Excerpt from The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson

We’re delighted to feature this excerpt from The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson

The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal story telling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life-and death-tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman’s womb is as real as the “previous tenant.” The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women-who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because “the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them.”

Excerpt from “The Rabbits”:  

There was nothing remarkable about the rabbits I gave birth to, other than the fact that I’d given birth to them. 

Little dun-colored rabbits with eyes glistening like wet stones. I’d had fifteen, over the course of as many days. They weren’t velvety, like most newborn rabbits, but softly furred, more like rabbits a few weeks old. As rabbits tend to do, they slept in a pile, their bellies moving in gentle waves over my quilt. 

My mother-in-law helped deliver them, although nearly all slipped out with little pushing. I know that in all her years as midwife, she’s seen many strange things—twins fused together at the shoulders; babies born with teeth, with both sexes, with pincers like lobster claws instead of hands; a drunkard’s baby covered in birthmarks like spilled wine—but nothing like this. She was silent on the matter. That’s her way: thin white lips pressed shut. My husband was the one who couldn’t stop talking. 

“If only you’d been thinking of gold, not bloody rabbits!” Joshua said, smiling. He supposed it would really amount to the same thing—that we’d be famous and grow rich so he could retire from the clothier’s business. “Just imagine the food you could provide. At a special price!” Other rabbits were on their way. I could feel them leaping in my womb. I wasn’t sure how to look on these rabbits, if I should consider them as victuals or even as special pets, like those kept by wealthy ladies. 

“Rabbits. Dear little rabbits,” was all I could say. I petted each one in turn before I slept at last, my hands on my restless middle. 

After my short nap, Joshua brought me a steaming meat pie, fresh from the baker’s, he said. When he told me it was rabbit, I shot up in bed and gave a cry, startling the bundles of fur around me from their slumber. I counted them, to be sure. 

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked. 

I’d been going on and on about rabbit pie, about rabbits in general, for weeks, ever since I’d been startled by one on my way home from the market. We tried to trap it, the other women and I, but it became more of a game as the rabbit darted this way and that, and soon we were laughing too hard to keep up. I’d been newly pregnant then, full of cravings and hoping for a boy. 

“Not anymore,” I said. 

We decided to house the rabbits in a hutch that Joshua built out back, so they wouldn’t keep getting lost under the furniture, or be trampled underfoot. I’ve always liked rabbits, as far as animals go. They spoil the garden with their nibbling thievery—still, they’re tender things. 

I had reason to resent these particular rabbits. True, they were living babies of a kind, even if they weren’t my own kind. Not long after I’d chased that rabbit in the field, I awoke to find that my nightgown was wet through to the sheets, and although I’d slept deeply, I’d had terrible dreams filled with darkness, birds, screams, a rabbit caught in a snare, pulling and thrashing so that the wire cut deep into its neck. Joshua dozed beside me. I lay still, hoping that the slickness between my legs was sweat, that my bladder had misbehaved during the night. When I finally lifted the blanket, I saw that it was all red underneath. He was not the first one I’d lost, but he’d lasted the longest; I so believed he would endure. My little boy gone, drowned in that shallow pool.

The following day, I felt a movement in my womb, and that’s when the rabbits came. 

BUY HERE

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Shannon Robinson’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, is winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction (forthcoming with Press 53 in May 2024). Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, failbetter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son. www.shannonrobinson.org

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