Ichthyosis

DECEMBER 2025, SHORT STORY, 4400 WORDS

 

When your skin peels away from your loosening flesh in coils, trailing soft, brown ribbons in its wake, your lovers swathe you in cotton-gauze and bring you to the sea.

This is how it begins.

On a searing Tuesday when the heat whorls outward from under your armpits, on the day that love slides under your entrails, on the day that everything changes, you decide to go dancing with your roommates from the New Era Ladies Hostel.

“Machan,” Thendral drawls in a ganja-induced haze. “We can’t wear these salwar kameez fucking tents, machan.”

“Wait,” you say. “I have an idea.”

“We’re going to get into a lot of trouble,” Kanika says. “We haven’t gone to any classes in a week. And who goes clubbing at two in the afternoon? We don’t even have the right clothes, and—”

A wide smile splits your face in two. “Do you trust me, chellam?”

At the childish nickname, her cheeks flame a vivid shade of red that’s almost bruise-like. “Fine, do whatever you want.”

Soon afterward, the three of you spill into a share-auto, your clothes smelling of sandalwood soap and talcum powder and expensive-seeming cologne—that you steal from the hostel warden’s room—and under it all, a faint scrim of ganja-smoke coating your skin, your collective breath.

Thendral’s hair sits atop her head in a scruffy pile. Gauges and rings constellate her ears from helix to lobe, refracting sunlight as she moves. She wears loose salwar pants, a sports bra, and nothing much else, her frail bird’s physique leveling any notions of immodesty.

Kanika dons her father’s slacks that are too-neatly pressed, a shabby tank-top, and a sapphire glinting in her nose. Through a monk-like adherence to plainness, she labors in concealing her beauty. It never works. The auto-driver’s eyes rove over her face, her clavicles, her slim hands.

You pull on a sludge-green kurta as a dress. It sits precariously on your angular frame, exposing vast swathes of leg and thigh. A crown of blush-yellow oleander frames your face, your collyrium-rimmed eyes. You wear no jewelry—the effect as always, intending to startle.

“I outdid myself, no?” you laugh, wedging yourself on the rexine-covered seat between the two, your bumpy knees skimming the underside of your chin.

Kanika tries and fails to pull her face back from grinning. “Fine. But we’re not drinking too much, okay?”

“The day I stop drinking is the day I shave my head in Tiruvannamalai and become a hermit, which is to say it’ll never happen,” Thendral hoots. “Or maybe it will, maybe!”

An effervescence lathers up your throat. It tastes unfamiliar—like comfort, somehow. As you rest your head on the soft curve of Kanika’s shoulder, you’re almost sure of how you feel.

The auto finally lurches to a stop in the middle of a five-lane scream of traffic. Laughing and trilling, you tumble out of it in a mess of clammy limbs. Thendral forgets to pay the auto-driver, who is so besotted by the trio of you that he does not notice anything out of the ordinary.

From the road, you feel the bass thump against your lumbar spines and ricochet off the roof of your mouths, your tongues. You make your way to the leather-sheathed door, unsteady as a herd of slick foals. The bouncer scarcely acknowledges your presence and waves you in, your façade of bohemianism displaying a keen edge of class and wealth to his eyes.

And then the music riptides into your faces as you dissolve into bodies upon bodies and more bodies, alcohol being pushed into your hands from hands you only somewhat recognize, drinking it all in, as the afternoon swirls around the club in a mirrored confection of light and kuthu songs and elbows.

When the music ebbs, you find yourself sitting knee-to-knee with Thendral and Kanika at a corner table, inebriation violently spearing your temples. You take turns eating ice cubes from an abandoned glass of beer.

Kanika pinches the crease of her pants with her thumb and forefinger, moving her palm down its length. “Appa is a policeman, you know.”

You sit very still, waiting. Thendral sprawls on your lap in a boozy, dance-fatigued stupor.

“He wanted me to study engineering. But there was a boy, and then there was a girl, and well. He did not know what to do with me anymore.”

“Do you like it here?”

Loamy shadows run across her face in the dark.

