Mysterious Skin

Throughout the night, Mike meant to get up and shake the coins from the bed. He felt some of them press against his back and legs, but he had been drinking, and was far too tired for his brain to be a commanding presence. He had a mental picture of waking up with nickels and dimes stuck to random parts of his body and face, like the button eyes on a rag doll.

It was morning now, and he opened his eyes with difficulty, stretching and yawning in unison. He tried calculating briefly how much money he spent at the bar, and he quickly decided against it: he'd soon realize that rent was blown this month. Oh, but he had fun. He drank, and danced, and kissed a random girl, and maybe smoked a little pot, but it didn't taste like anything. He grinned: part of his moral hangover was that he danced on stage, and he rubbed his face with his right hand, as one does in embarrassment. That's when he finally noticed it.

Mike's face was a labyrinth of ridges, like flesh-colored veins, but a little thinner.. He may not have noticed it at all, had it not been for the fact that his hand was abnormally soft and sensitive, and little hairs protruded from his palm. He flung up from the bed, and looked at himself in the bedroom mirror. His body was covered in waves and ridges, like wind-blown sand, forming dunes at the joints, and dissipating at long stretches of skin such as his thighs. First thing he thought was that going to work was simply not possible: not only because of the hammering ache that couped his head, but because the ridges didn't disguise him enough to go outside shamelessly. He still looked like himself: only upon close inspection could one notice the rarity of the situation. He looked closer in the mirror and with his oversensitive index finger, followed the line from his forehead, to his nose, to the upper lip, to the end on the other side of his nose.

The even stranger thing is that he was almost sexually aroused: that's how excited he was. This all had to mean something. Something had happened to him during his drinking binge. Something extraordinary that had caused him to now carry this mysterious skin. He laid on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember what it could have been. Meanwhile, his hand found its way to his chest, and following the ridges, trying to decipher its pattern.