Scratch

First published by Bag of Bones Press in their SKIN anthology, 2024

Later published as part of Sick Ink, my horror collection, 2025

Recommended in Ellen Datlow’s ‘Best Horror of the Year’ list, 2025

I stink of smoke and death. Jem at the cooker, stirring red sauce, points to the bathroom. Months of practice mean I manage to wash all over, hair included, before the hot water sputters off and I’m drenched in cold.

Jem has a fruity candle burning; an expensive outlay, but it does cut through the grey choke in the night’s air. The bad-meat reek from my bundled clothes. We eat our pasta in a swirl of synthetic blackberry, unable to recall what the fruits themselves taste like. Only people who can afford the right kit or forager rates get such treats now.

I start my new job in the morning, finally leaving the pyres behind. Jem and I talk about what it’ll be like in the clinic, what I’ll see and hear. She’s been a Skinner for three years – her former life as a veterinary surgeon got her straight through the door. I’ve had to work up to it. Training on the corpses in the skin-yard. Perfectly carving out shapes rendered on green-grey skin in colourful Sharpie.

I drift to sleep imagining the blade in my hand, the fine motions of my wrists. Slice, swab, slice, swab. Ignoring the wailing all around me. The wet slapping sound in the buckets. The stink of cheese-skin as it pulls away from inflamed flesh. I bring Jem’s hair to my nose, the tease of fake blackberry caught there like a happy memory.

-o-o-o-

Scratch. A disease unlike any other. From a microbe that passes between Kingdoms with the casualness of oxygen. Animal, Fungi, Plant, all affected. The slightest contact, break in skin, introduces the microorganism into the host. Nature repelling humans like never before, even as we long to be immersed in it.

For humans, it means any laceration, any graze, the finest scratch – from a beloved pet, an unseen insect, a thorned plant – lets Scratch in. Wriggling under the skin, proliferating, transforming. An annoying itch becomes a suppurating weal, becomes cold fire in the veins. Spreading through the venous system, Scratch turns the blood blue, while the skin softens, breaks down. Like an edible-mould cheese.

The only way to prevent further spread, save a limb or your life, is to carve off infected skin. It took years to perfect this, thousands of people died. Thousands more are left deformed and rotting. Now, if you get to a clinic quick enough, you’ll likely just lose some cheese-skin.

If you can afford it, you’ll get a graft, shaped to fit from the skin-yard. It’ll always feel alien, might come with hair or imperfections, but it’ll heal ok. Better than duct tape or melted plastic or old leather. Of course, if you’re a rich one in this new world – tucked away in the core of emptied cities – you’ll be able to buy SynthSkyn™. It’s a little too pink, but it heals well. That’s how you identify class in this dystopian hellhole – it’s advertised in replacement skin.

#

Halfway into my first day and I’m exhausted. I’ve only managed to skin three people for the Grafters. The shift supervisor, a creepy guy we all refer to as Fly, glares from behind his magnifying lenses.

‘Precise work, Marla, for sure.’ Fly adjusts his bottle-bottom lenses, pale eyes swimming. ‘However, you really need to speed up. I have clients filling the waiting room.’

Clients. Like we’re some fancy private hospital with fresh apple juice and clean white blankets.

I cut and carve. Replace scalpel blades. Empty the buckets. On my break, I puke twice. The stench of cheese-skin has crawled inside my nose, my mouth. Spatters of it coat my arms. I didn’t think anything could be worse than the pyres. The corpse sheds. It’s a step up in money only.

Jem joins me for a water break, tells me to try and recall a blanking scent – she brings forth the bright, talcum fragrance of roses. I try for peeled oranges, bubblegum, cherry cola. It’s been too long. The scents fade like old photos.

Fly keeps his oversized eyes on me, pointing to the nurse’s watch he wears on his leather waistcoat. I cut and carve.

A once-pretty woman with two grafts already on her face – one fuzzy with red hairs – has contracted Scratch again. Cheese-skin arcs over her eyebrow this time.

‘I feed the birds at Black Pond,” she says. “They’re so hungry, they get overly excited.’

I picture her leaning into a riot of feather and beak, scattering mouldy bread crumbs. Feeling the wildness of them all. The tenderness underneath. Risking what’s left of her own face for a connection we lost.

‘I used to have a canary,’ I say, before my scalpel starts its grim work.

