Mark turned off his alarm and sat up, yawning. Susan wasn’t in bed next to him. “Odd,” he thought. “She must have gotten up early.” He climbed out of bed, grabbed his phone, and headed to the bathroom to get ready for work.
Susan had left a pile of clothes on the bathroom floor, mostly dresses and other clothes she had made. Other than socks and underwear, she sewed all her clothes herself. He dumped them in the basket in the closet and sighed. After months of living together, he was getting sick of cleaning up after her.
After a quick shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist and combed his sandy brown hair. He winced as the comb went over a bump on the back of his neck. He got out a hand mirror and positioned it so he could see the reflection in the larger mirror on the bathroom wall. There was a small bulge at the nape of his neck, as if there were something embedded under the skin.
He pulled a pair of tweezers from the medicine cabinet and poked at the bump, watching in the hand mirror. A nearly invisible line appeared along his spine, almost like a seam. He managed to pull it open with the tweezers, revealing something long and silver underneath. A zipper.
He let out a gasp. “Is that… is that real?” He touched the zipper pull at the top, feeling the cold metal with his fingertip. “How do I have a zipper on my back? It’s my skin, not a costume… This has to be fake. I must be on one of those hidden camera prank shows. They got some makeup artist to stick it on me, like when they give an actor a fake rubber forehead so he can be an alien on TV.”
He prodded the seam with the tweezers, and managed to pull it apart all the way down, revealing more of the hidden zipper. The zipper extended from his neck down to his lower back. He couldn’t separate the zipper from his skin. It appeared to be a genuine part of him, not stuck on or glued in place. It was real.
“I’ll just pull it down,” he muttered. “That’s what they’re for. You pull the zipper and take off the jacket or the hoodie or whatever. I’ll just pull it down and take off… my skin.” But his hands didn’t move.
Susan’s voice came through the closed door. “Good morning, darling! Did you sleep well? How are you?”
“Fine!” he called. “My head doesn’t hurt at all anymore. I don’t even have a bruise.”
“Can I come in and get ready with you?”
“Not right now! I need some privacy!”
“Okay, I’ll wait. I love you!”
Thankfully, she hadn’t asked him to open the door and hand her the laundry basket. She liked to throw a load in to wash before she went to work. Sometimes she would forget to move laundry to the dryer and his clothes would end up musty. It was one of those things they were always arguing about. They seemed to be fighting a lot lately. This was the first time she had said “I love you” in weeks. She was unhappy, and not just with him. She didn’t like herself, either. Maybe they were both a little crazy.
“Or more than a little,” he thought. “This must be a hallucination, or a vivid dream.” He slapped himself in the face. Nothing. He tried it again, and again nothing happened. “I’m still here, and I still have a zipper down my back.”
He sighed, staring at his reflection. “If it’s really a skin suit, that means there’s something underneath. Why can’t I remember what’s under there? Did I not want to remember? Did I put on a skin suit and then erase my memory of what I really looked like? How? And why?
“Maybe I’m an alien. I’m a spy sent to weaken the earth’s defenses before an alien invasion. I disguised myself as a human named Mark, and I replaced my memories with his. You can’t get caught stealing someone’s identity if you don’t know you did it.”
He adjusted the mirror and took a closer look, squinting at the reflection. “No, I can see the logo on the zipper pull. It was definitely made on Earth. So I’m not an alien. Maybe I’m a human spy from another country?” He scratched his head and thought, examining the recesses of his mind. “No, I don’t know any other languages. I don’t even know which countries are supposed to be our enemies now. I’m definitely just an American.
“So I’m not an alien or a spy. Who else would be able to make a perfectly convincing skin suit? Susan is a seamstress. A good one, too. She makes costumes for the theater.” He laughed. Now there was a crazy idea. Why would Susan go from making dresses to making skin suits?
“Maybe she made it for me. Maybe it’s a gift, her way of apologizing for that big argument, when she got mad and pushed me and I hit my head. She was so upset, she just sat on the chair and cried.”
His eyes widened. He pulled open the bathroom door. There was no Susan in the hall, just his phone sitting on a shelf. It was playing an audio file named “Morning Hello.” The next files in the playlist were Welcome Home, Typing In The Other Room, Susan’s Laugh, and Goodnight Through Closed Door. He checked the list of recent files. The file played before this one was called “Self-Hypnosis Attempt #27.”
Mark rubbed his brow. “What happened to Susan? Did I do something to her? No, no, I wouldn’t do that. Susan’s fine. She has to be. Susan’s fine.” He stepped back into the bathroom and pulled the zipper down. He pulled off his skin – Mark’s skin – revealing long, blonde hair and an exhausted woman’s face.
Susan blinked away tears. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mean to hurt him. Just stop thinking about it. Don’t worry, you’ll make yourself forget again. And then you have to go to work at Mark’s office. Can’t let anyone know he’s missing.”
She got redressed in the skin suit and pulled jeans and a t-shirt on over it. It took her a moment to remember where she had left Mark’s favorite hoodie. She had taken it off in the basement, throwing it on top of what was left of Mark. Probably better to just buy a new one. The zipper was broken anyway.
