I recently signed up to a writing app that provides inspiration to get you writing. It will provide you with a prompt, which could be a picture, a sentence, a scenario or even a single word. Today’s word is ‘skin’. I wrote the below on the train home from attending a comedy show. I’m not sure the comedy inspired this piece!

I touched the dry, cracked, lizard-like scales of her face. She was so dehydrated it was like her skin had metamorphosed, creating a chitinous barrier to protect against the scarifying desert air. It looked and felt like dragonfly wings and disintegrated with the slightest pressure. I brushed the back of my hand so lightly against her cheek that I could barely feel the texture against the tiny hairs that had risen to attention on my skin, yet the top iridescent layer sloughed away in its wake.

The underneath was reminiscent of oak leaves in Autumn, after they have fallen from their tree; brown, crisp and easily crushed into dust. She must have been lying here for hundreds of years, hands bound in a prayer position with a strip of hide, the flesh of her arms shrink-wrapped to her bones – all moisture and fat dissipated or dissolved.

Her hair, in contrast, looked shiny, thick and healthy, copper and ebony streaks shot through with chestnut, and curling softly past her knees. It was like all the vitality had been leached from her body into her roots, which had remained active, growing even in death. It made me think of the Rapunzel fairy tale, and whether her hair would have continued to grow as quickly after her death as it had in life, slowly drowning the world in her crowning glory.

I looked back at the woman’s face, into black eyes that seemed to glitter in my torchlight, and realised, with a jolt of panic that flowed from the top of my head down to my fingers and toes in pins and needles like an electric shock, that they had been closed when I had first walked into the tomb.

Sick panic radiated from my heart through my chest as with a splintering crack her jaw dropped, exposing teeth that were originally blackened, broken stumps. Now they were elongating, growing into thin, sharp points.

I tried to run, to fall backwards, to scream, to breathe, to live… but I felt frozen, blood pounding through my ears, my eyes… my mouth sandpapery and arid.

Black spots crawled across my vision, the pounding in my ears morphing into ringing and I realised I was close to fainting…