“Learning to be a tool and diemaker in a fucking polytechnic college? Far away from him? Machan, it’s awful and I love it.”

Kanika’s laughter thrums in your ears and you yield to it easily, delight spilling out of your chest in great, raucous hiccups.

Thendral bolts upright at the sound. “Are we talking about lousy dads? Mine is a panchayat chairperson in some town. I think my mother was his third or fourth wife or even a mistress—”

Having heard various iterations of this story before, you immediately hold up your hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay kannu, you win.”

“What about your family?”

The music lifts, picks up speed. The strobing lights skitter over your eyelids. As your silence rubberbands and widens, Thendral gently tucks an oily strand of hair behind your ear.

“We’re poor, that’s all,” you finally say.

Back at the hostel, you somehow manage to find your door, stumbling and whooping and being propped up and stumbling again. Thendral lies prone on the ground, drunkenly refusing to cede her territory on the concrete steps as Kanika scoops her up, bodily transporting her into your room. Sozzled complaints and laughter ring across the parapet walls. You fall over each other on the floor in a blissful haze of exhaustion. Kanika and Thendral begin to doze, their bodies covering your torso like a fleshy blanket. Sweat pools in the spaces between your calves, the arc of your hairline, the folds under your stomach. But you do not move, lest you rouse the other two. Almost imperceptibly, you feel Kanika’s fingers slip into your hair. She turns toward you with beads of tears swelling under her eyelids. Saltwater rivulets cut across the bridge of her nose. She does not blink or look away. You edge closer and begin kissing her then, from her damp eyelashes to the line of her ear and jaw, and further down to her mouth, where you feel her smiling against your lips, suddenly, ferociously kissing you back, saliva and beer and the taste of her lunch, of plantain bajjis and something that feels like crushed grape-ice liquefying in your throat, until Thendral wakes from all the squirming, incredulous, until Kanika grabs her wrist and pulls her down to your stomach eagerly, until the shape of this evening finally coalesces in Thendral’s mind, and as if on cue, her arms slip under your shoulders, yanking the kurta over your head in a movement so swift it leaves you breathless, her sports bra and salwar long gone, her fingers and mouth now a runnel between your legs as Kanika’s inner-thighs wrap around your face, and you feel something vast, something precise gape open inside you, the air steaming up from the floor as you empty yourselves into one another, as you exchange gasps of I love you that melt into your limbs and hair and mouths each time, over and over and over again.

The walls emit a bluish-orange luminescence while early twilight pools around your bodies. You sleep and wake in anxious pocketfuls of time.

It’s well past midnight now. White-winged termites hurl themselves against the lamp on your bookshelf. You gently extricate yourself from the floor—Thendral’s slumbering drool still drying on your forearm—and make your way to the sometimes-working fridge to grab a bottle of water.

A puddle of moonlight forms outside the room. You step into it, wanting to savor the tableau of your nakedness against the street and its unusual desolation—save a few dispirited mongrels, wanting to bottlecap this precise moment, this sliver of indulgence that leaves your scalp buzzing.

You swallow a mouthful of water and it scissors down your throat in blades of pain so agonizing, you stagger backwards as your sight trebles, dims. You clutch at your neck to claw it away somehow, to rip your larynx clean out of your skin if you could, and as your hands curve around your throat, your fingers push into a wetness that announces itself with a new bolt of excruciation. You fall face-forwards, landing on all fours, rasping into the concrete in shallow breaths to dull your senses, to still time itself, for something, for anything to stop, for everything to stop. Black starbursts crowd against your peripheral vision. Blood dyes your fingers a deep, reddish brown. Through a minute-long flue of time that feels like a year or a hundred, you realize that it’s yours.

I need a mirror, you think. A fucking washbasin.

The hostel lavatory lies at the end of the corridor. A taut, aluminum clothesline runs along the length of the hallway, and as you wobble upright, your stained fingers twist around the cool metal, steadying, forcing the pain to haul itself into a recognizable arc, at least for the moment.

I don’t want anyone to see me. Not like this.

