I’ve been terribly busy this week so I hope you’ll all forgive me for copying and pasting this post, which I published on November 30th, last year, shortly after starting this blog.
Love The Skin You’re In
by H.Richer.
“I like to eat dead skin. I tear it or cut it off the soles of my feet, my fingers. I pull away scabs and grow new ones.
My dead skin has a chewiness to it, like rubber, gum, boiled snails. Or maybe more like the pigs ears I give my dogs to chew. My skin doesn’t taste of raw hide. It must taste of me.
I can nibble and chew at a fleck of skin, it’s that tough and there’s always plenty more. Not much is free in life. That’s why Hannibal became a cannibal, he liked to chew.
But, I get carried away. I pull too fast, too far and strip the dead skin right off my living flesh, very pink flesh, a deep orange pink. I cut, slice and chew with too much zeal, slice down to blood.
Fingers and feet bleed a lot and take a long time to heal.”
A piece of flash fiction, also known as short short fiction, can come to me in a sudden burst, like Love The Skin You’re In, but more often it takes a lot of work and therefore time.
The amount of time and effort required for the creation of a piece of writing, especially in the case of a novel, is rarely appreciated by the non-writer. If fiction writers were paid by the hour, we wouldn’t earn more than sweatshop workers.
Conclusion? It’s a mug’s game, but there’s nothing else I can do that makes me happy.
