y armpits itch.
I come from a wet area. I am not accustomed to this dryness. A hot and humid climate where people swim to work instead of walking. Or they drive. Everybody drives there. Nobody walks. I do not walk. I no longer can walk. I sit on the couch hoping the pain in my feet, the neroma, the swollen nerve located between the big piggy and all the little ones, recedes enough to make it into the bathroom for another shower.
The shower helps. Sometimes I just lay down in the basin of it, letting the water hit me like rain. It is all because of this dryness. This dryness makes my skin crack. It peels. Not like a sunburn. There is nothing warm about it. It 
stings. It is cold inside and dead on the out.
It is like the people here. It is like this place.
They all walk here, but nobody says hello. Nobody wants to know you. Nobody drives. I am not used to it. It is too dry.
My armpit itches again and again and again I scratch at it. Why does it itch like that? This has never happened to me before. My back itches in that place you can not scratch. I could not reach it. My stomach itched. I could reach that. My feet and ankles itched. I can scratch them too. I scratched them so thoroughly that I wore blisters into them. I scratched sores and kept scratching so they never had a chance to scab over until I slept. I made them bleed. The blood oozed and dripped and felt good and wet, so I kept on ripping off more skin from them. Not on my stomach, though. I need that.
As much as I have started to hate eating, to make dinner for myself all the time, for one, to eat a fancy and healthy meal alone with the glow of company on the television screen, to feel the bloated skin splitting after every tiny bite, I realized the necesity of keeping myself fed. I used the lotion to keep myself moisturized.
I use the lotion on my legs. It seeps into the wounds. It enters my veins, clogging them. Oozing out of the cuts. Transforming into a pinkish hue. They no longer need to bleed. I put it anywhere I could reach. I lather it on thick. I am a walking creampuff with the filling on the outside. Strawberry swirl. I put it everywhere. I thought I put it everywhere. Everywhere I could reach. I never thought about my armpits. Those are not supposed to itch. They are not supposed to get so dry. They are warm, moist places.
Not in this place. This place is dry.
Their humor is dry. Their spirit is dry. They sacrifice the supernatural for the scientific. To them there are no gods without explanations. They argue at the coffee shops about who has the best research. They all have diets they claim as the best. Vegetarian. Pescaterian. Organics. Vitamins. Biotics and Macrobiotics. They all have different exercise routines. They all have trainers. A thousand different versions of Yoga. They all have contradictory research proving theirs to be superior above the rest. They agree upon one thing: this lotion is the best. It is the cure for this dryness.
A six-inch diameter, circular patch between my shoulder blades ending as far as my fingers will stretch from both angles threatens to take over my whole body. From my back it has stretched onto my mind. Onto my psyche. Under my armpits. No matter how frequently I apply the lotion I cannot lubricate my brain.
If I had a scalpel and bone saw I might try.
My stomach and legs have begun to itch again. It seems like only a minute has passed since I last applied the lotion. At one time I could meditate the desire to tear more holes of skin away from my appendages with my fingernails. These desires seceded into numbness. The numbness permeated my mind. Neither the retreat nor the numbness helps much anymore. They have all begun to itch again. I reapply the lotion.
My lips are chapped. They have not yet split in the center like they would when I was a kid. But they are hard to the touch. Lips should be moist. Like armpits. Nobody has to, or wants, to kiss these red shells of mastication. There is nobody I really want to be kissing with them either. Not in this place. The people look at you on paper instead of skin. They read about your accomplishments. Your research. Your grade point average. Your level of degree. Your bank statement. Your income. Your exercise program. Your diet. The type of lotion you use.
My lips suck in breath. Dry air. I feel my lungs crack. They do not bleed. Blood would have a wet feeling inside. Wet would be good even if it were blood. I scratch at my ankles, removing the pink scaps, making them bleed dark red once again.
