Daily story, March 17, 2025

Flesh, in pencils, paints, or Plasticine, had always meant pink with a little yellow, the colour that outlined him and his brother and his sister and his parents. It always seemed a little odd to him, since it didn’t match the flesh of his neighbours and friends or even his uncle Den. But one day someone told him that we’re all the same colour inside, and so he thought that must explain it: people like him just happened to be the same colour all the way through. These days he was wiser, and he felt foolish when he recalled those childish ideas. But he couldn’t shake the idea of flesh as a pale and pink and squishy and elemental, made of nothing but itself, and of his own being somehow truer than other people’s.