“A STORY LIKE MINE.” I have a piece in the new Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Some few, persistent readers may remember it as a revised version of “Recognition.”

It’s… sort of fantasy/”slipstream”? It’s one of those weird pieces where I didn’t expect it to do anything, but it seemed to hit a chord with people–I was surprised at the response. The LCRW version is better than anything you’ve seen, and anyway, I’ve never been able to track down the old version, even through the Wayback Machine.

A quote from toward the beginning:

Once upon a time there was a boy whose face broke open.

He was shaving in front of the mirror one day–he had only just started shaving–when his hand slipped and his face split. Underneath the skin there was horror. Where the skin split he could see oily, black things, writhing and pulsing. He cried out, dropped the razor. His mother knocked on the bathroom door and asked if he was all right. He tried to hold his face together, tried to pinch the edges of the cut in the hope that it would somehow heal itself. He told her he was fine.

Whatever was under his skin smelled foul. The stinking stuff began to crawl out from between his fingers. In the bright bathroom light he could see that it was reddened black, like blood clots, and it had a gelatin texture.

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