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Skin



Estimated reading time — 3 minutes

I wake up.
Another beautiful day.
You know the best thing about living in a big city? You can completely reinvent yourself at any time. Become someone entirely new. That’s great for someone like me. I don’t like routine.

I did try living in small towns at first, but the problem with that is everybody knows everyone. Once they see you as someone, you can never be anyone else but that person. I hated that. So as soon as I could I moved to the big apple, New York City. And I love it here. You can be a company executive one day, and a homeless vagabond the next, and no one even blinks.

I get up. The apartment I’m renting isn’t very big, but it has everything I need, including the spare room I use for my projects.

I walk over to my wardrobe, and as I do I ask myself the one important question, the only thing that matters. I do it every single morning. It’s the only routine I can bear. I stand in front of my wardrobe and I ask myself ‘who do you want to be today?’
I was a banker yesterday. I think I’ll be a florist today. I open my wardrobe doors, and I take down the two hangers labelled florist. Hanging on the first one is a bright yellow dress and taped to the top is a picture of the girl who wore it. She’s quite young, not more than 25, and pretty. On the second hanger is a perfectly peeled human skin-suit, kept fresh with my own special balms. And since it’s only a day old, the hair is still attached. I slip it on, and then zip it up at the back. Then it requires only a few adjustments, eye color and teeth shape etc. and boom! Just like that I’m someone else. I’m the girl from the photograph.

The only downside to being a new person every day is that you need to be quick. If the original person goes missing for too long before I become them people start to notice and it becomes difficult to explain where I – where they were.

Being a florist is quite nice. I go to work and chat with my friends and sell some flowers and chat some more. It’s quite a fun day out. But can you imagine doing it every day? That would so terribly boring.

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Then after work I go to my home and chat with my mother. She’s upset because grandma has cancer. I nod sympathetically when she tells me this, but I don’t care, not really. I’ve never met the woman. I’m sure the original owner of this skin would care. But dead people don’t have feelings.

My new mother and I eat together. Chinese takeout food. After we finish I excuse myself to have an early night. ‘Busy day tomorrow!’ I say ‘Lots of flowers to sell’
Then I sneak out of the bedroom window and I head off to my real home, my apartment. All the way back I feel like I’ve forgotten something.
When I get back, I really am tired. I think I will have an early night. After all, tomorrow could be a busy day. I could be any of the three different people I took the other day.

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I’m just about to crash on my bed when I hear muffled screaming and thumping sounds coming from my project room. And then I remember what I’ve forgotten.
See I was feeling quite tired after taking three people the other day. As you can imagine it requires some effort to capture three people, and then skin them, and put their eyes and teeth in jars. I honestly didn’t need three, but variety is the spice of life, or so they say. But in my tiredness last night I remember thinking that if I only prepared two lives, I could do the third tonight. I guess that means no early night for me.

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I pull out a suitcase from under my bed. It contains a collection of my favorite razors and other tools. The muffled thumping gets louder. I sigh. It was the college boy that I didn’t prepare the other night. They always have so much energy.
I get out of the florist I wore today and head into my project room. Time to get to work. He’s gagged, obviously, but he does try to scream for a while. I keep cutting and cutting and eventually he stops, and breathes his last.
Two hours and a bloody mess later, I have a brand new life.
I think tomorrow I’ll be a college boy.

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24 thoughts on “Skin”

  1. i thought it was really weird but creepy great job but i love the Ben drowned alot more than this no offense it is yours too but great job again!

  2. I like the story as is, but I’d think it would be a lot creepier if at the end of the story we find out it’s a monster (or alien being or whatever) that is taking skins of people and “starting over” in new cities. The beginning of the story talking about moving to different cities and becoming anyone you want to be sounds like normal, human behavior. Many people like change and to start fresh in different places, so it throws the reader off to find out the meaning of “becoming anyone you want to be & starting over in a new place” means the monster is literally putting on different skins to become different people. I still enjoyed the read! 7/10

  3. It’s kind of funny actually. But I wouldn’t say it was all that creepy.

    It was more like a nice and short piece for those who only want to read a little bit of horror in their day and the ending was a nice touch on that.

    The perspective of the skinner had a good sense of disturbing optimism about what they were doing though and you could have used this to your advantage by gradually drawing the reader in as you escalate the circumstances that occur. Such as, you could have the culprit find a new way of skinning them each time until you make the reader sick and question whether they actually want to continue reading it. Only, keeping it within physically possible means of course.

    Obviously if the culprit is a human, they can’t just snap someone’s head off by the click of their fingers.

  4. That was incredibly…not creepy. And I mean that in the best way possible.

    Throughout the entire story, I wasn’t creeped out at all. I was laughing the entire time. The protagonists nonchalant attitude toward his macabre hobby forced my brain to picture him as Christian Bale murdering a man with Huey Lewis playing in the background.

    It was well written, if a little short. But I think that’s a lot of why a story like this works. Being bogged down in too many details makes reading some of the stories on this site a bit tedious. There were some unanswered questions such as the actual nature of the protagonist (gender, species, motivation aside from boredom), how it dealt with the difference in voice pitch, speech mannerisms and things of that nature. So, in my opinion, the story could have benefitted from a sentence or two of backstory but, at the same time, not too much. The mystery and unanswered questions are part of what makes a story of this type and length work so well.

    Although, the unanswered questions shouldn’t be questions concerning the logistics of the plot. The reader should rarely ever walk away thinking “there’s no way that’s possible because of these reasons…” or “this doesn’t make sense, how did that even happen?”

    Overall, it was well written and I hope to read more from the author. 7/10

  5. It does make more sense that it’s not a human because I think I would know if I was talking to someone wearing a skin :)

  6. Creepy, but not really believable. Mannerisms, tones of voice, things like that…a mother would be able to tell her daughter’s voice was off.

  7. You write well, but being honest, I wasn’t really too creeped out by this. I found it more amusing than anything, probably because it requires such a huge suspension of disbelief that I just couldn’t quite get in the mood. I still enjoyed it, 7/10.

  8. I think I want you to write more of these. I didn’t think I would like it at first, but you drew me in. Flesh out the next one. I can’t wait to see who he/she will be tomorrow……

  9. The Ghostly Presence Official

    Ok. Bit short. But aren’t they all..? I enjoyed it and thought it was a very interesting sort of murder. I’ve only been been properly intrigued by a murder story once. It’s when I watched Saw II (May watch the rest of them) But it was brilliant enticing and if this story was longer it would have that same gip that makes you want to keepwatching/Reading….

  10. David Mathewes

    Too short. Not enough. The story is vaguely interesting, and you could get a good story out of the protagonist being the person, I could see something there, but the idea of someone skinning people and wearing their skins is not original. The prose is rather dry, add some flowery (hehehe) words, spice it up, make me think I am doing more that reading some random strangers idea; make me think I am reading something special.

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