Microfiction Fri…err, Monday

Late post today, and there weren’t any saved up in my Drafts section…  I didn’t feel like coming up with an actual “topic,” so I took a song lyric for inspiration and threw together a flashfiction piece instead:

Someone Else’s Skin

Every movement was awkward and uncomfortable. Nothing felt right, nothing felt like it should. I stared and studied throughout my morning routine, but the face in the mirror stayed a stranger. It was close to my own, but not close enough.

More minutes, and more routine, and my clothes didn’t fit right. They hung and they clung, in all the wrong places. They were clothes for someone else…for that face I saw in the mirror.

The face that wasn’t me.

Time in the car gave more time to wonder, and to fear. Who the hell was I?

I stepped through a door, then, and strange faces smiled and called greetings. Faces I didn’t know, in a place I didn’t recognize. Dread grew and I feared I had lost everything.

The wrong face, the wrong clothes…the only thing that felt the same was me, but a me that was shrunken and hidden. I was a beaten thing, I realized, hiding from harm and danger. And from loss.

I was right, I had lost everything. Everything but me.

To wear someone else’s skin, to be someone else… Was I hiding, or had I finally surrendered? Had I finally accepted “better than nothing”?

Was I the stranger, and that stranger’s skin the real truth?

A return greeting for all those strange faces — a smile, even — and the answer began to terrify me.