I’ve always had issues with my skin.
I know, I know—clovenhoofclub, it’s not that weird to pick at scabs or pimples, it just makes them harder to heal, everyone does it, whatever. Well, when you’re blessed with the gift of cystic acne from the ripe old age of 14 and nobody told you what a cleanser was, picking becomes the only way to settle the score with a rampaging dermis. And even when I was offered a basic skincare routine thanks to one of my sister’s sympathetic friends, it was far too late for me: picking and popping were bad habits. By the time I was 21, I had gnarly craters lacing my cheeks and forehead, my face perpetually red. I walked around like I’d been beaten with a meat hammer.
Needless to say, this was not great for my mental health, and I was pretty much a shut-in. Even with a ten-step regimen straight from South Korea, my skin was still suffering because of my nervous habit. The prodding of family members and a handful of concerned college friends brought me to Dr. Willis, whose office was only a ten-minute walk from my apartment. He took my insurance and didn’t seem awful based on a handful of Google reviews, so I was just like, “Fuck it, what’s the worse that could happen?”
He figured me out quick, that’s for sure. Dermatillomania related to my obsessive compulsive disorder, which mostly manifested in stress-inducing intrusive thoughts. I’d become pretty good at internalizing most of OCD’s uglier symptoms, but, as the man himself said, “clovenhoofclub, even if you lock all the doors, it’ll just throw a rock through your window.”
That summed it up. So I got a prescription for Paxil to add to my rotation of meds. And, interestingly, an offer to participate in an experimental research trial sponsored by the Lusus Institute, some giant think tank based in the Netherlands that he was a representative of. The trial, as he described it, was tailor-made for “people like you”—people, in one way or another, obsessed with mutilating skin. I was kind of hesitant, mostly since I’d never been a part of anything like that, but he told me I’d get a few hundred bucks out of the deal. Who’d say no to free money?
And that was that, and a few weeks passed, and I heard nothing about Lusus or their research.
But later, when I’d gotten home after one of our earlier sessions, Dr. Willis sent me an email instructing me to get Tor and Protonmail for “security purposes”—both of which I’d never heard of before, besides those occasional “darkweb is scary” segments on the news. I thought it was a little weird. But, also, I figured there was a point to it; he was intelligent and well-spoken and probably meant okay. Maybe there was a security issue with Gmail or whatever. I couldn’t find a lot on Lusus from the occasional search, so maybe they did all their activity on unindexed browsers. But wouldn’t that be weird?
I couldn’t argue with the money, though. Flipping burgers the whole time, so I needed the savings. Fast food sucks, by the way. I remember how the grease from the fryer would form a slimy film on my face like sweat and glycerin. I’d dunk another batch of frozen tater tots and wince as burning droplets from the chemical reaction stung my neck. Rising wafts of vegetable oil would seep into my bursting pores, growing by the hour, red sacs of spider eggs hanging off my jaw. The whole place was warm and humid and salty-sweet, with a dash of burning.
I admit it—I’d pop them on the job. It was hard to stop when I could feel my skin swell and grow and hurt. I needed to get rid of it so I’d scratch up and down my cheeks when nobody was watching. The residue from the fryer steam would find a home beneath my chewed fingernails, and peeling skin flakes would make a mixture with the oil and salt on the grills. Little worms of pus would burn right up into blackened bits at the roiling surface of the deep fryers. I’d drip runny blood onto the burgers on accident, not even realizing that I was picking at another pustule while grabbing a fresh spatula. By the tail-end of my shift, my face would be weeping all kinds of liquids, and I’d be patting it frantically with wet paper towels in the bathroom after rush hour.
It hurt like a bitch.
I remembered all that, so I brushed away my concerns, conceded, and downloaded Tor. Dr. Willis and I corresponded using Protonmail, initially not really saying much of anything, until he sent me an onion address ostensibly run by Lusus. “This is a part of the pre-trial, but it’s important that you proceed thoughtfully. Let me know if you have any questions.”
I went to the address.
They were offering skin.
Live skin.
Hands, backs, breasts, vulvas, necks, chests, shoulders, faces, armpits, penises, mouths, feet, forearms, calves, testicles. And more. Of all colors, ages, and conditions: scarring, albinism, vitiligo, eczema, rosacea, fungal acne, melanoma, scabies. And more. And even more. You could have custom skin sent to your door. You could have a scalp full of flaky black hair, eyelids with long and delicate lashes, thighs with burn scars and sutures. You could have rows of lips of different sizes and shapes and colors, all of them with cold sores.
It was difficult for me to fathom the sheer variety of skin they offered. Nowhere was it described how they obtained the skin, whether it was cloned from stem cells and then modified, or donated, or just an organic hyper-realistic mimicry of actual human skin. Or something darker, more fitting the clandestine nature of the directory—not that I really enjoyed thinking about that. But it was real. I knew, somehow, this had to be real skin.
