The Glittering World by Robert Levy Page A

flesh threaded the air, a taste in his mouth both earthen and sanguinary, as if he’d bitten his tongue. But all he could do was stare at his hand, at the burned, mutilated marrow and the shocking raw pink of his fingers as the skin there stirred, and swelled, and changed.
    A few moments later, his hand returned to its familiar state.No blood, no scarring, no sign of being burned at all. Just the persistent smell of cooked meat, and above it that of the tomato sauce, still simmering in the pan. He’d cut and burned himself in the kitchen a thousand times over—as recently as last week—but it only now occurred to him that he bore no scars whatsoever.
    He wasn’t who he thought he was, not even close; he’d been wrong the entire time.
    He turned to the small window over the farm sink, his reflection transposed over the branches of the pines swaying past the property. Who are you? He gave himself a cold, clinical look, a scientist observing a specimen in a petri dish. Who are you really, underneath it all?
    He put a hand to his face. He moved it along his cheek, slowly, in a caress, his fingers touching upon the crooked swell of his nose. It had been broken ten years ago, when he was walking Elisa to a cab and was jumped by some dudes early one morning outside the Roxy. Most of the time, though, his nose didn’t appear broken at all.
    He let his hand come to rest below his right eye socket, where he hooked his fingernails into the tender area below. He grasped a fold of skin and pulled downward, tearing into himself, a narrow runnel dug along his flesh. There was no pain this time, not as he stripped away a flap of skin from his cheekbone, the tissue below exposed to light and air. He’d been wearing this camouflage for so long he must have forgotten it was a disguise in the first place.
    This isn’t me.
    A brackish liquid that stank of seawater squirted from the wound and left a spray of pinkish fluid across the window and the clay sink. He listed at the smell, not because it was repellantbut because it was intoxicating, exhilarating. He steadied himself, a pulsing light flashing beneath his skin, his skull surrounded by an undulating membrane of foliage, the leafy tissue interlaced in a tangled briar the color of lichen.
    He continued peeling at his face. It was like deboning a fish, or prepping a chicken, something he’d done in the kitchen on countless occasions. The surrendered parts of his disguise lay strewn all about: thick hanks of black hair stuck to the sink, mealy strips of skin run down his pant legs and along the floor in wet slug paths. But as he contemplated these castoffs, the ragged bits shimmered and began to melt, thinning to dewdrop-sized particles before vanishing from sight altogether. Where he had expected carnage, he found beauty; he was beautiful, underneath it all.
    I’m not human at all.
    All that was left of his old face were two unchanged eyes, two white and green-lensed orbs that stared back at him from the window like a pair of hard-boiled eggs. They were what remained of the masquerade, relics of this too-bright world. And past the twin white orbs, beyond the muscle and protein and all the rest of this pretend human squander, there was his secret self, his real self. Arms sickled like the forelegs of a mantis, his fingers birch-gray branches of transmuted flesh and bone, he tensed and released as his uncovered form rippled like a wave upon the shore. He was made of this place, of the night sky and grass and the woods on the far side of the glass. He was made of this land. And he would never forget that again.
    He plucked his eyes from their sockets, and everything changed.
    The air went out of the room, as if the entire world had become a vacuum. His mouth fell open and a wall went up. Hewas a creature caught in a net of feeling beyond feelings, all pervasive and alive, a thousand pricking needles in search of a vein. Chest pulsating with ecstatic sound and energy, he was made of