A. A. Balaskovits, a white woman with long blue hair and purple glasses, looks into the camera. She's standing in a park-like setting. — A. A. Balaskovits

Web and Media Editor Bess Winter: In this chilling Shirley Jackson-like fable, A. A. Balaskovits gives us a glimpse into collective cruelty and our age-old fear of, and fascination with, difference.

A Village Tries On Her Skin

The selkie woman shivers, naked and shamed, in the fountain the villagers tossed her in. It was erected years ago to honor the manner in which General So-and-So used to thrust the sharp end of his bayonet into their neighbors’ guts and waggle it about. She cares nothing for their monuments or victories; she only wants the stolen returned.

She splashes, wearing human skin, ugly and sad. They have taken her good skin. Her true skin. The soft, warm, blubbery elastic of a seal’s fur. She was born with it. It fit her so well: how she would sluice through water, as though she’d been born to waves. Her skin belongs to them now, the people of this town, through the ancient human practice of “no-take-backsies.” They held her down, even as she screamed, and peeled the flesh off as though she were an orange.

The crowd is large; all of them want to give her skin a go. They try her on over themselves, like a pair of trousers, one leg at a time. The skin is smooth and slippery, and stretches nicely over protruding belly or heavy breast, bony ankles and sharp elbows, all manner of chins. It always fits, even if it must be torn. When they wear her, they loudly imagine themselves of the sea, how they would swim through currents without resistance. How they could hold their breath for long minutes and hours, centuries. How they could travel down into the depths and claim that which is unclaimed. The skin of her eye sockets sags.

She reaches with shaking, unfamiliar fingers, but those human digits cannot reach as far as her desire.

They pass her skin from one hand to another. A lesson for the wide-eyed children present: Good people share among themselves. They smile at her with her cracked and red lips as she keens and kicks unfamiliar feet. They waggle their fingers through the holes they created in the thighs with the sharp nails of their human toes, imagining what it would be like to be her. They make faces at her with her face.

She falls backward, splashing. From her throat, she yelps in a language the village does not understand, even when they wear her ears.

A girl, far too young to wear the skin of a seal, watches the fingers of the selkie reach out again and again. She, a child, does what children do, and extends her own fingers, so they might meet. The mother is quick; no creature is faster. Fear raises her pitch to a sharp note. She screeches, “Don’t touch it!” and swats her babe’s hand away.

A. A. Balaskovits is the author of Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet (SFWP, 2021) and Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP, 2017). Her work has been featured in The Kenyon Review, The Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. aabalaskovits.com.