STEAL THEIR SKIN

Sarah Gailey -

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

There is original fiction in this newsletter

I don’t often write new short stories for the newsletter anymore, on account of being “so fucking tired” and “buried by deadlines.” But a couple of weeks ago, I got to write a short story on the radio, and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s after the career updates and community support links. I hope you like it. More than that, I hope you find it deeply morally instructive. (For legal purposes, we’ll consider that a joke.)

McSweeney’s Author Baseball Cards!

I have LONG been a huge fan of McSweeneys, one of the finest publications on this accursed internet. So imagine my amazement and honor at being asked to be part of their latest author baseball card pack, alongside some serious luminaries of the field!! Go check out the link to get yours and see who else is in this rad project!!!

Boredom and Propaganda 

Scholar Stephen Johnson wrote a fascinating dissertation on North Korea’s opera Sea of Blood. He also made this excellent TikTok about the role of boredom in propaganda – it changed the way I think about the current onslaught of news, all of which is designed to create a combination of dread and boredom that will ultimately make us complacent. Check it out, and then read Marina Frolova-Walker’s article on Stalin and the Art of Boredom. 

Surreal Paintings with a Scientific Flair 

Supper Club member and friend of Stone Soup Kellie M. Hazell has opened up an online art shop full of surreal paintings that draw on her backgrounds in clinical research and speculative fiction. She’s promising some great Small Business Saturday sales too, so go join her newsletter to stay updated!

Support Your Community

These days, The Digest nearly always includes links for community support and mutual aid resources. I am now asking members of the Stone Soup Supper Club to share their vetted and trusted mutual aid and support resources, so some of the things I share here going forward will be specific due to the referrals I’m getting from Supper Club members.

CLICK HERE for a round-up of more resources that will allow you to serve your community at home and around the world by getting vaccinated and helping support those who are currently in need around the world.

Negocios Infernales

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of appearing on the CBC Ottawa radio show All In A Day with stellar host Alan Neal, who was an absolute joy to chat with. We were engaging with Negocios Infernales, a writing prompt card deck created by C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez. The deck is designed to instill creative inspiration and hot damn, does it work. I, along with author Rebecca Hirsch-Garcia, pulled a card and then had twenty minutes to write in response to it.

You can listen to the radio show here.

Here is the story I wrote during that twenty minutes in response to the cards we pulled, one of which featured a grave robber and one of which featured the phrase “Skin is a coward”.

I stole his skin because my mother was hungry. If it had only been my own hunger, I would have taken his watch – a fine enough watch to be buried with, and nice enough to trade for a stale kelp loaf or a fist-sized hunk of soya. But my mother, who worked in the late trillionaire’s fulfillment warehouse until the cardboard dust in the air packed her lungs brown – who spent her bedbound days, these past few years, analyzing photos and feeding the results to an ever-growing algorithm – who birthed and nursed me and sent me to work when I was old enough to run the courier route – she was hungry. Her deep resonant cough was growing weaker. Her collarbones were the rims of calderas on her throat. She was becoming small before my eyes.

So I stole his skin to sell. It wasn’t hard. His funeral was so well-attended by so many people who did not care to grieve him. No one grieves the wealthy. They use their money to insulate themselves from anyone who might know them well enough to mourn their loss. I pretended – not that anyone was watching his coffin closely enough for pretense to be necessary – to be a lone mourner, draping myself across the open casket, sobbing real tears. I was thinking of my mother’s corrugated ribcage, that’s how I got myself to cry so honestly. I draped myself and wept for her, and I tugged the dead coward’s cowardly skin off his slack corpse. It came off easily – it was supple and cushioned by a slick layer of subcutaneous fat, like butter spread over a real wheat bun. His death had loosened it – something to do with the g-forces exerted by his vanity rocket, I guess. None of it matters – not his doomed space exploration hobby, not his wealth, not his slack muscles and closed eyes. All that matters is, I stole his skin and it will sell. For enough that I can but my mother meat, and broth, and a bag of millet. I stole his skin and if no one buys it from me, then I will simply feed it to her. She will sit up in her bed with bright eyes, and she will cough with true force and fervor, and tomorrow, we will go back to work.

**

Click here to learn more about Negocios Infernales, an incredibly inspiring project. And remember: Nobody mourns those who profit from our suffering.

If you’re a paying subscriber, come say hello in the Supper Club and share the ways you’re connecting with and supporting your local community! 

In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—Gailey