By Ashlen Renner

I once watched my pet gecko eat his own skin. It was late at night, and I woke to his little nails scraping against woodchips and rocks. I turned on the light and rolled over in bed to see the gecko paused, mid-chew, as the inverted white glove of his hand protruded from his mouth. His pupils were straight lines, his little shoulders tensed. He was startled by the light.

I lay still in my bed as the gecko slowly forgot I was there, sucking the shell of his hand into his mouth with a flick of his tongue. He twisted in a circle, scraping his body against the jagged edge of a rock to peel the skin off his shoulder blade. His diamond-shaped head craned backward as he gnawed at what he could reach. He grabbed hold of a loose patch of skin with his gums and yanked his head forward. The skin ripped free from his body like sheer tissue paper tearing.

It’s a lot of work for a creature just seven inches long. Geckos shed when they grow larger than the outer layer of skin allows. Over the past three days, I had watched with mild fascination as my gecko’s normally vibrant yellow and black speckled pattern dried out into an ashy gray shell. He had spent most of the day splayed out on damp paper towels. He was a pandemic pet—a symptom of living alone and also being allergic to fur—not particularly loving, but a living presence nonetheless.

I watched as he burst through his old skin headfirst, the new tender layer below gleaming through with fresh color and texture. His skin was dotted with raised goosebumps, forming indents on the shed skin. He crunched it in his mouth like popping bubble wrap. When the gecko finished shedding, he licked his newly formed nostrils and the milky film from his reptilian eyes. I didn’t know how long I had stayed up watching him until the sky began to gray. The gecko, sensing the incoming sunlight, waddled with his fresh legs on top of a rock and fell asleep.

I got up for work—an office job deemed too essential to work from home— and picked out the same outfit as the day before—wide-leg black slacks, a sports bra, and an oversized sweater. I dressed with the lights off, feeling for the tag on the back of the pants so I wouldn’t wear them backward, and wrestled the bra over my head. It was a high-neck compression top, purposely several sizes too tight. If I hunched my shoulders far enough forward, it gave the illusion of a flat chest in my oversized sweater. In the mirror pasted to the back of my door, I was a shadow. I couldn’t see the stretch marks on my breasts, hips, and thighs—all the ways my skin failed to accommodate my shape.

*

My mother once said to me in the Belk outlet: “You have a beautiful little body. I don’t know why you hide it.”

I was a teenager who wore clothes even my grandmother found “conservative” (I once wore the same bathing suit as her to the beach. We both shopped from the Land’s End catalog.) My mother was holding hangers full of high-neck, loose blouses I had picked out from the Women’s section, along with bras that advertised reducing your bust by two cup sizes. I didn’t want to tell her that I had cried in the dressing room because no matter how many cup-size-reducing bras I tried on, none of them made me small enough to disappear. Staring up at the dim fluorescent lights, I had tried absorbing my tears back into my eyeballs, but I couldn’t stop remembering the time a group of girls ganged up on me on the playground in the fifth grade and made fun of me for stuffing my shirt. But I had not stuffed my shirt. My breasts were real. At that moment, I began to imagine separating them from my body, lying down under a circular saw, or punching a hole in the nipple and sucking the fat out with the vacuum cleaner. I fantasized about getting breast cancer so someone could cut out the cells dividing, dividing, dividing inside me.

I would not know the language to describe what I was feeling until my mid-twenties. Until then, I settled into baggy shirts and sweaters.

*

The plastic surgeon showed me a picture of the inside of someone’s chest. The pink fat shone under operation room overhead lights like cottage cheese attached to a creased bit of soft leather, the skin peeled back with metal clamps. It fascinated me to see the fragility of the human body, how vulnerable it is to be willingly cut open. A few more centimeters down, a heart was beating.

I had spent the last couple of years researching top surgery, watching YouTube videos of new men unraveling the gauze from their chests and crying in the mirror. I wanted that relief, but I was not a new man—I wasn’t really anything. I thought top surgery was only for people transitioning, but I didn’t want to transition—I had just had enough of crushing my breasts to the point of suffocation. My back and shoulders ached. My torso bore the red indents of a bra too tight. So when I moved away from my small town in North Carolina to Northern Virginia, I looked for a surgeon who wouldn’t ask questions.

