By Dragonel
You can’t trust people with tans.
It’s bigoted, it’s small minded, it’s hurtful, but it’s true.
As I stared at the woman on the other side of the counter it all came to me. Every smug grin, strange overly-white teeth highlighted by unnatural amounts of melanin, every twist of sun bleached hair, you can’t trust people with tans. This woman redefined the meaning of tan. Her skin was sun-cured.
I was delirious at the time, so my accounting probably isn’t accurate. Her body had soaked up so many solar rays that it was now trying to bleed them off as effectively as it could. This woman’s withered, puckered, leathery skin was giving me sunstroke.
I couldn’t hear her over the fevered ringing in my ears, and I felt my face flush (being perfectly trustworthy, my skin is a uniform alabaster, I can trace the lines of my veins easily up both wrists. Quite useful when donating blood, but utterly painful in the presence of Ms. Isotope). She had sold us books, and I can only assume was unsatisfied with the offer, because I got the impression from the way she glared at me under her old-lady wraparound sunglasses that she intended to kill me.
The offer was a pittance, I believe a quarter for her moldy old series romance novels. But perhaps she was satisfied with it. Perhaps she was over joyed with the offer we’d made for her books... After all, she’d accepted it, yes? She was now bringing the slip to the cash register so that I could pay her, yes? I suppose it’s feasible that in my half conscious state it was I who was invoking her ire.
It’d make sense, I was certainly taking my sweet time. I couldn’t mask my morbid fascination at her very existence. She had far surpassed any hint of natural skin tones, having achieved a deep ruddy color, like you’d expect to finish fine oak furniture in. I suppose in her old age she wasn’t accustomed to having so much skin, and had misjudged the proportion of ultraviolet exposure she needed to attain a healthy glow. To be certain, she had a lot more skin than any person should have. The skin of her waddle was thick and creased, hanging from the jutting point of her chin down fully to her clavicles, reminding me of some Triassic misanthrope, forever misplaced in time by the horrible depredations of Stephen Spielberg.
I found myself wondering, much to my shock, what the rest of her looked like. She was modestly dressed for one who so clearly had no fear of the elements, and I couldn’t help but entertain the thought that her long-sleeved blouse existed to hide her patagia. Perhaps at night she slipped into some bizarre geriatric sports-bra and lurked in high places, waiting, perhaps, to swoop down on unsuspecting book store clerks, slashing at their throats with her yellowed old fangs, and then sailed away on her bat-like wings, leathery skin stretched taught, osteoporotic bones visible through that hard membrane of too-tanned skin.
She took her money and, I believe, bought a small stack of romance novels. I find it curious that she didn’t request a senior citizen discount, even though we post clearly that we offer one. Perhaps she wasn’t as old as she appears? Perhaps this is what happens to those bubbly and vivacious soccer moms, the ones who are too fashionable and can’t be seen without the mark of the tropics on their skin, when they turned 40?
The whole ordeal was terribly sinister. I write this at three in the morning hoping that venting these fears of bizarre conspiracies of bat-women and the mutating effects of the earth’s sun at three in the morning. Perhaps with my terrors discharged I’ll be able to get to sleep, and not see those faces.
The dark, over-tanned faces. Faces which have been tanned and hair sun-bleached to the point were a person’s entire body is a uniform beige, broken only by their perfectly bleached smile, a shade that harkens back to the bone-white grin of the skeleton which hung in my high-school science teacher’s class, and the perfect ocean-blue of their bovine eyes. Or worse, those people whose carcinogenic overexposure has progressed to the point where their skin is darker than their hair... bright blond eyebrows working above conspiring eyes, their head-shots looking like curious black-and-white negatives. And worse faces, far worse, still haunting me.
Be a good person. Live indoors if you must, use sunblock. Treat your body with respect, and always remember: Fear the tanned.
--Dragonel