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Skin Contact

Zachary Bos

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The deep ravine slashes through the Pennsylvania woods like a wet, stony wound. Halting her hike along the narrow streambed, Valeria Calderón tugs her bandana back into position. She squints to see where to step among the tumbled rocks and clumps of sedge and catbrier. Her summer research assistant Rowan Kaur catches up.

“Should we be checking these?” Rowan asks, indicating the pockets of water pooled in the sediment.

Val nods her head. “No. They’re not stream species. Too risky with the runoff and unpredictable water flow. We’re looking for safe, moist crevices and cover.” She points to a shelf of rock. “Let us hunt our sally prey up there.”

“Sally forth?” Rowan asks.

“Jawohl! Let’s get to work.” Val keeps it light-hearted in the field to prevent the long days of collecting from turning sour. Besides, it’s important to build camaraderie with the interns. Especially Rowan. They were sharp and eager, but Val could see that weight on Rowan’s shoulders, the kind you get when you’re too used to being looked at sideways.

She remembered the first time someone called her ‘a diversity hire.’ Kept her head up, smiled through it. Sometimes she saw that same tension in Rowan — always bracing for judgment. Now the world seemed to be closing in even tighter on people like Rowan, and Val felt protective. Jokes were her way of saying, Hey, I see you. I’m here with you.

Rowan wipes their hands on their cargo shorts. Water drips onto their heads from dangling roots. “Tell me the numbers, Val. How many salamanders do I need to find before Professor Tom will write me a good recommendation? Six million? Seven?”

Val shrugs, driving her trowel into a fissure packed with loose stone. “If there’s even still money for grad school. Who knows? I’m a postdoc, not a prophet. Climate funding’s gutted. Can’t research what they say isn’t happening.” She flicks her hand at the ferns studding the rock face, each circular sub-frond bright and waxy. “Ten years ago, you wouldn’t find crimson spleenwort this far north. Everything’s shifting.”

Rowan nods. “We’ve got armadillos in New Jersey now. Seriously. In Cranford. They’re digging up people’s yards.”

“Hold that thought.” Val crouches, levering up a slab of schist with her trowel. Beneath it, two thick-bodied salamanders lay curled like mottled apostrophes, dark against the sepia mud. “Behold! We’ve found their hidden lair.”

Val turned on her lecturer mode. “They’re like Ambystoma, kleptogenetic, right? Stealing genes from whatever males they mate with. They tuck away that chromosomal material like a blue jay hiding nuts in a hollow tree. Saving something for later. Some individuals haul around triploid, tetraploid, even pentaploid genomes. Walking larders full of purloined DNA.”

Rowan reaches down. “Whoa, don’t touch!” Val barks, but it’s too late — Rowan’s fingertip brushes the slick back of one. The animal flicks back and forth spasmodically, and Rowan jerks their hand away.

Val sighs. “Row, mi amigue. Do we have to talk about field safety again? Zoonotic transmission is real. Like armadillos, right? They carry ze leprozee. You’ve got to be careful.”

“Sorry! Guess I’m more of a hands-on learner,” Rowan says with a chastened grin. “Ow.” They inspect their finger where a line of red is seeping from what looks like a papercut and try to rub the sting away on the flap of their shirt.

“Wash that out! No cellulitis on my watch,” Val chides. She pulls a headlamp from her pocket and leans against the ravine wall to bring her face level with the animals. “Okay, so it looks like one is deceased. It is… no more. It has… ceased to be.”

Rowan groans at the dated references to Monty Python and continues to soap up at the shallow stream.

Under examination, the living salamander’s gold-flecked eye glistens in the light. Then Val freezes. On either side of the creature’s throat, two smaller mouths are opening and closing, as if breathing. “Dios mío.” She excitedly digs through her backpack. “We’re cutting open the dead parrot,” she announces. “Row, notebooks out. This is not a drill.”

She finds the portable dissection tray, sets it down on a flat boulder, and begins, slicing carefully through the soft throat. Pleated mucosal membranes fill the auxiliary mouths. As Val uses her pencil tip to probe the soft folds, she mutters to herself. “Not paedomorphic. Not gill tissue. Carajo, do they even have an aquatic stage?”

Rowan is rubbing their hand. “Ow.”

“… maybe over-development of the mucosal lining? Rowan, look. Adductor bundles, subarticular. No jaws, hmm. “Like the embryo tried for three heads but lost courage halfway through. ‘Cerberus of the plethodontids’, heh.”

Val writes in quick, urgent script as she mumbles distractedly. “… developmental crossed wires from too many borrowed genomes? Inheritance from half a dozen different, hmm, parental sources, what does that do to embryonic patterning? Semi-expression, expression conflict, displaced expression… maybe fodder for, I don’t know, ventilation adaptation? A broader range of temperature stress response?”

“Val…” Rowan holds up their hand. The cut has split open wider. Another cleft appears on their palm and pulls apart into a red-rimmed gape.

“Rowan?” Val looks up, her face blanching when she realizes her student’s forearm is blossoming with mouths. Her trained mind enters diagnostic mode as she disassociates. Stress-induced hyperplasia? A rapid-onset transmissible cancer? Or god, those stolen genes, gone feral and insinuating themselves across species barriers. Lateral, direct, forcible acquisition. If that’s true…”

One of the mouths opens and emits a tiny, high-pitched sound. Another joins in, harmonizing. Rowan squeezes their fist, and the mouths pinch and pucker. The dazed undergrad reaches toward her. Val stumbles back. “No. Don’t touch me.” She grabs the bottle hanging from her belt and smears sanitizer across her palms.

Rowan sinks heavily onto the silt, transfixed by the thin sounds coming from their own skin. More singing seeps from cracks in the ravine wall.

Val shoves her notebook into her pack and backs away, keeping her eyes on Rowan. “I’ve got to go get someone. There’s no cell service here. Stay put. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be back.”

“Val — please — ” Rowan sobs, repeating Val’s name, the eerie voices take turns whimpering in unison with them. Val’s chest clenches, torn between reaching out and running, but instinct takes over and her legs are already moving. She backtracks upstream, forcing herself to walk, not run, over the break-bone detritus. A twisted ankle could mean never getting out. Never getting help. Her footsteps crunch on gravel. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears and beneath it, she hears the faint chorus from the ravine chasing after her like a spectral dirge. “This is real,” she whispers with resolve, breath catching on each word. “Real.Real. Real.”

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Zachary Bos is a writer, poet, and translator based in Massachusetts. His bylines have appeared in Iowa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Fulcrum, Bosphorus Review of Books, and elsewhere. He directs Pen & Anvil Press and works as a bookseller and union organizer.

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