Clothes fly off the line as you grab and lurch your way towards the bathroom. You pile them on in layers—from the threadbare nightgown that skims your ankles, to the t-shirt printed with galloping elephants, and finally, the plaid lungi that you bind around your waist over everything else. None of them belong to you.

You bolt the lavatory door. A miasma of phenyl and urine leaves you dry-heaving into the sink. When the heaving spasms into an unsteady lull, you stretch the t-shirt away from your collarbones, willing yourself to look up into the mirror.

Along the curve of your neck and shoulder, five angular slits lie below each ear, your skin a tattered flap over the gristle and flesh underneath, a pulsing rawness.

It is four in the morning and the predawn sky is an ink-blue expanse, swelling overhead. Pale blots of daylight leak across the horizon. Soundlessly, you dress yourself in the bathroom as you try to outpace the load-shedding blackouts that herald the start of the day.

Piece-by-careful piece, your college uniform armors over your body. First, cotton underwear with the patterns boiled and starched out of them. Second, salwar pants with inoffensive tan stripes. Third, a kurta lining so coarse, your skin immediately pushes up a terrain of hives in non-cooperation. And finally, your off-white kurta with a two-meter-long dupatta pinned to its shoulders to obscure even the haziest suggestion of breasts. You are now a working simulacrum of bashful restraint.

Today, you add another piece. A linen-scarf mottled with khakis and grays, tightly encasing your neck. Your still-healing gashes throb, as if on cue. A new ache settles softly on your inner-cheeks. You quickly bite it down as you step into the street and head toward the charioteer-god’s temple, as though all the days that had come before and all the days that would come after eddied together, marbling into a routine ordinariness, into a certainty that you could once lay claim to.

Not anymore.

Everything takes on a burnished patina of longing, of urgency—prayers from the dargah foregrounding the bustle of the street, office-goers pushing past you with their aggressive upper arms, secondary school dropouts sharing a single glass of limetta juice at Silver Star Cool Bar whistling and hissing at your shapeless form as you walk by. Along your route, the Ice House sentinels the beach. A champagne pink confection of a building that had once stored large wedges of ice from New England in the 1800s, it now stood as a memorial to a Vedanta mystic who had spent a lone afternoon napping on the premises.

On this morning, the egg-puff man parks his cart outside the wrought-iron gates of the Ice House. His face furrows in concentration as he folds and refolds translucent sheets of ghee-soaked pastry with his fists. Hillocks of hard-boiled eggs ring around his maida-coated work surface.

From across the street, the movement of his arms catches your eye. A memory unbidden glides across the perimeter of your forehead.

It was your first meal at the hostel canteen. You attempted to chase the watery sambar on your plate with a piece of dosai that puckered like skin. Thendral had winked at you from the other side of the table as if to say, can you believe this shit. Before you could understand what was happening through your cobwebbed early-morning haze, you were running down the street with your arms interlocked, her warm elbow skimming the side of your torso.

“I wasn’t going to let you eat that central jail breakfast, machan.”

She had called you machan with a fluidity that had discombobulated you with its ease, as though you were the sort of friends that had spilled into each other’s lives for decades—swapping clothes, food, lovers, your bodies, hospital bills.

“Okay, here we are!”

Thendral pulled you to a stop in front of the egg-puff man’s cart. When she placed your orders, you couldn’t help but observe that her lilting Tamil dialect conjured up waterfall torrents and squat plateaus in your mind’s eye, a marked contrast with the sharply-angled pidgin of your big-city tongue.

As you ate your egg-puffs in increasingly urgent mouthfuls, you realized that your happiness was a whole boiled egg concealed within sheets of puff pastry, a kind of joy that disintegrated into a mist of grease and crumbs between your fingers.

You arrive at the temple. Easing out of your sandals at the entrance, you head towards the sanctum-sanctorum without lingering at the miniature shrines that border the red oxide-coated pathway, as you would have once done. The silver-mustachioed form of Krishna as charioteer looms before you, a stern benevolence exuding from his dark visage.

