Melinda Selmys has at various times lived in the woods as a hermit, reformed the Ontario electoral system, dated a fallen angel, opened a homeless shelter, home-schooled four children and made food fit for the beatific vision. Her favorite Vatican  document is Mulieris Dignitatem and her favorite poisonous mushroom is Amanita Muscaria. She writes from Etobicoke, Canada.

"You are flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone," the voice droned softly into her ear as she looked down at the endless line of laid out, bloodless flesh drying under the harsh lights of the supermarket store. A love song wilted in the air, stifled by the scent of day-old clams. The meat looked bitter and unpersuasive. She picked up a roast of beef; it was too stiff, too coarse, not marbled. She remembered the days of her childhood, and the rich scent of gravy, and the cows out in the pasture. Flesh had been something different then. Something mysterious and familiar. She put down the beef roast and impulsively grabbed a bag of halal chicken, as though the connection with a faintly mysterious, ancient-world religion would bring life back to pre-bagged meat.

She sat looking down at the chicken with a small knife in her hand. It was a knife that had been given to her by her father, before the accident which had not been an accident, and it had once sliced open the spine of a fish and laid it open, gills still gasping, flopping on the electric puppet-strings of severed nerves even after they had taken the head off. Very carefully, like a lover pulling the blankets off after the first night, she slid the knife under the skin of the chicken and began to peel away the delicate membranes that held skin and flesh together. It was strange how easily they came apart, how fragile the connections were, but there were places where the filaments were tough, where the surface refused to budge and reveal what laid beneath. The knobs at the ends of the legs. Tough ankles, tough wrists. Extremities that wouldn't let go. She put the knife down and used her hands, wrenching at the skin, pulling it off like an organic pair of socks. When she was done, there was still too much left to show what had once been: dry, yellow rags still clinging to the bone.

All the world contained an image of the interior. She hadn't told them that on the tests. It was a secret, or rather a mystery: a holy thing that had to be kept out of the prying hands of psychologists. They always thought that they were twelve steps ahead of you, with their programs and their guidebooks to grief and there little self-help cliques of other women who kept their secrets wrapped up close to the bone. There were some who would pull back the skin a little, and show a fragment of their hearts, but it was always the ones who had nothing to share -- the ones whose innards had already been cut out, the ones dancing to the music of synapses and tears. Not one of them -- not even the psycho-surgeons with their dream-analysis scalpels, had been able to get a wedge underneath her skin to find out what was there. But she talked a lot. Talked and talked, like a mother with a lullaby, or a hypnotist with a softly muttered spell. She had talked, and they had taken it for revelation.

There was a certain alchemy in cooking, but it could not turn her into a Muslim. She wanted to be one, in spite of all the nonsense about terrorism and women's rights. She wanted to be able to veil herself entirely, to look out through a haze of gauze, to feel her own breath circulating constantly back over her cheeks. Those women -- not the modern Muslims with a little scarf to cover their heads, but the ones that had the women's groups so up in arms, the ones completely covered, like ghosts sifting through the sands, those ones could cry and cry. They could weep oceans in the desert, and no one would ever hear it. But a piece of halal chicken, carefully sliced, and a couple of desert grown grains, and a little slice of lemon, these could not transform the soul. She had not been born for deserts and droughts and minarets. These had impressed themselves on her from the outside, late in the day. She sliced up an olive and put it into her mouth. It had come a long way. It had not weathered the journey well.

She lays out the dishes on the table like a pack of playing cards. Two of Plates, Four of Cups, Queen of Silver. The Knave of Roses is in the middle, in a glass vase that had once been an anniversary gift between her parents. The old card table is inlaid with mother-of-pearl, an antique. Lives have been gambled away over its cracked, refinished surface. The mother of pearl lies. It shows a family sitting by a riverside, fishing, the old man with the long beard trailing into the water has started to drift off to sleep, and the fish are clustering about his unbaited hook, hungry to leap into mother's cooking pot. She rearranges the roses, but they are liars and jesters all, as insincere as the card table. She realizes, with a little shudder, that she is being equally insincere. The man coming to dinner tonight ought to know. But instead she rearranges the roses, and turns the corners of the napkins up, lying them together with little nooses. The Hanged Man, quietly smuggled into a deck of innocent hearts and diamonds.