The woman smiles, her tears spilling across the back of my wrist. ‘Oh, how lovely.

#

Flaytown grew up around an abandoned hospital – the perfect site for a clinic – and became a community. Sprawled out like the blue veins of Scratch. Folk came for treatment and stayed – plenty of work in a cut town. Some set up table-top stalls in trashed shop fronts. Selling everything from medicine to books, toiletries to plastic for melting. Our currency is in tickets – slips of paper in different colours. There’s also trade with food and alcohol. Foraged fruit and fungi – foragers are some of the most grafted in the new world, risking their skin for a punnet of brambles, a bag of wild mushrooms. There’s money in Nature’s wild things.

When I trade a blue ticket for toothpaste and two sour crab apples, Jem is furious. We need paracetamol, she shouts. Loose tea and the strong soap that removes the cheese-skin stink from our hair.

‘I need new smells to recall,’ I say, rolling the apple back and forth under my nose.

‘We can’t even eat those.’ Jem shakes her head.

Later, when she kisses me in bed, her mouth is filled with my mint-scoured tongue. She grins. ‘OK, I guess that wasn’t the worst call.’

#

Walking home after a second day skinning, I’m drawn to a burst of wild flowers, sprouting where an old brick wall meets concrete. Yellow and white, they make me think of boiled eggs, of sunshine among clouds. I have to be careful picking them – where there are flowers, there are bugs, and in these side alleys, rodents grown cocky with hunger. I should come back with gloves. I should leave them altogether. But it’s a special day and I picture them on our kitchen table, golden hearts filling the room with life. With the smell of childhood walks, when finding bugs was a joy.

I pull my sweatshirt sleeve over my hand. Blow on the dusty ground around the stems to discourage anything lurking unseen. I grab fast, assured. Shake the scraggly bunch. I’ll have to rinse them off when I get home, just to be sure, but I can’t stop smiling. Something pretty, something living, on a day where I filled thirty buckets with dying skin. Where I turned one man away for being too far gone for grafts.

It’s only when I turn on the kitchen tap that I see the caterpillar. Lazily furling and unfurling across the back of my hand. Soft as a breath. I freeze, discarding the flowers in the sink. I should throw the caterpillar far into the garden, squash it even. I’m mesmerised by its creamy fluff – like a catkin, a sweet rescued from under a sofa – I touch it gently and it curls into a cashew coil and my heart melts onto the tiled floor.

I leave the washed, wilting flowers on the table for Jem – she’ll be up from her nap soon – hide the caterpillar in a matchbox with a single leaf and then I head back into Flaytown.

#

There’s a woman with a stall in what used to be a music store. Everyone calls her Bric. She sells things people used to buy in charity shops. Stuff she dug from rubble and ash like treasures of old. She cleans them in a bucket of scummy water, displays them on balding velvet. A pottery cottage with climbing roses. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like frogs. A fat glass fishbowl.

Bric looks old – bony and bent as a felled bird with sprigs of white hair – but she’s actually forty-something. Time is less kind now. She lost both her kids to Scratch. They were playing in a pile of fallen leaves like troublesome puppies. Bathed and put to bed giggling. By morning, the disease had already wrecked them. This was in the time before Skinners and Grafters. When only people with money got real help. Bric didn’t have a sharp knife; she used a pruning saw, its teeth wide and brutal. She gave the boys brandy to make them sleepy. Pliant. They still screamed like butchered calves. A neighbour found Bric in the bathroom, blood-soaked. Slabs of skin – infected and healthy – all around her. In the bath, the kids looked like raw beef browning at the edges. Too far gone.

I trade a green ticket for the fishbowl. Bric wraps it in years-old newspaper; pink headlines raging about disease and bodies in streets. She doesn’t ask what I want the bowl for – there are no pet fish – she avoids small talk altogether. Her eyes are shadowy doorways leading to Hell.

#

On my fourth day, I get a child on my gurney. I look to Fly; he smirks back at me, taps the upside-down watch. The child is maybe six, maybe ten. A scrawny boy with dirty curls and achingly beautiful green eyes. He turns a yellow plastic cat over and over in his hands. Its painted face is wearing off.

On the Treatment Card, the boy is named as Digger. The ‘appropriate adult’ with him is a sister, Loren. She’s paid for the most basic Skin and Graft package. The less desirable bits from the skin-yard. Offcuts.