The plastic surgeon said to stand in front of the mirror so I could see what he was doing. I did not want to see what he was doing. I wanted nothing to do with what he was doing. At twenty-six years old, no one had ever seen my bare chest. I never felt compelled to be intimate with anyone that way, and yet this stranger lifted one breast in his cold hand, gauging its weight. He dropped it and it landed with a slap against my belly. I clenched my teeth to keep myself from vomiting.

The plastic surgeon used the sharp tips of a metal caliper to measure me. The ends pinched the tender skin no one had ever touched.

“So we would shrink the areola to about this size,” he said, moving the scissor ends closer to the nipple by half.

“I don’t want them,” I said. “No nipples?”

I had heard horror stories of nipple grafts failing, the barely healed skin flaking off in the shower, the circle of bright red swollen stitches permanently deforming the flesh. It wasn’t worth it. No one would ever see my naked chest anyway.

“No,” I said.

He dictated this into his phone. Patient is adamant about no nipple grafts. Patient wants a reduction to that of an A-cup. Patient is sure this is the right surgery for them.

I pulled the gown tight back across my body and crossed my arms in front of my chest. The surgeon said I would need a double incision to remove the parts of me I hate—two slashes eight inches across my chest, my breasts filleted open like Thanksgiving turkey. I wanted nothing to do with it. I just wanted them gone.

I paid him four years’ worth of savings. The surgery date was set.

*

When I was growing up, my family went to an old Episcopalian church with the other traditional nuclear families in town. The chapel was built in the 1800s from stone. The headstones in the graveyard stood crooked and mossed over, the names no longer legible. The windows were stained glass with scenes of Christ’s crucifixion reflecting beams of red light on the ancient wooden pews. I was often dressed in sheer black tights that squished my love handles inward and an a-line skirt to cover my growing hips. I sat down in the pews in between my mother and younger brother. I was 12 and he was 10, and when the service settled after the first two hymns, he pulled a red Hot Wheels car out of the pocket of his khakis and used the curved end of the pew as a race track. “Stop,” I hissed, but he ignored me. I looked at my parents and they were staring straight ahead at the pastor giving his sermon. It wasn’t my brother’s interruption of the sermon that angered me, but the freedom he had to do it unnoticed. I was supposed to be the good example, to sit up straight and bow my head. Quiet. Ladylike.

I prayed that God would make me a boy. God answered that afternoon in the restroom of a Mexican restaurant. I pulled my skirt and the tights down, harsh red lines already forming across my waist from the elastic. I saw a brown, crusted stain in my underwear, and I panicked thinking I had shit my pants somewhere in between church and the restaurant, but then I realized the toilet water had turned a deep red. I stood frozen for a while in the middle of the room, the dirty subway tiles, the buzzing fluorescent light, the flies slamming their bodies into it over and over with tiny zaps. All I could think was massacre . . . massacre in my body and God is cruel.

I had learned in Sunday School that God made me in his own image, but if he did, that image was distorted and confusing. My insides contracted and cramped. I felt sick. Maybe God was punishing me, I thought. I shouldn’t have wished to be a boy—and yet I don’t think that wish was completely sincere. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I also didn’t want the pressures of being a girl. I wanted to be nothing. The Sunday School teachers told me God made me to become somebody he would be proud of, and yet I had prayed to be nobody, to write my body out of existence. I had severed myself from God’s will.

With toilet paper wadded in between my legs, I returned to my family’s table and pretended nothing was wrong. Moments later, the food arrived, and the waiter placed an enchilada in front of me soaking in a pool of chunky red sauce.

*

A few weeks before meeting with the plastic surgeon, I moved from my single-bedroom apartment in rural North Carolina to a house full of grad students in Northern Virginia. As I entered the dingy townhouse, I clutched a Tupperware container with holes punched in the lid in my hands. The gecko had been standing alert in there for close to seven hours, strapped into the passenger seat of my car as I slogged through stop-and-go traffic up I-95. One of my roommates asked what was in the container, and when I peeled back the corner of the lid, the gecko jerked to attention, staring at us with something like the angry Eye of Sauron. It was enough to make me put his container down and go back out to my car to get his tank.