Dr. Willis messaged me again as I was browsing and cautioned: “No bones or ligaments—just skin. And only your first selection is free, as per the trial. Choose carefully. What do you think could best alleviate your condition, given what we’ve discussed?”
I liked picking at my face since it was always ripe and ready to wound, but backs looked more inviting. Myself, I never had bacne, but a girl I dated briefly in college had an awful case of it because of some shampoo she used. Her entire back, from neck to hips, was flaming with zits on zits, a Martian landscape—practically a goldmine for nervous pickers like me. I used to give her my Xanax to help her sleep, then take off her shirt and scratch her back until it turned irritated and glowing like a sunburn. I’d lick the dead skin and blood and eat the pimples caught underneath my nails, which were jagged and raw from a newly-formed biting habit. I’d pop the cysts and let the yellowed discharge roll between my fingertips. Her skin was so rough even after scratching it every which way and I’d fantasize about stripping the epidermis off with a thin knife or scouring it with steel wool.
We broke up.
After a lot of deliberation—more than I’d really like to share—I ordered premium back skin with acne vulgaris, folliculitis, and epidermal cysts. They would send it to a distributor in my region that would later contact Dr. Willis, who would have the package for me by our next session.
He was incredulous and somehow I could tell he was testing me. “Why this back skin? Why are you drawn to it?”
My reasoning was a bit obtuse. “Doctor, I just want something to pick at.”
Two weeks later, I had a sixty pound package sitting in my living room. The skin on an entire person’s body can weigh around sixteen percent of their total weight. The back that I ordered shouldn’t have weighed so much—not even half. That was when I first realized that they probably weren’t bullshitting me about the “live skin” bit. Something had to keep it alive.
I held my breath and carefully split the packaging tape with a butter knife.
It was a back, all right—worse than my college ex-girlfriend’s. When I first unwrapped it from its layers and layers of protective packaging, I thought it must have somehow gotten cut up during transport; not a single inch of it was clear. The berth of it was carmine and bumpy, like raw ground beef, some of it oozing fresh blood while other sections were crusted over with dead skin and scabs. Sticky and wet to the touch with the slightest provocation causing it to weep. Even the wrappings it was encased in were stained with fluids. My hardwood floor was a crime scene while I tried to wrangle with it.
As I propped it up to see what the back of the back could be (lol), my fingertips could make out the faintest hint of a pulse.
Most of the weight was from a stainless steel support that, I guess for lack of a better phrase, kept the thing alive and gave it its shape, since the skin wasn’t supposed to be covering any bone. The flesh of the back was abruptly demarcated by this thick sheet of metal, acting like a prosthetic in the way it turned from flesh to machine. The “BLS paneling” or “BLS backing”, as it was called, was completely featureless except for a small component in the center that opened up like a detergent dispenser for a dishwasher. This was how you fed your skin.
Luckily, the thing came with feeding instructions. One tiny pill of nutrients a day (the package came with about sixty, if I recall correctly) was enough to keep it alive. You just popped open that dispenser, inserted it, and closed it, and the biotechnology in the BLS paneling would do the rest. So long as you did that, Lusus guaranteed that your skin would be perfectly fine, barring any accident on behalf of the skin-owner.
So I did just that. I flipped it open, inserted the pill, and closed it, setting the metal side gingerly onto my floor with the skin facing the ceiling.
Then I sat there, almost afraid to touch it. I knew that stretch of radiated red flesh was waiting for my sweaty, shaking, greedy hands to caress it. But I couldn’t, not yet—I felt like I had to prepare. I almost believed I was about to desecrate some sacred relic from a long-dead faith, more afraid of ruining the history behind it than the sanctity it now embodied. And yet a part of me knew that wherever this thing came from could not have been a nice place. Was I, by extension, committing a sin by letting it into my home?
I could hear a faint buzzing from my half-open window. Cicadas. That high-pitched humming always made my fingers twitch. Like worms crawling along my muscles.
Before I was really aware, I was picking at it. My knees were splayed and I could feel my spine crack as I hunched over awkwardly, as if I was trying to protect it from the rain. Slowly, my nails ran down the flesh in rhythmic motions, prying, testing how thin the upper layer was. With each graze, I instinctively brought my fingers to my mouth, slurping the blood and pus that gathered beneath my nails. I could tell it was genuine flesh there and there—the faint musk of the dead skin, the acridity of the blood, the brittle texture of the scabs I had caught sitting underneath my tongue… I knew for a fact this was the real deal. The revelation made me throb.
I was only half-disgusted with myself after my session with it had ended. Honestly, I was satisfied. Not a lot had happened in the long run; I left most of the ripe pustules unmolested for another time, when my urge to pick was more overwhelming. I wrapped up the back in plastic wrap and, paranoid about any friends dropping by unexpectedly, hid it under my bed.
