Free Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories by Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Tremblay, Mercedes M. Yardley, Richard Thomas, Damien Angelica Walters, Kevin Lucia Page B

Bleached. Painted. Kept. Valued. Destroyed.
    Remembered.
    Taken.
    Oh, yes, they can be taken. While the victim still hangs on them, a skinsack of meat. Veins still connect, blood still carries oxygen back and forth like it’s a precious thing, and at that point it still is.
    That’s when their beauty becomes something real. When bone is exposed to the air for the first time, and the marrow gasps as it breathes in deep. The rest of it, the tissue, gristle, and muscle is pulled away, and the skeleton is allowed to be free.
    That’s the part Michael Harrison liked the best. Peeling away the stinking red refuse and letting the white parts glitter and shine through. It’s the most awe-inspiring kind of birth, the most natural. Give all of us time and nature will do it for us. But sometimes nature needs a push.
    ***
    Nikilie was a strong, beautiful thing. She suffered from pain that pressed behind her eyes like delphiniums, but she still got out of bed and moved around the world as living things do. Her tongue was red and her eyes the warmest of browns. Eyes you could fall into, dark skin smooth as butter. It invited the unwanted stares and hands of men and women everywhere she went. At least it used to, until she started taking razor blades and serrated knives to her body in the dim quiet of her bathroom.
    “You’re so lovely, Nikilie,” friends told her. She cut and sawed at the skin on her thigh, leaving tight, slim lines beaded with blood. Jewels on the skin of a goddess. That was beauty. That was purity, right there.
    “Baby, come here.” Cat calls on the street and lascivious glances turned into something genteel, something finer under her blade.
    “I want you,” her boss told her behind his office door. He was one of many, simply another person abusing authority. His hand slid up and under her shirt. “A gorgeous woman such as yourself should never be lonely.”
    “I never am,” she replied, but her whispers disappeared under the sound of fabric ripping, her favorite top turned into rags. Her words, though, shone as she carved them into her skin in the silence of night.
    Never lonely. Never. Never never never.
    Fabric can be rent, and so can skin, but at least she made the choice this time. Pried under the coating. Saw what lay underneath.
    She wasn’t simply her face or her skin or the smooth Island accent of her words. She was herself. Nikilie. She was what ran under her skin, not merely the features built out of it. She wanted somebody who would love her from the inside out.
    The first time Michael saw Nikilie, he stopped and stared at the aggressive way her skull pressed against the paper-thin skin of her face. She pursed her lips and worked her jaw, the bones moving in such a way that Michael had to stifle a groan.
    “What is your name?” he asked her. She sat on the hard, plastic seat of the subway, an exotic flower growing from the cracks in the pavement. He stood next to her, holding loosely to the straps above.
    “Trudi,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
    “I don’t blame you for lying. I’m a stranger on the subway. My intentions may not be honorable.”
    Her eyes flicked up, then, warm and wet. He saw moss and flowers and lovely things growing in their humidity. A tropical paradise.
    “You’re not from New York,” he said, and then blushed.
    This made her laugh, and she scratched at her wrist. It always itched.
    “No, I’m not. But you are. And yet you’re easily embarrassed. How can this be?”
    He shrugged, grinning, and she smiled back. Beautiful white teeth, strong, and one overlapped the other just a bit. Perfection.
    He wanted to run his fingers across them. He wished to wear them as pearls.
    “I’m awkward,” he said, and lifted his shoulders again. A what can I do? gesture. The self-realization of a different man. “I say what I think instead of saying what I should. I don’t mean to make people uncomfortable. I just do. I’m no good at small talk.”
    “Why is that? If