She swam through the drowning shelter, she confronted the spider-skin. Her old flesh was floating above the shower, a plagued husk of an algae-covered corpse. She woke up, swam to it, and turned it around to stare into its face. She turned her dead flesh over and it was not elder Sophie the dead and venomous, no. It was Patrice. A burst of bubbles. A drowning scream. Patrice crawled out of the dead-girl skin, the skin molted like tissues of festering onionskin paper that peeled away as a teenaged Patrice unzipped herself out of the rotting body-cocoon with a black and opalescent claw. It was Patrice as she must have looked after the car accident, just after the rescue team had pulled her out of the wreckage. Her ribcage was shattered and shoved out to either side of her gore-sponged and distended belly, shattered bones stabbing out of her mutilated and breastless torso like wicked white flowers, like spider legs. Fog of water, fog of blood. And oh, she was smiling. She dragged Sophie up into her arms, her claws, she kissed her beloved and hated sister’s neck with needle-like fangs all thronging and shivering out from underneath her twelve-inch tongue, so many teeth, and she breathed against Sophie’s neck, “Sister mine.