"The chicken is delicious," he says. It is boring conversation. Not even the nodding of a hypnotists watch in the wind, ticking away the time. He means that he is in love with her skin, and that he wants to press himself against its folds. Today she is a Muslim, and she will not even make the pretense of being seduced by such commonplaces. She nods and drones something equally mundane, picking up a little bite of chicken on the end of the fork. It is drenched in lemon, and there is tahini ground into its flesh like sand into the wrinkled faces of women in the desert. "This is a beautiful table," he adds. "It was my father's," she says. She twists the hem of her napkin into a rope.

Her father's hands were already wrinkled, worn out with fish-scales and playing cards, as they dealt the fatal hand. Everything should have been lost, but there were measures that had been taken. Mother had heard the Sybil whispering in the night, and slowly, carefully, she had measured out the store of nights remaining, and had siphoned their contents into hidden reservoirs. That was why they hadn't lost the table the next morning. That was why she had been able to keep the cut-glass vase where the roses stuck out their many taunting tongues in a too-romantic jest. There had been nothing left of the old farmhouse, of course, but who would have wanted it then? He had pulled down all of the wallpaper in his room, peeled away the layers of its skin. He had even picked at the old paper clothing the gyp rock, and had taken the tiles down off the ceiling. They had said that he had thought there was money hidden away there, left by the old woman that they had bought the house from. He had been desperate to find it, like a scientist dissecting a frog and hoping to find some meaning hidden within the secret web of its veins. But there had been nothing, and when he had been finished, there had only been the bare beams of the ceiling overhead, and a host of debts swirling like sand across the table in the drawing room below.

She sat in front of the window, looking down at the city street. Her dinner guest stood behind her, with his hands on her shoulders, and his lips hovering just a little ways from the nape of her neck. She had read everything in his heart, had penetrated the future foretold in the laying of the table. He was willing to gamble a little for the luminous skin that clung by slender membranes to the person inside her. He was willing to press his hands against the packaging, and test the quality of the meat. But he was not willing to gamble with his life. He would go into debt with her so far, and no further. He would steal a drink from her stolen reservoirs, would grow fat and gluttonous with pleasure, but in the morning he would shake the dust of her body from the heels of his sandals and set out into the desert. There was nothing offered except an exchange of dryness. "Do you fancy a game of cards?" she said.

It is said that there was an Arabian princess who held a man charmed with words for a thousand and one nights. It was with a web of words that she kept him from noticing as she bewitched the cards and dealt them out. He did not play well, was distracted by the turn of a hair, by the glitter of gold lying around her neck, by the wearing away of the hours, by the thought of twisted sheets and untouched layers of mystery. She held her cards before her like a fan, peering over them, studying the meanings in the curving lips of the Queen of Spades. She won quickly, voraciously, gobbled up his luck, until at last he had grown worn out and dry. When she picked up the deck again, sliding the surfaces smoothed with the oil of sweating hands back and forth between her deft fingers, he held up his hand and wanly begged her to stop. He did not want to play anymore. She laid down the deck undealt and stood. He draped himself around her waist, pulled her towards him, tried to bind her down with a veil of empty promises. She raised her head just a little, but her lips were not offering anything. As he bent to drink from them, the last poisoned sentence of the spell was pronounced over him in silence. His skin transformed into a hard shell, dark, nearly black, flaking in undulating lines, like the shell of a clam. She pulled away and surveyed the transformation. She had not known what form it would take, but now that she saw it, she could see that it was fitting. She got her old fishing knife and sliced open the thin flap of skin that kept the hardened lips together. The shell split open, but there were no pearls held inside. The meat had all dried and withered, and it crumbled away like sand, except for a small, tenacious tatter of rotting white that still clung to the mother-of-pearl interior.

With the point of the blade -- her father's blade -- she gently incised the thin skin of veneer covering a space of darkness in the center of the old card table. Into the wound, she pressed the flakes of mother-of-pearl that she had pried from inside of the shell, forming them into the image of a man. It was slow work, painstaking and careful as taking the skin off a chicken. When her work was finished, he was whole again, sitting by the side of the water, fishing with his father-in-law. A broken family, nearly restored. She folded down the leaves of the card table, and picked up the treasure-chest clamshell. All traces of meat had been scoured away. It was pure now, inside, shining and permanent. She concealed the deck of cards within, and laid it on top of the table.