There wasn’t room for my gecko’s 30-gallon tank in my bedroom, and it was too heavy to lug up the two flights of steps, so his tank was placed in an alcove facing the front door. At the beginning of the semester, we threw a house party, and as the guests jingled through the door, the gecko watched grudgingly from his hiding place in the rocks. The guests congregated around the tank, tapping the glass and speaking to the lizard in baby voices—I’m not one to judge. I did it too. By popular demand, I took the caged lid off the tank and scooped the gecko up. His scaly belly was warm from the heated rocks, and as I lifted him out, his front legs stretched out like Superman flying.

The gecko waddled across my hands, and then came the questions: Does he recognize you when you hold him? Does he do tricks? Does he feel love? Does he feel joy? I still don’t know how to answer these questions. I can believe that he feels some sort of attachment toward me, that he knows the hand that brings him out of his house, that feeds him live mealworms at night. Then again, I can see straight through his head through his ears. When I see him sitting on his rocks, he often stares at the wall, and I wonder if he is thinking of anything at all. So I think for him. I fill in his blank mind with the illusion of begrudging love.

At the party, someone cautiously put their hand palm up next to mine. The gecko paused for a moment, licked his nose, and continued walking. “He feels weird,” they said, the gecko’s claws pricking bare flesh. “He likes you,” I answered.

*

The surgery was set for the week after New Year’s. When I visited my parents’ house back in North Carolina, I told myself that I would tell them, but Christmas came and went, and then New Year’s and then I was hugging them goodbye early in the morning so that I could beat DC traffic. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t disturb the fragile shell of their idea of me. The skin underneath was too raw, not yet formed. I couldn’t explain why I would want to destroy a part of me, why I would risk bleeding out on the table. It felt like vanity.

I decided that I could hide it. I’d tell them I lost weight. They wouldn’t notice. And if they’d notice, they would be too polite to ask. This is what I still tell myself.

*

There was a shed in the backyard where my dad kept his tools and the lawnmower. Behind it, acres of woodland. Mom was out getting groceries and Dad was weed-whacking the front yard. I pushed open the groaning door of the shed, the smell of sawdust and gasoline triggering my allergies. I sneezed with a quiet squeak against the back of my hand.

Stepping over a pile of last winter’s firewood, I reached over the lawnmower where a steel shovel hung rusting on the wall. I gripped its wooden handle in my hand, went to the back of the shed where our property ended and the woods began and sliced the ground with the entire weight of my body. The roots of the grass ripped from the earth like Velcro. Earthworms writhed exposed in the air. I fed them my blood-stained underwear—two days’ worth of it. It lay in a rumpled pile of frayed, overstretched elastic and cotton tainted with the smell of copper.

I hoped that the worms would destroy the evidence as I covered the hole back up. How long until menopause? I calculated at least forty years. I decided then I could keep my bleeding a secret for that long. If I didn’t acknowledge it to anyone, it wouldn’t exist in the open, just in my own body. I could keep it in.

*

Shed. It is to allow skin or a shell to come off and be replaced by what’s underneath, it is to lose hair, it is to let leaves fall to the ground, it is to prevent something from being absorbed, it is to take off clothes, it is to discard something undesirable.

In the case of my pet gecko, he consumes what he sheds. It provides him with nutrients that help his skin grow. How can something undesirable become valuable? I look into his tank while he sleeps in the crevice of two rocks. The gecko only thinks of survival, in a constant state of fight or flight. In some ways, I feel as if I’m in the cave with him, crouched behind rocks clutching my scarred chest. I am bleeding through the gauze. I am shedding stitches like Triscuit crumbs. I am whimpering, “Don’t look at me. Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.”

*

On the day of the surgery, I sit in a lounge chair in the waiting area with an IV taped to the back of my hand. The nurse calls me “Miss” but I don’t correct her. What I am is too complicated.

The plastic surgeon comes to draw on me with a purple marker, lines where he will cut. He asks me if I have photos of what I want my chest to look like. I pull

up a photo of a breast cancer survivor who has had her breasts reconstructed. The photo shows two fist-sized mounds of faceless, nipple-less flesh—the skin stitched together from a patchwork of flesh taken from other places on the body. I am not interested in the aesthetic integrity of my breasts. I want the shape to be just enough for me to pass as woman, but little enough for me to be ambiguous.

I walk myself to the operating room. On the way, a side door opens and I see an unconscious woman on a table, her breasts bare. I had heard her whispering to her boyfriend in the waiting room. She is here for implants. The door swings shut and I feel a sense of relief when the nurse leads me to a room in a dark corner of the building. One of the fluorescent lights is out overhead. No one passing by would be able to see me cut open.

