Skin
by Sergio del Molino, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead.
Polity, 238 pp., $25.00
In March 2021, as the New York winter refused to quit and tiny husks spread across my skin, plastering first my elbows, then my upper arms, underarms, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, and shins, I booked a room at a cheap hotel in Nassau for a week. I was in the Bahamas nominally to renew my US work visa, but the trip’s secondary objective was, in a way, more urgent: to expose, within the limits of local regulations on public nudity, as much of my body as possible to the sun.
By the time I landed on the island the rash had swarmed across my face, forearms, and waist, scabs succeeding each other to form archipelagoes…