‘Can you show me the infection?’ I ask the boy. The yellow cat turns, turns.

‘Here, Digg, I’ll do it.’

Loren pulls up his left sleeve, reveals a swathe of cheese-skin on his inner forearm. The boy’s eyes are like a glimpse of summer grass through frost. He bites his lip until a bead of blood pops between his teeth.

‘He went scavenging when I was asleep.’ Loren’s smile is wretched. ‘There was a rat.’

I pat Digger’s hand. ‘It’s not too bad.’

I use the smile Jem helped me perfect in our bathroom mirror. It clearly needs work; Digger’s eyes flood with tears. When someone in the screened bay opposite lets out a terrible scream – bays are screened for the intimate or large-scale jobs – the boy presses his face into his sister’s chest.

‘Can you give him something?’ Loren asks.

She means the gas. I check the Treatment Card again although I know the answer. The box is unticked. Fly never makes a mistake. Loren pulls on her greasy ponytail, eyes pleading.

‘I couldn’t afford the gas. We went to a Shark to pay for cutting. The shitty graft. I used everything we had.’

I think of the Sharks, hunting in clusters around the hospital, detecting desperation as if it’s chum. They’re the lowest in a place full of low people. This woman and her brother will never be free of whichever predator they crossed.

‘I can’t.’

I tilt my head towards Fly, who is circling, flitting in and out of bays. Two Skinners recently lost their jobs when he caught them sneaking free gas to their clients. They couldn’t even find work in the skin-yard after that.

Loren nods. She’s used to disappointment. Her eyes dry up, become flinty.

‘Best get to cutting then.’

I strap Digger’s wrist as gently as I can – a sudden jerk mid-cut can be catastrophic when your blade is so close to major veins. We have a bleed kit under our tables, but if you’re reaching for that, it’s probably too late.

‘I’ll be quick, Digger,’ I say, glad his beautiful eyes are turned from me. From this ugly work.

I am quick. My scalpel blurring across his corrupted skin. His wails are dulled by his sister’s breast. She speaks into his hair. Old nursery rhymes. A long unheard pop song. The yellow cat, still now, stares with no eyes.

‘Excellent, Marla.’ I hear Fly say, and it takes everything not to slash the scalpel across his vile face.

#

Jem’s at the kitchen table, unwrapping a small loaf. Something in the oven fills the room with a meat smell that has my mouth watering.

‘What’s cooking?’

I lean in for a kiss. Jem pulls away, scrunching brown paper into a tighter and tighter ball.

‘What’s that?’ Her head tilt-jerks.

The fishbowl is on the windowsill over the sink. A twiggy branch inside, like a tiny tree. A carpet of soft leaves on the bottom. I’d laid a saucer over the opening; condensation fogs the glass. 

‘I was careful,’ I say.

‘Careful.’ Jem’s voice is hard.

I want it to be soft. I want everything to be soft, here, just for a moment. Away from blades and pain hammering into my ears, my soul.

‘It was in the flowers I got you. I wanted to see it change.’

Jem turns from the caterpillar frilling leaves, starts slicing the bread. Tension leaves her with each knife stroke. We haven’t had bread in a while. The smell is divine. Jem mouths a flake of crust, grins.

‘It’s a chicken,’ she says, her voice lighter. ‘One of those small feral ones in the old allotments.’

‘Bird and bread? Fancy.’

Jem pulls me into a hug. ‘Happy Anniversary.’

‘I only got the flowers, sorry.’

She kisses me. Soft. Perfectly soft. Later, after hot meat and warm bread, I’ll be ready for harder.

Jem looks into the fishbowl, the caterpillar curled up. ‘Not change, Marla. Metamorphosis. You got me that too.’

#

One of the best foragers for miles around Flaytown – he got the bird for our anniversary dinner – is Mishmash. He goes into all the dangerous places. Relatively safe in a protective suit made from patches of neoprene, heavy leather and more obscure materials. The name Mishmash though, that’s because of his skin – or what it’s become. 

He has something akin to old-world surgical addiction. A kind of Munchausen’s. He’s driven to replace his skin, even though it’s uninfected. He does much of the cutting himself, with Japanese knives once used for fine fishmongery. When he needs assistance, such as to add to his backpiece, Mishmash calls on Jem.

