Kellina Moore

Skinless

Excerpt

I have never been good at hooking up with strangers unless I’m drunk. Even then, it only goes as far as making out before the string of alarm in my belly is plucked and I pull away. I have always been a great expert at pulling away: my first chance at a kiss in high school arrived when a boy I liked came to see the play I was in and leaned down to kiss me up against the brick pillar in the hall outside the auditorium and instinctively I pulled him in for a hug. It was the first time I felt what is now so familiar to me, the impulse to dart away like a frightened deer from someone looking at me too closely. And dart I did, thirteen-year-old knobby deer knees wobbling as I walked away from him and sobbed off all my stage makeup, mascara in rivulets down my face. I told everyone I was sad about the show closing, and there were so many other melodramatic freshmen tearing up around me that I managed to blend in. But really, I was crying because I couldn’t figure out why I had turned his head away from mine.   

The second time I was almost kissed was at Junior Prom, after slow dancing to Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” My date, his hair spiked straight up with greasy gel, sang all the words in my ear, out of tune. When Lauper’s whine and his receded, I moved from his arms, but he held fast to my elbows. Then he moved his hands up to my head, pulled me in so forcefully and without consideration that he misjudged his aim and planted two wet lips on my cheek.   

I leaned away; he leaned forward.

I leaned further away; he leaned farther forward. 

This went on until we had tilted our gravity too far and I crashed like a tree to the gymnasium floor and he collapsed on top of me. A circle cleared around us of our teachers and peers looking at us twisted up on the floor, a pile of ashamed limbs. My date sprang up quickly, but I remember that I just laid on that sticky linoleum, unable to conjure even the possibility of movement in my head until my date hoisted me up by my armpits.  

Then, in front of everyone, after all that, he kissed me on the lips: a long, unmoving kiss. The whole time I watched from inside myself as lips pressed mine, and the thought I don’t want this floated by, but I had no hands to grasp it and turn it into action. A certain violence bloomed in the force behind the kiss, like he was punching my lips with his. I couldn’t feel anything but the fear. When he released my head from his grasp, I looked him in the eye and walked away without a word.  

These are only the first two attempts and first success at physical intimacy, if you can call it that. Of course, there would be other encounters, and of course some of them would give me even more reason to confuse desire with dread, training me a heart that was always beating too fast for the wrong reasons. But even before I had proof of the ways closeness could be used like a knife, that string of panic was always in me, like a piano wire wound too tight, waiting to snap.

O

What the girl is eating is not food. She closes her mouth around the man’s unwashed brown hair, tilts her head back to jerk a few strands from their follicles, brings the ends into her mouth with her lips like she is eating spaghetti, swallows. She and the man are sitting cross legged, facing each other on the floor of an attic drug den, which is draped with patterned sheets and multicolored moving lights. Bent down over her lap, his head is her offering. She bites again, yanks. Leaning up to look at her he sees her smiling, twirling with her fingers the hair that still dangles between her teeth. Her own hair is just a few scraggly patches of blonde, the remnants she hasn’t eaten yet. When she laughs, it’s like there are little cartoon hearts floating up from her; she laughs into the crook of the man’s neck and he laughs too. They are closer than they should be. When he tries to kiss her, she grabs him by the jaw and thrusts him away from her, down to the ground, still laughing. She is going to eat so much of him it makes her sick. 

I have wanted to watch this movie, Are We Not Cats, since it was added to the horror-focused streaming service Shudder in early 2018, but every time I went to press play, my hand would hesitate and finally click away. The description of the film, a horror/romance about two people who fall in love over their mutual compulsion for eating hair, intrigued and repulsed me. Since I watch a lot of horror, I’m quite desensitized to violence and gore, but ironically it’s the subtle gross-outs that still get my stomach churning. The sensations feel closer when they are subtler—I can’t imagine what it’s like to have my head exploded into bits, but I know the texture of a hair on my tongue, the panic of feeling something caught in my windpipe. The thought of sitting through a whole movie featuring people eating and vomiting hair daunted me.  

Finally, I found the courage to press play. The following seventy-seven minutes were some of the longest of my life, agonizingly slow. But I left feeling like those two hair-eating monsters understood something in me, that the grotesqueness of their intimacy rang true.

O

The body all twisted up, morphed, mutilated, is the defining motif of “body horror,” a subgenre of horror that is particularly concerned with the way the body can be violated. Of course, most horror involves some of these transgressions of skin, but in body horror films they take on a greater significance; the camera lingers on the wounds or the grotesque transformations. The fear here comes from the knowledge of our own fallibility, the reminder that our body can betray us at any time. In body horror, the threat is even closer than in your neighborhood, or even inside your house—it’s in your very own skin. The fear relies on intimacy: you cannot run from yourself.

Are We Not Cats utilizes a subtle form of this body horror—we are not seeing the body brought to its limits, as we do with other classic extreme body horror like the Hellraiser franchise, but we do see the body distorted by closeness, the unreal look of a hair follicle in high-definition close-up. Eli and Anya become grotesque because of their obsessions with their bodies, the physical manifestation of their psychic wounds.

This understated gore works perfectly in tandem with the romance aspect of the film. The body is horrifying for the same reasons romance is horrifying—the closeness of it, the vulnerability, the constant threat of its ability to reveal something unforgivable or unchangeable about ourselves. Being naked in front of someone new feels like I have taken off my wig to reveal the patchy hairs underneath. Admitting my need for someone feels like realizing too late that I’ve eaten their scalp clean.

About the Author

Kellina Moore is a nonfiction writer based in New York who is obsessed with horror, maximalism, and reality television.