He was a fish once, you think. A great, horned beast that rippled within the seas of cosmogenic dissolution, ferrying life itself through the eyelet between ages.

Many lips move in tandem, in prayer. Suddenly, a rending sound tears across your ears, echoing as though it’s approaching from a distant underpass. A salt-lick tang of blood rushes up your throat, and you gulp it down.

It’s too soon.

You break into a fevered sprint then, not pausing until you reach the hostel that has been emptied of its office and college-bound inhabitants. Leaping over the stairs in twos and threes, you scud barefoot onto the terrace and run towards the water tank, plunging yourself into its cavernous depths.

Nightfall veils over the tank. Your mouth is now less a mouth and more a gash swarming with bladed teeth, a rupture across your cheeks. It culminates in a protruding underbite that holds a pair of needle-pointed incisors, leaving your sockets bleeding as they grow upward, pushing out of your once-human lips.

On the water, algal blooms gather in soft, green clouds. A clutch of pearlescent larvae drift above your ear. City sounds muffle into shadows as you sit submerged, taking in large swallows of breath. Oxygen sluices through your gashes, through your gills now healed, now fully formed.

You are alone, at long last. For a brief moment you had permitted yourself to slip and freefall into indulgence—a gossamer swirl of love and duplicity and companionship. You had allowed a loose semicircle of a plan to form, involving a 1BHK flat for the three of you to settle down in. You had even concocted lies for all your future neighbors who would wield gossip and chit chat as prized artillery, if, when, the we’re only roommates excuse eventually petered out. In one lie, you were cousins sharing a paternal uncle. In another, you were MTech students cramming for tests in grumbling but supportive camaraderie. In a third, you were nurses from Coimbatore working alternate shifts at the Government Veterinary Hospital, providing healthcare services to overfed pets.

Your mother would have entirely disapproved.

Many moons ago, you had joined your mother for dinner on a weeknight—a rare but unremarkable event. Silence coated the room. It was a silence fomented through necessity, through her love dispensed via scant thimblefuls of affection that had vanished when you turned into a model of resolute independence, when you had stopped needing her altogether. Over the years, your conversations were whetted down to a rictus of obligation—a handwave, a phrase, or a single word, with nothing spoken in the weeks and months in-between.

But on that night, she told you a story.

She was once a girl from an island that sat between two seas, and there had been a cyclone. In its aftermath, thickets of bodies had floated down newly formed waterways filled with unclaimed limbs, receipts, bicycles, trousers whose pant legs inflated with sludge. The dead were cremated in the bluewhite plumes of a kerosene fire. Their ashes surged in a leaden estuary that flowed towards the ocean for days, for weeks. Slowly, the survivors began to eke out an existence in the new topographies that the storm had gifted them. A row of bioluminescent tidal pools where there had once been a market. Killifish in a psychedelic array of colors shoaling through the exposed cadavers of homes that had once been whole. A sea goddess birthed from ingenuity and misfortune and song, adorned with garlands of kelp and curly-leaf pondweed, with earrings fashioned from abalone shells, a diadem of blue coral pricked with iron salt.

For a time, the survivors swam in the petrol-laced rockpools, slept with one another, and ate what the sea gave them. For a time, things continued to be good and peaceable, moving without incident.

Then, some people started turning. Necks perforated and raw, skin unwrapping to reveal polished scales, tentacles, tails, spongy appendages. It may have been the food, or a blessing from the goddess, or the rage from still-forsaken corpses that lay in canals, seagrass meadows budding out of their orifices. Some people waded into the ocean and never came back. The ones that had not transformed had grown weary, spent. They sailed to the mainland to dissolve themselves into monochrome lives of normalcy. And even still, their offspring, their nieces, their in-laws, their cousins once removed, started to shift and turn. And when they did, they found their way back somehow, to the island between two seas, slender as a finger’s breadth.

“But the government—” you began to say.

Your mother laughed.

“Indhuja, our Chief Minister had shaved his head in mourning. He was the lover of an aging Carnatic music singer who slumped into her plate of idlis one morning and never woke up.”

“I didn’t know.”

