Late Bloomer
by Georg Gerstenfeld
He tucks and folds his skin in the mirror each morning. He bought it on discount at Aldi. It was meant to mold over the old skin, advertised to shrink in the shower to vanish your unwanted former hide like a stain remover or thong underwear. But this new skin is no better, sagging askew and shifting with the weight of him. Sloughing all this flesh will hurt like a motherfucker, a pain he’s meticulously avoided all his life. But he’s just about made up his mind.
Georg Gerstenfeld has been an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine since 2014. His fiction has appeared in Invisible City and Blood & Bourbon. He studied English and German literature at Cornell University and lives in Napa Valley with his wife and their wackadoodle, Jake.
Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash
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