he stopped bringing it up.

Alice did other things that drove him crazy. She wouldn’t eat for hours, and then when she was hungry, she’d get laser-focused on the specific thing she wanted, usually meat, or shellfish, she was always on some version of the paleo or keto diets, and she’d circle the kitchen like a hawk, digging up meat in the fridge or freezer and quickly cooking it, tearing into with her teeth with a speed and intensity that was unsettling. 

Her biggest ask, aside from sometimes acting like a cat in desperate need of a scratching post, was wanting Paul to go to her family’s cottage with him every weekend even in the winter. There was nothing to do except light fires and walk outside amongst the bare trees, watching her stare longingly at the frozen lake.

She loved the water. She loved swimming in it, boating on it, lying on the sand in the sun.

“I come alive in the summer,” she told him once, a few weeks after they met through an app for nature lovers and outdoorsy types. He tried to picture her big green eyes lighting up as the sun kissed them, her limp, dark hair and pale skin slowly transforming into shades of gold. “I feel most like myself.”

“I like you the way you are now,” he told her, and she smiled sadly. 

“Everything is temporary,” she said, and he, instead of being relieved, who lived for life on the road, for new cities and towns, for stolen moments and hours with girls he’d never see again, felt bereft.

He rescheduled an upcoming six-week jaunt to the jazz bars of Europe. All those Steinways he’d never felt under his fingers before, all that cognac, the women who carried themselves with a different kind of confidence. His booking agent threatened that he’d have to compensate him for their losses, but it felt right to him. Alice, he realized, could be The One. In time, he thought, they’d work it out; they’d live somewhere rural, where she’d have space, where she could work remotely and be outside whenever she wanted to be, in time, he could tour again.

She was lying on her side on her purple couch when he decided to tell her. He’d been at an artist’s market and had bought her a silver ring. The stone in middle was topaz, iridescent like the lake sparkling in the sun, with two small pieces of green peridot on top that reminded him of floating lily pads. Her eyes widened as she moved his hands to her shoulders. She took her shirt off, wiggled her arms out of her bra straps.

“You’ve been oblivious,” she said, “to how much I’ve been changing.”

Her skin felt more brittle, he noticed now, hot and angry against his. He scratched harder and felt something burst under his nail, a bubble, he wondered, a blister. “Don’t stop,” she insisted, “whatever you do, don’t stop.” Something sharp broke through, a crisp but delicate black corner; he touched it carefully at first. “Pull,” she whispered, “keep digging,” and slowly, it emerged, a translucent piece of skin lined in black, like the paddle of a canoe crossed with a fly’s wings. Some blood was dripping too, and a similar piece was poking out of her other shoulder.

He hadn’t done drugs in years, nothing that would cause him to believe that this was actually happening, that Alice’s skin was peeling off her body, that her arms and legs were sharp black lines, that her waist was turning into a bulge, that her face was hardening, that her huge eyes didn’t seem to see him.

“I’ve never understood why humans are so repulsed by insects,” she said, her voice sounding tinnier by the syllable. “Damselflies can’t hurt you, our bites can’t even penetrate your skin.

“I’m still the same, you know, all the things you loved about me, all the things that drove you crazy. You just helped me to become what I’ve been trying to be for so long.” Her voice trailed off, her lower lip shook. She stared at the window in front of them, lifted her hand and he understood. Slowly, he opened the window. She disappeared with such speed it all felt like a dream, but the layers of skin, the drops of blood, the thick, chipped fragments of bone, scapula and humerus, lay before him, as irrefutable proof that she’d existed, the bits of clear and black wings he’d accidentally scratched, a little proof of everything she’d just become.

Danila Botha is the author of the short story collections, Got No Secrets, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and the ReLit Award and Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness. The collection won an Indie Reader Discovery Award for Women's Issues, Fiction, and was a finalist for the Canadian Book Club Awards, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and the National Indie Excellence Book Awards. She is also the author of the award-winning novels Too Much On the Inside and A Place for People Like Us which just won an Independent Press Award for Contemporary Novel. Her first graphic novel, Vidal, which she wrote and illustrated, was published this spring.