When he arrives that morning – crack of dawn, orange-streak sky behind him – he looks bad. Sick. I help him to the kitchen and Jem grabs her cut kit. Mishmash is six-two, all stripped-back muscle and legs, but he drops like a sleepy child onto the chair. The remains of his own skin are grey and clammy. Long dark hair is sweat-stuck to the plastic grafts on his shoulders.

‘Mish, what the fuck?’ Jem brings him water, presses her hand against a band of real skin on his forehead.

‘Scratch got me. Maybe something else too.’ Mishmash’s deep voice judders.

He’s only had the disease twice, despite being a forager. His protective suit is that good. He tells how he once came upon a freshly crashed police car, found a stack of stab vests in the boot. Carbon fibre, seriously badass.  

Scratch has him now, though. Judging by the fever pulsing off him, filling the kitchen with sour heat, another bug got in too. Old school bacteria.

‘Where?’ Jem’s pulling on surgical gloves.

Mishmash removes his right hand from his pocket. Cheese-skin glistens down the outer three fingers, spreads just beyond the wrist.

‘I thought you wore tactical gloves?’ I say.

‘I do. Always.’ The big man’s head droops. ‘I just had to touch it.’

Jem explores the infected area, feeling for the tension of viable skin alongside the rotting. Mishmash doesn’t react – pain is a constant for him, a desired friend. A reminder he has some control in a world of chaos.

‘What did you touch?’ My voice is croaky. I look at the fishbowl filled with steamy green.

Mishmash smiles. It’s a gruesome thing on his face – a patchwork of colour and texture – but tender too.

‘There’s a colony in Concert Park. It’s a wilderness now, they can stay hidden. I knew he was following me; I just knew.

‘I threw some dried rabbit, sat in the long grass. When he came out, I took my glove off. He was dirty but so soft.’

‘Damn Mish.’ Jem hands him more water. Checks his pulse.

‘He didn’t mean to hurt me, I’m sure of that. He got spooked. Feral dogs around there too. Mean bastards. My hand was buried in his fur, so thick and warm, like a blanket. He was purring, whole body vibrating up through my arm, into my chest.

I’ve never known peace like it.’

I lay my hand on the big man’s shoulder; hope he can feel my touch through all the grafts.

Jem clears her throat. ‘Marla, take some tickets from my wallet and go see The Chemist.’

Mishmash growls. ‘I don’t need painkillers.’

Jem squeezes his healthy hand. ‘We need the fever down before I cut. Antibiotics too for whatever’s causing it.’

Mishmash nods, defeated. His eyes wet and lost in his remade face. ‘He didn’t mean to, I’m sure of that.’

#

The Chemist works a stall behind the hospital, deep in the shade of shaggy ornamental trees. He was a gardener once, pruning and deadheading the grounds of a stately home. Now he makes and sells pills and potions. Teas and snorting powders. Phytochemistry. The plant world flourishing now, he pays foragers to source ingredients. Pays them well. People want oblivion more than ever and The Chemist provides it. There’s always a queue at his stall.

I stand three back from the cluttered table, watch him work. He packs a handful of dried mushrooms in paper for a twitchy woman with grey-blond hair to her waist. I think about how Jem was once that woman. Seeking oblivion in the musky, muddy taste of fungal tea. In a way, it’s how we met.

-o-o-o-

Jem had a real taste for it at one time, the fungal tea. Spending tickets, trading food, then meds she appropriated from the hospital. Craving the psychedelic freedom, the out of body, out of world moments. She was high at work one day, seeing colours swirling as she cut cheese-skin from a teenage boy’s palm. The scalpel seemed to shimmer in her hand before slipping in rotten blood, slicing clean through the boy’s pinky finger, just below the second knuckle. Blood roared across her table.

It was only her veterinary training, the sight of blood scattering the remains of the fungal high, that saved the boy’s hand. Jem tore open the bleed kit, had the wound sutured in no time. When the Grafter arrived with his perfectly sized and prepared corpse skin, Jem was dousing the repaired wound in iodine. The severed finger was pushed deep in the cheese-skin bucket.

I doubt Fly considered punishing her – Jem was his best Skinner. Her name synonymous with quality work, drew clients like ants to sugar. It helped that the teenage boy had paid for triple gas, was higher than Jem as it all unfolded. He was easily convinced there’d been evidence of Scratch on his pinky – excision impossible, amputation the only option.

