Salena Casha
As Seen Here: Woman Preserved in Iron
When Peter brings the cast iron skillet home, Elaine is shocked by how natural it comes to him. How he seasons it with shortening and azure flame before working oil into its skin. The house smells like Crisco and sweat. Her bones shiver as he kneads it. He tips the pan, coating the metal, and then lets the extra oil patter down onto aluminum in the oven.
Once he’s finished, it’s a smooth black patina. So unlike the web of lines underneath Elaine’s left eye. He leaves it out on the stove and goes for a run and while he’s away, she dips her thumb into the black pool, expecting liquid heat. Instead, her skin slides away. Not bone or muscle, but uneven iron.
The start of panic hardens behind her eyes. I’ve got a deck to do tomorrow before the big meeting with Carlisle. When am I supposed to fix this? She thinks of calling her PCP but shuts the app down. Her last visit with them resulted in the most expensive five minutes of her life. So instead, she takes a seat at her kitchen table and stretches her arm out, palm up, on the wood. The table is cherry, her skin is eggshell except for the deep black of the thumb.
If the neighbors see it oxidize, she knows what they’ll say. That Elaine, she’s really let herself go. And it’s fine, you know, if she keeps it to herself, but it’s just spreading.
It’s the same sentiment as the time her friend told her she looked prettier when she didn’t smile. Containment, she learned, was always preferred by outsiders.
She brings the thumb close to her face. It’s still newly forged, but she knows that if she takes her eye off of it for just a second, it’ll be unusable. It’s fine now but it would become a problem when it creeps up her neck and chest. Then, it would make sex weird and she does love sex. More troubling, she wonders if it could make it hard to breathe, if it’ll be like inhaling icy air, if the alveoli in her lungs will burst or just fossilize.
She gazes longingly at the door through which Peter left. He probably won’t know what to do either, she realizes. If there is any time not to panic, it’s now. That realization brings her arm up from the table, her elbow hinging inward. She stands and pushes the kitchen chair back in place before walking to the stove.
She breathes deep, lights the burner, and begins. When Peter returns, she’s got the oven open and her hand inside and he pulls her away from the heat before he sees it.
“Ok,” he says when she explains what happened or really, just tells him what she knows so far. “We can work with this.”
The seasoning ritual gradually replaces her daily shower. As she makes coffee in the morning, she gets the oil and turns on the burner and marinates in the gentle solution. She always preferred it to butter and her mother swore by it for face masks. Though now, her crows feet and discoloration are no longer visible. No longer something she worries about.
Peter never mentions a cure and as the days pass and the iron spreads down her limbs, she begins to notice small, but concerning changes. Her fingers cannot grasp items and so she walks around with a pair of kitchen tongs to pick her clothes up off the floor. If she goes outside in the sun, her body temperature rises to over two hundred degrees and blisters her soft insides. She wears gloves and then long sleeve billowy tops and then wide legged pants and finally a hat that she hates but hides her well enough so people don’t say hello.
Soon, she stops going outside entirely. Peter, on the other hand, begins running longer. She prefers when he’s outside so she can spend the hour in front of her bathroom mirror, checking for signs.
It all seems so silly now.
“You’re so beautiful,” Peter says to her. He said that before the iron and he says it still, but now, she knows it’s true. She has seen her iron skin glisten. “You have to tell me if it starts to hurt.”
His eyes are worried and the gray is beginning to come through on his eyebrows. With an index finger, she smoothes away the crease above his nose.
“Of course,” Elaine says, but she knows it will never hurt, that it’s just a gradual slowing, a gradual burning away motion and movement and she wants to embrace the time she has left as much as she can. It’s happening already, how, if she doesn’t remind herself to breathe, she stops entirely. How she wakes in the middle of the night and is unable to rise.
So, even though she is flexible enough, she has Peter help her with the oiling and the brushing, has him spend more time than necessary on harder to reach areas, the spot between her shoulder blades and the dimples just above her hip bones. She closes her eyes and savors the way his palms press and kneed into her metal. Shivers when he licks the excess oil off her neck. Slow dances with his bare chest on her cool skin, letting it suck away his heat in the summer.
And one day, as she’s heating the oil in the palm of her hand at the stovetop, her heart stops. Her feet are so heavy now she can’t even lift them to stagger back and collapse on the floor. Instead, she places her hand against her neck and lets her vision tunnel.
Peter finds her and holds her hand, still warm from the stove. Even though he tries, his thumb does not peel away.
It was just for her all along.
Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent words can be found in HAD, Metaphorosis Magazine, and Flash Frog. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her Substack at salenacasha.substack.com.
