Skin In Cursive Novels & Stories

He caught himself bracing his palm on the desk hard enough to feel the grain bite into his skin. He dragged the glove off with his teeth, spitting it onto the table without meaning to. His bare fingers looked wrong—too human, too vulnerable. The scar at his brow throbbed again as if the stress had reawakened it, and when he rubbed at it his skin snagged under his nail. He dipped the quill. Ink gathered on the nib—thick, glossy, black as spilled blood-wine. A single drop fell too early and splattered on the parchment like a wound.

He turned slightly, exposing his back and ribs, and pointed before taking my hand and placing it. Faint slits lined each side of his torso, almost undetectable unless you looked for them. Kairos's skin was covered in faint tattoo-like patterns that did not appear to be ink. When exposed to light, they shimmered subtly. Some were symbols, others resembled a flowing script that I could not decipher, and his gills were hidden beneath them.

My eyes moved to the word beneath it. Italic script. The letters leaning into each other with the compressed elegance of a font chosen by someone who understood that how you wrote your name was its own kind of statement. C — r — o — w — e. Five letters. The first one tall. The r and o pressed close in the italic lean. The w that had read like two letters in my sketch because in italics it nearly was. The e at the end with its curved base. Crowe. My notebook sketch was right.

I loved how I was feeling because that meant that the viewers would also feel this way and I would get very high traffic from this movie. The next move was an O, which was the same arch as the C but it was not half. She would able to compete the full arc and she cried out loud. She didn't stop. She did another half arc to form the next C and at this point, I could tell that she was barely hanging onto athread because her face was flushed and looked like she was about to burst out. She was also looking very red and combustible. Spencer started massaging her back, using his thumb to rub on the area close to her ass and she continued moving, till she got to N.

As the ashes on the floor began to rearrange themselves, Ryan, Beck, and Josh watched in awe and disbelief. The letters formed a font that seemed to glow with an otherworldly light, as if imbued with ancient magic. The letters were sharp and angular, with intricate curves and loops that seemed to flow like a river of silver. Each character was etched in a delicate script, with lines so thin they were almost imperceptible. The font seemed to be alive, pulsing with an energy that emanated from the very heart of the script.

I opened it, and my stomach did a slow, sick flip. The handwriting was a nightmare. It was a cramped, cursive script, full of loops and slanted lines that looked more like barbed wire than letters. To my eyes, it was a moving target. The words didn't just sit there, they vibrated, the "f"s and "s"s tangling together until the page looked like a map of a forest I’d never find my way out of. Disbursement... Asset Recovery... I tried to type the first entry, but my hand cramped. The letters on the screen didn't match the movements of my fingers. I deleted the line. Then I deleted it again.

Hi, everyone! This is Curvy Writes, and first things first: I need to take a deep, dramatic bow and then just collapse on the nearest couch. Because, people, we did it! I just want to say a massive, soul-hugging, confetti-tossing THANK YOU to every single one of you who has been reading my short story, "In Her Skin." Seriously, from the bottom of my slightly exhausted but extremely grateful heart, thank you. You guys have been the absolute best audience a writer could ask for.

“And neither are you, and it’s because you didn’t want to listen to people who told you what to do.” He groans and pulls out a pen from his pocket. “I don’t have paper.” “That’s fine.” I uncap the pen and hold up my forearm against the wall. “You’re not going to put those things on your skin?” “Relax.” I copy the shape of the first one, but instead of drawing the X shape perfectly, I create it as hash marks with gaps in the middle. I show Cassian what I’ve done. “See?” “Okay,” he says. “Very clever.” But he looks more deeply uncomfortable than I’ve seen him since we got here—since I met him, really.

"Last time you'd brushed against it. Now it's in your skin like smoke in a curtain. Sit down before you fall down, boy, you look like a man who's been sleeping in shifts." I sit. Arguing with her has the same success rate as arguing with weather. "I need you to look at something please." I put the paper on the table. Drew it myself on paper, twice, because she doesn't read curses off what she calls a lightbox, and those of us who occupy the twenty-first century refer to as a phone. The nested lines went down wrong both times, like the shape resists being copied. "She carves it where she takes them. We've found four now. Three old, one fresh."