Jem quit the tea that day. Instead of drinking on her breaks, she’d join a group of Skinners and Grafters by the old morgue doors. They would share a vape, pass it round like a joint at a festival. Maybe two or three puffs each. A tiny buzz shared.

That’s where I first saw her. Her face resolving from a fine mist of sickly vanilla. Plump cheeks bitten pink by cold air. Perfect smile. I was pulling a trolley from the skin-yard – piled with skinned body parts, rejected grafts – headed for the pyres. I was filthy. Her friends grimaced, turned away, puffed. Jem stared and smiled. I pulled down my face scarf, smiled back.

Later, I’d find that sickly vanilla on her lips and it would taste like ice-cream.

-o-o-o-

Mishmash sleeps on our sofa, legs hooked over the end, blankets pulled to his chin. In the morning, I crush chalky pills with green-tinged powder, stir it into a glass of warm cola. Mishmash sits up, thanks me, drinks fast. It’s the fourth dose of The Chemist’s concoction – Mishmash seems less feverish, a pink flush in his real skin. Jem checks him, nods.

‘We’re good to go.’

Mishmash lies down again, his hand splayed on a pad of towels.

‘Take the lot, Jemima.’ Mish’s voice is stronger, deep as a TV villain.

‘Don’t be daft. You know I’m good. Marla will measure for the graft.’

‘Take the lot,’ he says again. ‘No messing about.’

‘You’re talking about degloving,’ Jem says, tension prickling in her throat.

Mishmash points to his backpack, the foraging gloves in a front pocket.

‘There’s your graft. Stitch one to the wrist. Then I’ll never take it off again.’

I stare at the fishbowl. We brought it into the shade of the living room. The leaves are now pale skeletons, devoid of succulent flesh. Among them is the chrysalis – different than I pictured, darker, more robust – protecting the life inside. It could already be changing, a molecule at a time, soft bristles vanishing, soft skin hardening.

Jem’s voice breaks my reverie. It’s hardened too. Her no-nonsense work voice. The one once used on disobedient dogs.

‘Get more towels please, Marla. Boil some water.’

‘We delivering a baby?’ I say in a ropey attempt at levity.

Mishmash laughs though, even when Jem cuts into the healthy skin of his wrist and forearm. Blood soaks the towels. He chuckles periodically until Jem starts to peel his hand away. Then he shudders on the couch. The wet-tearing sound is awful. Mishmash groans, deep in his chest. His eyes roll white. Jem is working the finger skins free one by one. I grab the fishbowl, hold it in front of the tormented man’s face.

‘Look, Mish. Look at this.’

His eyes open-close, open-close. Then they focus on the bowl, become still. Jem presses towels over Mishmash’s brutalised hand, reaches for the foraging glove.

‘Look inside, Mish,’ I say, tears in my voice. ‘I had to touch too. Something soft, real. It’s changing now. Into something new, beautiful.’

Jem is suturing, curved needle gripped in pliers, flashing over and over. Bright blood freckles her face. Mishmash smiles, his fingers trace the contours of the bowl.

‘It’s called metamorphosising,’ he says.

I smile, shaking my head. ‘Great, another smart arse.’

We stay like that, both holding the bowl, until Jem finishes and Mishmash flexes his new glove-skin hand and shows how he can already lift his mug of tea with it.

#

I’ve been a Skinner for a month. I’ve cut on people knocked out by gas and those wailing in anguish. I’ve learned to switch off everything but the blade. The precise cuts, the tilt and flense. Handing over my ergonomic chair to the Grafter, my senses flood again. The slop-slap of the cheese-skin in the bucket returns. I lean into a recalled scent of sour apple, give my completed Treatment Cards to Fly. You’re on a trajectory for sure, Marla. Clients ask for you.

What a thing to be. A coveted cutter. A sought-after Skinner. What a thing.

Jem and I bring home more tickets than we ever imagined. We buy bread every few days. We pay Mishmash to bring us enough brambles for a pie – he’s removed his left eye, a pink melted-plastic patch in its place.

We buy a book full of sketches of butterflies and moths from Timbo the bookseller. Try to figure out what might be waking in the fishbowl, while longing to be surprised.

#

I get home after a long, challenging cut. A full infected leg; I’d had to carve off grossly deformed tattoos of a koi carp and a Geisha woman with unlikely breasts. My lower back aches and I’m ready for the rabbit stew Jem promised to make for dinner.