The nurse holds my IV tube as I hop on the table shaped like a cross. It takes a while for me to scooch up so my head falls in the right place. Another nurse I have never seen is behind me giving directions. “Keep going. Up more. More. You have to have your head here.” Never mind I can’t see where here is. I only see the lights overhead, the tray of plastic-wrapped sterile objects beside me. Things to break the skin, things to cut away fat, things to peel flesh from the body. The nurse is getting frustrated that I am too short to conform my body to the table’s shape, but the Valium has hit my veins, and I no longer care.

The plastic surgeon enters with his arms bent upward at the elbow like a priest about to bless the body and blood of Christ. Someone slides his long gloves on. He cracks a joke that I don’t remember but I remember the room is full of people laughing. He asks me what music he should listen to while he performs the surgery. I say, “I don’t know, hip-hop?” And then I pass out.

When I wake up, my legs are shaking. The nurse (which one, I can’t remember) tells me it is my body trying to eject the anesthesia from my system. My chest is bound in a white vest fastened in the front with Velcro. Blood stains the fabric under my left breast, or what is left of it. Two plastic tubes hang from my armpits attached to two fist-sized flasks of blood. My insides are being sucked outside. The nurse tells me to squeeze the blood out every four hours. I have to measure how much comes out of me. She never says how much is too much.

*

The day after I buried my bloody underwear in the backyard, my mom found a wad of them in the kitchen trashcan hidden under some plastic bags. I had school, so I didn’t have time to bury the newest batch behind the shed. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, and I was not sure if she was hurt or angry. I looked down at the vinyl kitchen floor and shrugged.

Yellow-wrapped pads appeared on my vanity along with a new pack of Hanes underwear in hot pink. I cried as I put them away.

Years passed. I was twenty-six when I went to the OB-GYN for the first time to get an implant I heard would stop the bleeding. When the nurse asked why I wanted it, I lied and said I was sexually active and that I needed birth control. It was the most acceptable answer, but it wasn’t the truth. I knew if I told the truth—that I was not interested in sex, that every month my Google search history featured “can you donate your uterus?”, that my periods had gotten so painful I often found myself writhing on the bathroom floor dry heaving in the toilet—she would think something was wrong with me. Instead, I made up a boyfriend named Richard. Richard and I had been dating for four months. Richard and I had safe sex. Richard was supportive of my decisions.

With that, the nurse punched a hole in my left arm and inserted the hormonal blocker that would thin my uterine lining, stopping it from shedding. It worked for a while, but a month after the top surgery, I woke up to a deep cramp in my insides, went to the bathroom, saw the brown stain. I sat with my head in my hands for a long time, crushed by the realization that this was something I could not bury.

*

I go downstairs where my pet gecko’s tank glows under a heat lamp. The sun is beginning to set through the windows, so I turn the lamp off, and the gecko startles awake. “Hey there, buddy,” I coo, and he glares up at me from his hiding place with slits for eyes. After the surgery, I didn’t trust myself to handle the gecko. I was on some cocktail of drugs that made my brain elastic to the point I would forget whole conversations and repeat them over and over. When the Oxy ran out and I was able to move my arms above my shoulders, I felt the need to hold the gecko again.

I pluck a mealworm from its plastic tub with a pair of tweezers and dangle the writhing creature in front of the gecko’s face. His eyes grow wide and focused. I lure him out of his dark cavern, and as he snatches the worm, I scoop him up. He freezes and then tries to escape through the cracks in between my fingers, but I’m faster. I lift him out of the glass, and he digs his nails into my palm. For a few minutes, his chin rises and falls with his rapid breaths. I carefully sink into an old armchair, wincing at the pull of my stitches. I cradle the gecko to my chest. He sniffs my blood-stained binder and I wonder if he understands. This is my new body. But, oddly, it feels as if I have always taken this shape.

---

Ashlen Renner is a journalist, essayist and amateur medievalist based in Virginia. They are a fellow at the Cheuse Center for International Writers with a research focus on medieval German literature, currently working on a book of obscure female saints and their violent deaths. Ashlen is the nonfiction editor of Phoebe and they are finishing their creative writing MFA at George Mason University.