“This was before your time. The woman had two husbands. So, tell me, what could he do? Worry about a scrap of land in the middle of the sea, or his two new headaches?”

“But—”

“Look Indhu, he was a man in love. Maybe he was a useless politician. But his government left us alone. If we keep to ourselves, we can live and die without a fuss.”

“But amma, is this enough?”

“Is this not?”

Your plate caked over with the remnants of your dinner, forgotten. You wanted to wrap your arms around your mother, hold her hands, and sit for just a moment longer. Her wrists had glistened in the dark. You self-consciously offered her a smile instead, and fled to your bedroom afterwards.

The next morning, she was gone.

Indhu? Indhuja!

At the sound of your name, you bubble up from under the water.

Kanika’s kurta balloons as she drops feet-first below the lip of the tank. You push yourself deeper into the curved, opaque shadows of its plasticine walls.

“How did you know I was in here?”

“The tank lid was open. You weren’t anywhere else. I thought I’d just check.”

“Machan, really.”

Despite yourself, the jagged tear of your face, your oilslick teleost eyes, your throbbing anamniote body that is becoming less girl with every passing moment, you smile. And somewhere within your scaled underbelly, you feel the fist of your fear unclenching.

“No, I lied,” Kanika says. “I found your book bag on the terrace.”

“See, that makes more sense.”

Kanika cleaves toward you.

“Please stay where you are. Please.”

“Why? Are you going to give me cholera? Anyhow, we both probably have cholera just by being in this water. Is this the filth we’re drinking? I’m going to complain to the warden—”

Please.

Your voice rips in protest, taking on a clanging, sonorous quality that leaps around the tank. Not human. Not even close. Horror-laced shame folds you in half, your head dipping between your knees. In response, Kanika wraps the entire length of her torso across your back, and the two of you stand there unmoving for what feels like a long time. Your breathing whirlpools underwater, curling gyres on its surface.

Her question kisses into your shoulder blades, sepal-soft. “Indhuja, does it hurt?”

You melt into her, weeping. Words spume out of your lips, the water afroth with your panic.

“I’m leaving, I’ll leave. So please don’t call our hostel wardens or police or some reporter or or or. I’ll quietly go—”

Kanika remains immobile. She holds you tight as your fear rises, ebbs, then crests over the both of you.

You pull yourself upright. “I don’t know where to begin, machan.”

“Let me.”

Before you can answer, she runs her knuckles over the fresh mucilage of your eyelids, then your widening forehead, then your incisors. Your skin settles into calm as her hands continue to peel down your body, untwining its luminance.

“It’s okay,” she mouths at last, against your torso. “I had a cousin.”

You wait for her to go on.

“They kept him in a well, machan.”

“What?”

“Really. My aunt spread the lie that he was working in Dubai. But I could hear him howling for food at night.”

“No one knew or cared?”

“They would always blame the band of jackals in our colony.”

Questions upon questions fizz and pop in your mind. “Did you, did you see—”

“I used to sneak out at night, sometimes. I threw a pineapple into the well once. He seemed to like it.”

“A pineapple?”

Your sudden laughter wavelets over the water, and soon, you pull into each other in tears, limbs, dermal denticles, and mirth. You laugh until you heave with sobs. For what’s left of you. For the boy in the well. For your mother. For what you must do, and where you must go.

“We should tell Thendral,” Kanika finally suggests.

“Yes, we should,” you agree.

The sea and the sky are sewn together in a clear, blue expanse. A train like an arrowhead hurls toward a sliver of land between oceans. Tiger-prawn fishermen occasionally mark the scenery with diaphanous nets, their lungis knotted above their thighs. You lie nestled between Kanika and Thendral on your berth, your human skin sloughed off almost entirely, save a few odd patches spotting your ankles.

Helices of stories loop through the stillness of your compartment. You tell them about your mother, about an unseen home that was a sheath of light over seawater, about half-humans living lives that were fuller than most.

