Deerskin - Robin McKinley

There were also further shapes and smells in the bins where she had first found apples and onions and potatoes that were undoubtedly other vegetables, and while she and Ash ate them, she never did know what most of them were. Some grew recognizable upon scrubbing clean, like carrots, even old wrinkly rusty-orange ones.

But there was a carrot-shaped thing that, when cut, was creamy-colored inside, and which disintegrated in the soup-bucket much more quickly than carrots, which she did not know, although the taste seemed vaguely familiar. Some things, like a long round brown root that had to stew most of a day before it was soft enough to eat, she had never met before. There were also a few bags of astonishingly dry and rot-free grains of various sizes and shapes, round or oval or folded, tiny or not so tiny, all of which she and Ash ate, although the husks of some of them caught unpleasantly in the teeth and the throat. And, best of all, there was a big rough sack of salt: salt for bread and salt for soup, salt for any and everything, lots of it, more than she could imagine using. The salt-sack made her feel rich.

They had been in their cabin for several days or perhaps several weeks when Lissar woke up one morning and thought, What is that smell? There must be something rotting in the vegetable bin after all. She would attend to it later-she wasn't going to get up yet. She curled up more snugly on her side, drawing her knees up and tucking her chin down over her crossed hands; and a breath of warm air slipped up from beneath the blankets, beneath her flannel petticoat and addressed her nose.... Oh, she thought. It isn't the vegetable bin. It's me.

Taking a bath was an arduous process. There was only the one bucket and a few bowls of varying sizes and depths to hold water. She tore another strip from the blanket that had already yielded floor-scrubbing and dish-washing and hot-bucket-of-soup-holding cloths, to wash herself with. Her clothing had ... adhered to her skin in several places where the ... wounds were the worst; and here her mind began blanking out on her again. But by then she had begun to remember what it was like to feel clean; even though that required a clearer memory of what it was like to live in her body than she usually permitted herself. She found that she wanted to feel clean again.

Grimly she soaked the crusted flannel free; sometimes she wept with pain suddenly awoken from uneasy quiescence; sometimes she gasped from the reek.

She heated the water over the fire; but she no longer let the fire burn as high and hot as she had at first, as she realized how quickly they might use up their wood-pile, and going back outdoors for more snow to melt made her shiver the worse from her ablutions with luke-warm water. Furthermore she was impatient. She had learnt to put their supper on early in the day that it might be cooked by evening; but she wanted to be clean now.

Finally she could peel her shirt off; bent over, her filthy hair tied back to keep it out of her way till its turn came, she saw her breasts for the first time in ... she did not remember, but a howling darkness sprang up from nowhere and struck her down. When she climbed to her feet again, grabbing for the table edge to support herself, she twisted her body, and one soft breast brushed against her upper arm.

And with that gentle touch she fell again, and retched with great force. There was little in her stomach to lose, but it felt as if her body were turning inside out to get away from itself; as if her flesh, her inner organs, could not bear the neighborhood of the demon that ate at her, that by exposing her body the demon became visible too.

She came to herself again slowly, taking great heaving breaths. She lay on her side, the arm beneath her stretched out in front of her; she could feel the weight of that breast against that arm, and she dared not move. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she made her other hand approach her body and ... touch it, touch her own body, stroke her own skin, as if it were some wild beast she hoped to tame, or some once-domesticated beast whom she could no longer trust. She touched her side; even after a good deal of soup and bread, each rib stood up individually from its sister, stabbing up through her skin. And I have not even a coat of fur for disguise, she thought, caressing the thin, shivering side. I have less charity for you, my own poor flesh, than I do for Ash.

Her fingers crawled upward and touched the outer curve of her breast, and the fingers paused, quaking in fear; but after a moment, despite the panic trying to break out of its shadows and seize her mind, she told her fingers, Go on. This is my body.

I reclaim my own body for myself: for my use, for my understanding, for my kindness and care. Go on. And the fingers walked cautiously on, over the curiously muscleless, faintly ridged flesh, cooler than the rest of the body, across the tender nipple, into the deep cleft between, and out onto the breast that lay limp and helpless and hardly recognizable as round, lying like a hunting trophy over her other arm.

Mine, she thought. My body. It lives on the breaths I breathe and the food I eat; the blood my heart pumps reaches all of me, into all my hidden crevices, from my scalp to my heels.

She sat up, and began slowly and dizzily to wash her body; then she mopped the floor, and hauled the dirty water outdoors, to spill it over the latrine-corner; it would be frozen by the time she brought the next bucket of dirty water out.

The private places between her legs were still sore, and some old scab cracked open and began bleeding anew. She knelt by the fire, her arms wrapped over her clean belly, and her hand holding the bloody cloth, and wept for the loss of whatever she had lost, for whatever it was that had brought her here, to a tiny one-room hut with snow lying waist-deep around it, and a too-rapidly diminishing store of wood and food, alone with her dog, and afraid of herself-afraid of the touch of her own flesh, afraid to give herself a bath, afraid to do what she wished to do; afraid to be clean, afraid to relish being clean, which would be a new, more complete reinhabiting of the bruised and humiliated body she feared and tried to ignore.

She wrapped herself in the cleanest of the blankets when she was through, and Ash came and nuzzled her, and sniffed and licked some of the bits of her that were exposed to view. Lissar stared at the sodden, streaky grey-brown heap of her clothing, and wondered if she could ever get it clean, even if she had proper soap, instead of the soft, crumbly eye-and-nose-burning stuff she had found in a small lidded bowl. There wasn't much of it, but it burnt her hands as well till it was mixed with a great deal of water, so she did not worry about this, at least, running out; though they could not eat soap. She sacrificed the biggest bowl, the shallow one she used for making bread, to put her clothing in to soak for a while.

But her bath had cleaned some window or mirror in her mind as it had cleaned her skin, and she began to have visions, sleeping and waking, that came between her and the simple time-consuming tasks that were now her life. She saw the faces of people that were no longer around her, but that she knew had once been a part of her ordinary days; and always, just out of sight, was the monster who haunted her, who still entered her dreams at night and woke her with her own screams.

Even in daylight its looming, oppressive presence was near her, just out of sight, just out of reach; she found herself looking over her shoulder for it, and not believing that it hadn't been there the second before she turned her head. She felt more vulnerable to it, whatever it was, now that her skin was clean, as if the dirt and the half-healed wounds, the sores that by some miracle were not infected, had been protection. Now that she could feel the air on her skin, she could feel her oppressor's presence more clearly too.