The kitchen doesn’t smell of cooking, though. I find Jem in the living room, kneeling on the floor among broken glass. I drop down beside her.

‘What happened?’

Jem’s hands are pressed to her chalk-white cheeks. Thick, curved chunks of glass surround her.

‘Where is it?’ I search the ceiling with darting eyes. The shadowy spaces under shelves. The paper ball light. ‘Jem?’

She moves her blotchy hands to my face and I see what she was covering. On the apple of her left cheek. Red-pink, like cold air pinched it. The slightest abrasion. Tiny blue veins like insect legs reaching for her eye.

‘How?’

Jem kisses me, her lips dry. ‘It wasn’t a butterfly, Marla.’

#

Everyone changes at the end of a world. Changes or dies. Bric was a loving mother who became a shell. A joyful, intelligent woman who now sells things people used to call tatt. The Chemist once tended the soil, knew its composition from the texture and smell. Now he stays removed from the growth, the roots. Pounding berries to syrup, leaf buds to mash. Dancing across the line between toxic and healing.

Mishmash was always a loner. A survivalist, a man people avoided. He was almost made for the new world. Then remade in its image: battered, grim, just slices of humanity in all the ruin. 

Jem was a functioning addict. A kindly, experienced veterinarian with a pill habit. A woman with a husband and a nice house on a posh street. If you ask her, she’ll say she didn’t change so much as reveal her true self when the world went to shit.

Then there’s me. Thing is, I was always hard. Spiky, jagged edge. Childhood pain distilled to hot rage. The biggest change for me? When I cut now, I don’t want to hurt them. When I cut now, I’m sorry for the pain.

#

The graft is ready, glistening in a bowl of saline. My inner thigh screeches in pain under a thick dressing. Allografts aren’t recommended anymore – the risk of infection is high, antibiotics aren’t always available, don’t always work. Donors often end up more cut on, more deformed than the recipient. Jem wouldn’t go to the clinic though, and I wouldn’t see her lose any more of herself.

So, I handed a couple of orange tickets to The Chemist. He’d grinned, said you and that hot girl of yours are good business at the mo. I bought a stinky salve that “promotes healing” for myself. A gritty powder with “analgesic properties” for Jem. Better than any gas, The Chemist assured me. Happy cutting.

Back in the kitchen, the beetle is still trapped inside an upturned glass. It had made it to the back door, hidden in a tumbleweed of fluff and dust. No less scared than Jem after she peered inside the fishbowl – the pupal case split open – desperate for the first glimpse of a mystery butterfly. Instead, she found a thumbnail-size insect looking to escape.

It is beautiful though – the colours remind me of a calico cat. I slide an old pub coaster under the glass; the beetle skitters in panic. I wrap duct tape, secure it for later. After dinner, I’ll return it to the alley where I found the egg-coloured flowers.

Jem is on the small bed in our spare room. Prone on an old sheet, a pillow wrapped in a bin bag. Her left cheek is covered in a greyish crust – The Chemist’s powder mixed with warm water, applied like a poultice. I scrape it off, uncovering the patch of cheese-skin, blue veins strident.

Jem squeezes my hand, kisses my knuckles. The hazy sunlight veils her face like vanilla vape. She gives me that smile, that perfect smile that once made me lower my face mask. Lower my guard.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ I whisper, stroking her healthy cheek. Warm, plump apple.

She kisses me hard. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone else to.’

I reach for the scalpel, already sure of where to start.

‘Remember,’ Jem says, swallowing tears. ‘When you suture – small bites, with confidence.’

‘I’m going to scar you.’ The scalpel blade rests against Jem’s skin. Thrumming. 

‘This is my metamorphosis, Marla. I get to have something of you with me, forever. It will be a beautiful scar.’

I cut and carve. I switch everything off but the blade and memories of Jem’s perfect smile. I’m quick. Fly would be impressed.

#

Later, we’ll get more books from Timbo, find out that the larvae of Dermestidae – skin beetles – are called woolly bears. That they’re often mistaken for caterpillars.

Later, we’ll give Bric a green ticket and take home a glass paperweight with a Painted Lady butterfly inside. Jem will press the cool surface to her itchy cheek; imagine how soft the gold-dust wings would be on our shared skin.

If you liked Scratch and would like to read more of my horror writing – my collection Sick Ink is available HERE

Bag of Bones’ excellent charity anthology, SKIN is available HERE