Cleaning up was a bit of a mess, but the exhilaration I felt was well worth it. The orgasm I had in the shower not long after was incredible.
For a while, it was the same humdrum routine—feed the back a pill, go to work (a 9 to 5; I somehow managed to escape fast food a few days into the trial), get home from work, take out the back and go to town, wrap it up, shower. Watching the skin evolve and warp over time kept me interested, and the fact it wasn’t connected to a living being made the whole process so much easier. My own facial skin cleared up significantly in a matter of weeks.
I was still corresponding with Dr. Willis on Protonmail, who was pleased with my progress and my experience with my “Lususkin”. I also ended up getting in touch with some other folks who were also in this trial, and we started some kind of convoluted group message about our skin and the effect it had on us.
A lot of it was about upkeep initially. Some of the participants have fetishes for specific body parts, and since Lusus offers little in the way of instruction on how to care for the skin besides feeding it (to this day, I’ve still never directly spoken with a rep from there), they had to get experimental. I knew a few guys who showered with their skin, which apparently had zero effect on the BLS paneling. Others were more cautious and followed a regimented skincare routine, even applying makeup to their disembodied faces. And still others, like me, do the bare minimum of keeping it alive, since our entire experience hinges on the unhealed skin conditions doing their thing.
Despite the weirdness of the trial and our initial confusion, we were pretty damn content with the setup. We would share progress pics and talk about how our lives have improved as a result, how we got here, our hopes for the future. There were all sorts of people in the trial, not just flesh fetishists. I chatted with an arson victim who was using her second- and third-degree-burned chest skin to experiment with products and alleviate her picking habit. I knew abuse survivors who chewed toenails, hangnails, cuticles and calluses as nervous habits; they wanted to be able to go out for pedicures or walk with open-toed shoes without embarrassment. We even had an older gentleman, a Gulf War vet, who started pulling his hair from the root and eating the white bulbs after returning from his tour of duty.
All of us were fuck-ups. We had tried everything else and failed—we realized that mutilation was a part of us, whether we liked it or not. There was a kinship in this shared drive to deform.
One night, though, a buddy of mine, K, was frantically emailing us and CCing everyone she knew that was in the trial. She’s your standard nervous picker. She likes to eat eyelashes, so hers are entirely gone. So, she had three pairs of eyes on her Lususkin, all different eye colors, all of them decked with thick, heavy, wispy lashes.
It took me a second to realize what I was looking at.
‘It’s watching me. it’s fucking watching me bro’
The photo she had attached was blurry and pixelated, taken in a dark room without flash. On her nightstand was her skin, propped up against the wall, roughly the size of a binder. Compared to some others I’ve seen, it was relatively well-cared for. Two pairs of eyes, half of their eyelashes ripped off, looking off vacantly into space. The topmost row was staring straight into the camera.
‘What the FUCK do i do? why is it looking at me? has this happened to anyone else? ive never seen these fucking eyes move before. theyre not attached to anything right?’
‘that’s why you put a blanket or shirt over it when you’re not using it. pepega’
Replied another acquaintance of ours, H, whose Lususkin was just half of a face. He used it to put out his cigarettes since the smell of burning skin made him calm, and his own pock-marked skin had cost him jobs.
‘You are such a dick H. you know that doesn’t help.’
‘i’m just saying i’ve never had this issue before with MARY. pepeshrug’ (Mary being the name he gave his Lususkin.)
They went back and forth for a few more replies. It was easy to get them to bicker. After a while S, a college professor, chimed in. I know nothing about them besides their paraphilia for cold sores and dead lip skin—they have a long, long row of lips that they kiss each morning, apparently.
‘K, something similar happened to me recently. Usually, all 11 of my lips are completely motionless, even if I bite deep into them. However, I was grading papers one afternoon and I noticed that some of the lips were moving, as if it was attempting to speak to me. Of course, lacking vocal chords, teeth, and tongues, it wasn’t anything intelligent, but it spooked me all the same. Do we have anyone here with a linguistics or speech pathology background? Next time, if this happens, I can record it. I’d like to see if they were trying to form words.’
K went quiet at that point. Instead, U—one of the few with a full face for Lususkin, like Cassandra from Dr. Who—also chipped in, going off of S.
‘S, r u for real? lol u mean u havent had ur Lususkin try to speak to u? It happens 2 me like once a week. I wake up in the middle of the night n I hear it moaning n stuff. N sometimes it looks at me even when Im not looking at it. It mumbles stuff in my ear 2. lmao I thought that was normal cuz its like a person right? Or am I wrong?”