I look at the crags that are growing there. They convalesce up the torso. Out to my arms. They are flaky white scales of dryness. They want to crack. They want to bleed. They don’t. I take a sip of water. Under my hair, on my scalp, I am sure there are the same flakes. My head wants to split. My brain hurts. I take another sip. I am so thirsty. I drink a gallon a day. It does not help. I am always parched. My mouth is always dry. It tastes like I have been sucking on gauze pads at the dentist with that suction thing removing all of my saliva.
I shower three times a day now. Sometimes four. Sometimes more. This is bad. The chemicals in the water only makes it worse. It fries my hair. It splits my ends.
It makes my armpits itch.
Not immediately though. Immediately it is relief. Immediately it satiates. Immediately it is a temporary buffer from the dryness.
I let the room steam up. It is a fake warm and moist place. Like an armpit. I apply the lotion to my condensation rich skin. The lotion extends the buffer until the next time I feel the need to shower.
I am not supposed to put lotion on my head. I do anyway. It makes me look greasy. I could sell used cars if there were anyone here to buy them. Here they like the brand new green machines. They like the researched to death safety statistics. They like statistics. They like data. They like unemotional, nonfiction, cold hard facts.
They gave me this lotion. They suggested it. This lotion I use is top of the line at fifteen dollars a bottle. It was not tested on animals. It was not bottled by foreign children in a sweat shop. It was not even bottled on foreign soil. It is made and bottled and distributed right here in this country, in this state, this city. Right down the street. In a shop with an organic garden and an assembly line, it is put inside a recycled container. Better than that, it is a reused container. It is a reused container made from recycled materials. They wash out the old ones and give you a dollar discount on the new. Otherwise it would be sixteen dollars a bottle. It is made of a biodegradable corn plastic polymers.
But my armpits still itch.
It is not that this lotion is no good. It is the best. I could only imagine how I would feel without it. It is crafted from the highest quality all natural ingredients scientifically tested to bring you the best in dermatological moisture relief without poisoning the drinking water or harming the fishes or polluting the stream. It is safe enough for a baby to drink a pint without needing to be admitted into an emergency room. An adult could drink a case. I do not know how this was tested, but it was not on animals. Animals are sacred here.
All sentient life is what a cow is to a Hindu. Dogs with the right permits can walk off leash. They are still not allowed to pee on plants or enter most shops. There are more dogs being trained as seeing eye dogs here than there are blind people.
I look to the scales on my arm again. They are the same pattern as on my legs. They are jagged, overlapping currents of shell. I am turning into a fish. I am like the caterpillar achieving metamorphosis. Except there are not wings in my future. I will not be waiting in this aviary of the body waiting for the day to fly off. Instead, there is a pond. A murky pond. A polluted murky pond with some sort of red bacteria growing in it. This was on the news the other day. They do not know what is causing it. It was not my fault. Here it is illegal to contain water. It is too precious. All water, drainage water, rain water, waste water, irrigation must eventually follow its natural course down the hill. To the creek. To the red stream. I use the all natural, nonchemical, non polluting lotion. I thought everyone here did. They do. It gets strained in a reservoir, treated with an algae, dechlorinated, and spat back into the creek for the rest of the world to drink. I guess.
Just thinking about it makes me want a shower.
I take one then I put on the lotion.
The soap I use is made of the same stuff. It comes from the same place. It has Shea Butter in it. The shampoo and conditioner is from there too. It has Henna. My armpit hairs have highlights. My crotch hairs have highlights. This is a lie. I shaved them. I only said that for shock value. It is easier to apply lotion to skin without hair.
Maybe I will shave my armpits. Maybe I will shave my arms. My legs. My eyebrows. Some days they itch also. Some days I have dark circles under my eyes like I did not sleep through the night. Most days. Every day. My eyeballs feel strained and tired and feel like they are bugging out of my head. Like a fish. I know that sleeping is not the case. I sleep more than ten hours a night. A day. Still they are red. They are bloodshot. They are dry. They itch. They are tired of looking at things. They are tired of making water. They want to sit in a bowl of juice.
