Saturday 15 June 2024

'Tommy Was Six Weeks Old When He Shed His First Skin' by Katie Holloway

Turning to Tommy’s Moses basket at the 3am mewl, my mind’s eye flickered between reality and the dream he’d hauled me from. I slid my hand into his shoulder-poppered sleeping bag, the velour at the neck stiff with dried milk sick. As I pulled him out, that first skin stayed behind.

Wrinkled at the knees and elbows, puckered with cradle cap, that husk was surprisingly inflexible. I inspected it as he fed, suckling with his pink mushroom lips, cheeks full and smooth as my life had been. When he was asleep again, tongue clicking against nothing but the roof of his mouth, I slid him back and stashed his shed shape. I wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in a jiffy bag at the bottom of my wardrobe.

At seven months, grinning and dribbling, Tommy crawled right out of that next skin while I ran his bath. This one was thicker and, when I held it next to the first that evening, impossibly large. I hid it inside a maternity dress and stowed it in the attic.

By the time I was preparing to return to work, Tommy stepped out of his third skin after his nap one afternoon. I wondered if it was time to tell somebody. That health visitor with all the pamphlets, perhaps? My mother-in-law with her artillery of supplements? Ed, with his SLR camera? But then he giggled at Bruno and chanted ‘dog!’ so gleefully that the thought slipped my mind as easily as he’d slipped those skins. I folded it up inside his first shoebox and kept it, mine.




Katie Holloway has never been able to help being a writer. She has a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and after accidentally taking a decade-long break from writing, discovered flash fiction in 2021. Since then, she’s been shortlisted in the 2024 Bath novella-in-flash award, won the 2023 Retreat West flash fiction prize, has received a DYCP grant from the Arts Council England, and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best Small Fictions. Her stories appear in Popshot Quarterly, The Phare, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Press and more. Katie tweets @KatieLHWrites

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