After Thendral learned of your ongoing transfiguration, she had urgently concocted plans involving psychopomps and mantravaadis—as you knew she would, visits to the smallpox goddess temple that somehow culminated with elaborate baths in neem fronds, and consultations with backroom surgeons that peddled in full-body lifts and coolsculpting. You waited until she had wrung herself into exhaustion.

“I want to go home,” you had finally said. Your voice felt human, but it had taken on a booming overtone of sound that hewed itself into two distinct halves.

“Okay, let’s go,” Thendral and Kanika had agreed in unison, in confused relief. “If this is what you really want.”

The train pulls into the vacant station. Kanika’s arm grips the sinews that edge around your waist in black stripes, steadying your pace as you step down to the platform. Thendral draws the spun-cotton robe tighter around your torso, around your coin-bright scales that bleed rills of light, around the serrated expanse of your mouth.

Frothy breakers lap over the rail tracks. The only other passenger who disembarks is covered head-to-toe in a stifling tracksuit and hoodie. They cross the platform in a purposeful clip and step into the sea. Decapod tentacles bloom out of their sleeves. You stand watching, until their form pinpricks the horizon and disappears entirely from view.

The islet is as desolate as a cyclic refrain. Sand grits between your still-human toes. You slide out of your robe and walk towards the rocky outcrop of tidal pools that are gracefully arrayed at the rim of the bay. Kanika and Thendral peel off all their clothes, and the three of you tread into the lilac blush of the water. Iridescent swells of limpets, polyps and sunburst anemones flicker within its depths.

Vanjaram, Kanika breathes in reverence while her palms whisper over your scales.

Seer fish.

There are classes of seeing. Eyes snapping over a surface, taking in nothing, taking in everything. Emotional viscera splashing onto the hostel parapet in cords of drunken vomit—an accidental indignity, hiding within a spectacle. Your bodies, naked and breathless and on display under the daylight, cross-hatching each other—a knee, a homocercal tail, a dusting of birthmarks under a rib, an earlobe against a saw-toothed jawline.

“We’ll come by every year and make offerings of booze, machan.” Thendral smiles as she traces the vellum of your dorsal fin with her fingertips. “Can a mackerel drink alcohol?”

“My life would be easier if I wasn’t in love with two idiots,” you say.

Kanika wraps around you like an adventitious root, her face a disarray of snot and tears. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t cry. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

You pull them close for a fleeting moment before you launch yourself into the currents. Kanika and Thendral are now indistinct forms, their outlines softening into each other. You suppose you had once been completely human, but the ocean gapes and draws you further into itself, and you are not so certain after all.

Return to Issue #99

Behind the Scenes with M. L. Krishnan

What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?

I wrote the first draft of this piece in 2020. I spent a lot of time yearning for the sea during the lockdowns, and I wanted to capture that precise feeling: of craving an elsewhere that I could not get to. I had also been thinking about mermaids and makaras, a sometimes fish, sometimes crocodile with the torso of a human and the mouth of an elephant or stag. I was captivated by the composite nature of these beings, the horror and wonder of it all. Slowly, this coalesced into something tangible, and I began writing about a character on the threshold of everything. Who hungered fiercely, but had to keep many parts of herself deeply hidden, a fragmentary existence, until something irreversible happens. The core of my story stayed mostly the same through revisions, but I did expand certain sections last year, because I wanted the narrative to breathe. I wanted to stay with Indhu, Kanika, and Thendral for a bit longer.

How does this story fit into your body of work? Is it similar in ways to what you usually write or is it very different?

I have specific fixations—body horror, the sea, my South Indian city, embodied queerness, Indo-Gothic architecture, unruly transformations—that are integral to my stories and my writing. In that sense, it definitely fits right into my body of work, but I wouldn’t say my stories are similar to one another.

How would you describe the heart of this story?

The beating heart of this story is queer desire, the love itself between the characters. How they fall into each other, and how they move through it.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your work, or this piece?

This piece is set in the city of my birth, Chennai. All the landmarks I mention in this story are real places, attractions, and neighborhoods. In many ways, this story is also a distinct love letter to my city, but every story I write turns into a love letter to Chennai and to Tamil Nadu. I am consistent with my obsessions.