U’s casual revelation sparked a heated discussion that lasted nearly a week. Is this genuine skin? Is it a real person? Is it grown in a lab? How does Lusus source it? Why does it respond to stimuli if it isn’t attached to a nervous system? We had so many questions and no answers—we only knew Lusus through our shrinks, who were preternaturally tight-lipped (no pun intended).
This gradually devolved into experimentation, which wasn’t covered by our warranty. H, who was cavalier when it came to these things, had recorded a video of his “dissection” of Mary. He sent it to us in four separate emails since the Protonmail attachment size limit is stupidly low.
At the time of recording, Mary was so badly charred that it would be difficult to tell she used to be half of a face without prior context. Her skin was shriveled and cold, scar tissue layered over scar tissue, fragile and gummy. Ruby red blisters lacerated her cheek, forehead, and chin, her features flat as paper due to the lack of a skull or jaw, with her nose recessed into the rest of her face like an eroded mountain. Her eye was removed by H at point (he fed it to his grandpa as a “prank”). Her lips were parted slightly, and from what I could tell, the inside of her cheek was his favorite place to stub out his cigarettes. I don’t wanna go into why.
Still, she was alive—as alive as flesh could be in that state.
H had his phone in one hand and an X-Acto knife in the other. He started by lightly tracing her skin with the blade edge. This warranted no reply from Mary (as expected). Even cutting up her lips and shoving the knife into her eye socket was met with silence, which he commented on with delight.
“Do y’all think this is sus? Am I being sussy?” He asked aloud, voice thick with phlegm and dip tobacco.
This continued for some time until he accidentally hit the side of the paneling with the blade while he was carving into her forehead. That was a mistake.
A shriek. The blood-soaked gurgling that came from Mary sounded like the death throes of some chthonic creature that lived and died before man was man. Despite possessing no visible vocal chords or a functioning throat, she could somehow smack her slippery flesh together to make noise, and H was so caught off-guard that he nearly dropped the X-Acto onto the floor.
I didn’t watch the last attachment, since by then I was getting kind of nauseous. From what I understood, after cutting her up like a pan of brownies, it was discovered that the flesh and blood beneath her skin was “integrated into the wiring”. H couldn’t figure out how to strip Mary from the steel backing.
Not too long after, S gave us some bad news.
“It came to my attention from another participant that, out of curiosity following H’s recording, U attempted to open up the BLS paneling that keeps the Lususkin alive. I am told that he has now been terminated from the trial and his body has been taken into custody. From what I understand, the paneling reacts very strongly to the presence of organic material, and tried to subsume U into the biomechanical components that it’s comprised of.
Stay safe, all!”
After that, things were quiet. I didn’t check on my back for a few days, but I had no urge to pick. I kept thinking about Mary, and K’s rows of eyes.
During my next in-person visit to Dr. Willis, I tried to gently confide in my worries regarding Lususkin and what exactly we were getting into.
He completely avoided the topic; instead, he scolded me for talking to the trial’s participants, which to be fair was something I had revealed on accident while explaining my thought process. “clovenhoofclub, are you serious? You cannot discuss this with others participants. If I hear about this again, I’m going to have to dismiss you from the trial and reclaim the skin Lusus so generously donated to us. Do you understand?”
I did. I didn’t want to, but I did.
That evening, when I got home, I continued my ritual. I couldn’t help it. I needed release. I took out my back from under my bed and unwrapped it. It wasn’t dead yet. It had no eyes to judge me with, no lips to tell me how fucked up I was for enjoying this. I put my weight onto it, my fingers curling themselves deep into the gnarled, pitted folds of ruddy flesh covering the rhomboids and trapezius muscles. I inhaled the sickly pungency of the half-healed abscesses and cyst plugs, overflowing with pus that dripped from every pore. I was at peace. I forgot how right this felt. I rested my cheek against its right shoulder, my tongue flicking over its bleeding wounds. Half my face was coated with wet, sticky redness. With one ear buried into it, I could hear the weak and distant pulse of the skin. And as my fingers continued meandering around, digging themselves deeper and deeper, always testing the pliability of the epidermis, I felt the vertebrae for the first time. Something it wasn’t supposed to have. Like finding a pig eye in your sausage.
It’s living for real, I thought. It’s living, it’s a living being, and it knows who I am.
In the end, I still got off. But I felt so dirty and I didn’t know what to do. So I ended up just doing what any normal person does, and I discarded the rest of the Lususkin nutrient pills, wrapped the skin up in thick layers of plastic wrap and canvas fabric, threw it in some layers of garbage bags, and put it back under my bed.
I starved it, I guess.
It’s been a week since then. I need to go see Dr. Willis and tell him what happened; I can tell it’s really starting to decay. I can’t let my landlord get suspicious about the smell.
AND GOOD LORD I NEED IT AGAIN. I NEED IT.
But before I head out, is anyone here in the market for skin?