I take a bath. I put the soapy moisturizing agents in the water. All of them. The soap. The shampoo. The conditioner. The lotion. I lay in it face first. It is not quite jelly as I had hoped it would become. But it is thicker than usual. Thicker than water normally feels. I open my eyes. This is okay. The soap is from the same place as the lotion. The lotion is all natural. The soap is all natural. It is completely safe. They use the same ingredients, except different ones. It feels good, although, I know, it is a temporary relief. I could lay in here all night. I could sleep here. There is no pain.
I should find out for sure where all of the showers drain. I know lots of people in this place use this stuff. The drainage ditch is probably full of it. I coul dgo there. I could lay in the mud. I think it all drains to the creek. With the red bacteria. I remember seeing the symbols of fish on the sewer caps. "No Dumping" they say in all caps with the little fish emblem like in the old days of Christianity. They had to be secretive of their meeting places. Their churches. Their sanctuaries. They carved fishes into the wood of benches and dwellings pointing the way to temple. Jesus was both a carpenter and a fisherman. His disciples were vandals. I will have to look into where the heads of our fishes point. I will bet it is the creek. The creek is the church. The creek is my salvation. It is wet. Wet is good.
Yes, I remember now. I have seen a cap on Main Street on my way to the lotion store with that fish emblem. It has tiny blue bubbles coming out if it's mouth. I will go there tomorrow. I need to go anyway. I need to buy more lotion. I will go there and I will look at them. At the fish.
I should go tonight. Why wait?
I remember a runoff pipe exactly parallel to that sign on the sidewalk and the creek. No, it was not a sewer cap. It was a gutter. I will go to the gutter. Into the gutter. I will swim around in the muck. I will open my eyes and I will see underwater. I will grow my thick scaly skin. I will grow a tail. Or flippers. My legs will merge into one. My feet will web. I will no longer have to walk. I will swim. The neuroma, Morton’s neuroma, the scar tissue building between my toes will inflame to such grandiose proportions. It will spread to two and three, and three and four, and four and five until there are no numbers. All of the piggies will become one. One large webbed flipper. I will splash and I will frolic.
And my armpits will not itch anymore.
My arms will fall off. Or fade into my torso. I will no longer have armpits that need itching. They will be tiny fins for steering around the rocks and logs. My lungs will fill with water. Wet breaths. In the tub where I contemplate this my lungs do fill with water. I do suck in the wetness. The moisture. Instead of choking I accept it. My arms fade. My legs begin to merge. My toes web. It is miraculous. I am turning into a fish.
The displacement causes my entire body to shrink. I begin growing the hard shell scales from my lips to the whole of my body. Evidently, skin takes more space than a hard scale. I shrink. I wither into a smaller frame. During a spasm induced by the transformation, a lurch, my back flipper hooks the chain on the drain cover. It unplugs. The water recedes. It is being returned to the creek. I do not need to find that religious icon on the street. This will take me there. I think of what life will be like living in the creek as a fish. There will be no scientist fish telling me about the absence of gods. Everything will be because of the gods. None of my fellow water dwellers will think of doing research. None of them will have special diets or work out programs they claim to be the universal best. The thought of walking will be obsolete. No driving. No going to work. No judging your paper self. I will my self to be small. Smaller. Little enough to make it into the pipe. Tiny. The pipe is the highway to freedom from this dryness. I see the liquid tornado swirl forming over the escape hatch.
Wait.
There is a grate. A hair catcher.
I am not small enough to fit through that grate. I would have to be microscopic. Well, not quite that small. Small, though. Really small.
As small as a piece of the red bacteria.
The transformation is complete. I am not that small. My aspirations were not that large to be so small. I cannot fit through the guard. I cannot change back.
The water is going. It is almost gone. The water is gone. I flop into the moisture residue on the porcelain and take another wet breath through a beaded puddle. The puddle drains. I flop to another. The air is dry. Everything is so dry.
My scales itch and I have no hands to scratch them.
My eyes blur. They are too dry to see. My breathing of this dry air is labored. There is no more water. The place under my fins itches.
Fish do have armpits. They itch.
