\u201cA STORY LIKE MINE.\u201d<\/strong> I have a piece in the new Lady Churchill\u2019s Rosebud Wristlet<\/em>. Some few, persistent readers may remember it as a revised version of \u201cRecognition.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s\u2026 sort of fantasy\/\u201dslipstream\u201d? It\u2019s one of those weird pieces where I didn\u2019t expect it to do anything, but it seemed to hit a chord with people\u2013I was surprised at the response. The LCRW <\/em>version is better than anything you\u2019ve seen, and anyway, I\u2019ve never been able to track down the old version, even through the Wayback Machine.<\/p>\n A quote from toward the beginning:<\/p>\n Once upon a time there was a boy whose face broke open.<\/p>\n He was shaving in front of the mirror one day\u2013he had only just started shaving\u2013when 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n