Shelley jolted shrieking awake with her night terrors. Simon had become used to it as a regular part of their sleeping schedule, and he pulled her close, the heat from him warming her clammy skin. She never woke up entirely, but murmured about falling from a great height. Always falling. The one time she woke up enough to sense, she cried about falling alone.
Elsewise she never remembered the dream, and they knew it as the falling dream only because of Simon’s morning reports.
A couple months after Simon turned 8, he got a skin infection. After various visits to the doctor, they found a dollar bill embedded between his epidermis and dermis. Much was made about where it came from, whether it was abuse from his parents, bullying from the schoolyard, or self-abuse, but the dollar was removed and the wound quickly healed.
Then the second bill appeared. A similar patch of infection irritated Simon awake one night, and another round of visits and paranoia ensued. Simon’s own fear and befuddlement was misapprehended as cover for the responsible party. Rumors circulated the family and few school administrators involved.
But when the third bill, and then the fourth, appeared, Simon learned to stop telling people about it, and the adults and his classmates, for their part, learned to stop looking at his condition.
They came irregularly, and never more than two at a time. They came from different parts of his skin, the first from his forearm, the second from under his left nipple, then his right leg, then one from the back of his neck. Sometimes they came wrapped around a finger, from the bottom of his foot, or his armpit. He learned to shave everywhere because the dollar bills would remove patches of hair if they shed from his scalp, his chin, his pubis.
As he grew older, the dollar bills diversified. He’d get fives, tens, twenties, the rare Benjamin Franklin. He shed $2 bills just as regularly as the rest, which he eventually found funny, as those were the only ones people wondered were counterfeit. The bills were genuine and marked and the signature changed with each Secretary of State. He used to keep them in a separate piggy bank from his allowance savings but eventually found they spent just as well as any other fiat. There were no repeated patterns in the currency, nothing that suggested a conduit between the source of the money and their emergence from a flaky, dry, itchy bed he would have to peel off about a dozen times per month.
The irritation, however, could sometimes be unbearable, and like a mosquito bite or a poison oak rash, would cause Simon to scratch himself to the point of bleeding; or in moments of impatience he would dig into his skin with his fingernails and tug at the bill, trying to draw it out premature to its surfacing, resulting usually in thin strips of torn green linen/cotton dangling from narrow scabs.
Thus the other children chose to keep their backs to Simon during school hours, and despite their initial excitement for potential riches, eventually avoided engaging with Simon at all.
Until high school, when he met Shelley.
Simon was always first to class, not having friends to talk to in the hallways, and was sitting in his usual back corner for third period on the first day. Shelley walked in next, the sun backlighting her auburn hair and, his adolescent loneliness quick to register, her body through her dress. But her smile was brighter still, and she sat down right next to him, and said hello.
He pulled away his forearm, where he had been scratching, but she had already seen. Shelley reached out and gently took his arm, and ran her cool, soft fingers over the flakey white, deadened skin below his elbow. He had barely time to explain when she deftly dug her nails in, like selecting a coin from a pile, and easily peeled a $100 bill from him.
His skin always felt cool and refreshed after an extraction, but now it hummed with frisson.
“You must be rich,” she said.
“Not really,” he mumbled. He forgot to hide his face because he was dazed.
She had a way with his condition. It still burned and itched, but when she treated it with her lotions, strangely bottled and in foreign languages, or when she picked off dead flakes and peeled away dead surface like dried Elmer’s glue, it felt relieving, releasing, sometimes even pleasurable. He could now control his scratching and endure the bills until they were fully surfaced and easy to remove, no longer pulled prematurely and ripped or left with stains of blood, rendering them unspendable.
They were married in the summer before college. The income from his skin rarely broke $200 a month, so she pushed him to relearn how to talk to people. Being a loner of constant self-control and needing distraction, he was able to put intense focus into web development. He still kept to himself, and people largely let him, but with Shelley he regained normalcy.
They were a fire and water couple, his skin burning hot regardless of weather, always dry, bumpy and scabrous; hers always smooth and cool to the touch, continuous and sinuous. He soaked in cold showers and stayed panting under blasting AC, she learned to live in layers and slept curled close to his radiating body like a cat near a heater.
They initially put the money from his skin into an account for their future children, but Simon turned out infertile and Shelley burnt out from social work. They learned, in their quiet and self-contained way, to live together simply, in a single bedroom casita, to sit with each other in silence on their own devices, leaning into each other in winter or lazing spread-eagle under summer heat.
They were in their late 60s before the flight. Simon’s skin condition had advanced, and it was no longer easy for him to sit still. One or two bills at a time became two or three, then three or four, and now sometimes up to five.
A friend of theirs had died from emphysema in Seattle and they had struggled to get to the airport. A particularly rough-edged and wrinkled $5 bill had been embedded in Simon’s hip for longer than normal, longer than ever before, and the edges of the patch had started to ooze. He was doing his best to keep his hands from unconsciously picking at the bandages Shelley had been redressing the last few days.
They entered the plane in disarray. She had a book on basic home nursing and he was set with an iPad full of action movies and headphones to distract him. Their neighbor, a woman on a business trip, turned her head to face the window in the same manner that most people simply looked away from Simon.
The flight attendant asked if Shelley and Simon should really be seated in the emergency row, as they were old. Simon grumbled about leg space as he shifted uncomfortably. Shelley smiled apologetically and pointed out they specifically upgraded to the seat as it was the only additional leg space they could afford.
But they had never flown before. As the plane took off and the pressure changed, the pain in his hip had becoming piercing, the usual heat flashed through his nerves like lightning. The plane rose and his moans fell unevenly from his lips. Shelley shushed and stroked his bald head, holding him, as he squirmed in his cramped seat, legs kicking out into the aisle to the dismay of the flight attendants.
“He needs medical attention?” the flight attendant came back, hovering, barely asked so much as stated.
“No no, he has a regular skin condition, don’t worry, I’ll handle it,” Shelley said, and she pulled at Simon’s hem.
They unbuckled and rose, all apologetics, Shelley calming Simon with her magic touch, a hand lightly on his hip, coming away wet. He wanted to stumble back toward the bathrooms, but the drink cart was in the aisle and the attendants all gawked. A wave of pain jerked Simon over and he clenched the back of his seat.
Shelley, trapped under the overhead bins, was bent over and near his waist anyway. She pulled up his shirt and ripped the patch away, bandages, $5 bill, and all, with a decisive tug of her hand.
Their neighbor in the window seat, next to the emergency door, saw what she believed to be a woman tearing the skin off a man’s hip, shrieked, and pulled the emergency lever.
For a moment, Simon felt the usual post-bill relief. Then he noticed Shelley wasn’t there. Then he was outside the plane, sucked through the door, and spinning briefly, saw Shelley below him, pinwheeling arms and shrieking the screams she made from her falling dreams.
Then the fog of his life was cleared, and he angled himself toward her, his only meaningful goal. And then he had her in his arms, and she was no longer pinwheeling. And then they fell, clinging together.
Her clammy skin was warming under his radiator skin. At terminal velocity, he looked into her eyes. Rather than fear, or panic, or worry, he saw contentment. He saw how she saw him that first time walking into third period. Now they were both now backlit by the sun, and still her smile was brighter. He accepted the rush of air as a bed just like their own, and curled his body around her. The wind was colder and more powerful than any AC he slept under, and it washed away the heat and irritation of his skin.
This story was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Flight.”
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