Drop your skin off at the tailor’s after you shed eighteen pounds chugging laxatives and jogging around your ex-girlfriend’s cul-de-sac at two a.m. because you want to fit into your hazard orange Dumb and Dumber tuxedo for your brother’s wedding. You’re the best man. At the wedding and in life. Your mother always said so.

The skin tailor offers a choice of any loaner skin. Stand there, all exposed meat and muscles and organs, the overheard sprinkler raining the tailor’s proprietary painkilling lubricant on you, misting numb joy, and flip through the skins hanging on the rack.

You’re a young man, the world tells you; with ancestry from southern Europe, the DNA kit claims; privileged, so say the politicos; college educated, your diploma insists; American, your passport tells you; poor, your tax returns reveal: but how can the world actually know you, what you are, how you feel? Maybe you’re an elderly Turkish woman screaming at an Erdogan rally or a Japanese toddler running around the outskirts of Osaka buying half-price sushi or a duck paddling its fat waterfowl ass around a half-frozen pond in New York’s Central Park or a disembodied consciousness slopping around in a bucket of ether? Who is to say?

Slip into a loose sack of a Black woman’s skin. The tailor says your own skin will be perfectly tailored in three days but you need to swap out the loaner for another tomorrow. Gladly accept the terms because what matters is looking good at the wedding, showing up, being the best, and you’re curious about Blackness.

You have miles to walk in another’s feet. Spend the day as—inside, within—a middle-aged Black woman. Grocery shopping at the Aldi struggling with a rickety cart no one offers to help you with. A mani-pedi by the Vietnamese women on Fifth. Are you becoming a caricature, a stereotype of what you imagine Blackness or Black femininity to be or entail? Is Blackness even supposed to be capitalized? Remind yourself to google it later as you pinch the folds of borrowed flesh.

The whites of their eyes on you, foreign sensory organs taking you in. Can they tell who you are, suss out your inner race and its presumed attendant prejudices, sense the systemic oppressor lurking within? Skin-swapping is common enough. Or perhaps the eyes you see belong to different races than their skins project? A street of essences shrouded in chosen flesh. 7.8 billion paranoid frauds and counting.

You google black + Black people + hobbies. The AI results tell you that African Americans enjoy outdoor activities. Running, jogging, trail running. They also may prefer more structure and less adventure than white people. But you’re not adventurous, normally. Or is this you adapting to your new loaner Blackness? Once again you opt for the familiar, heading to the usual McDonald’s drive-thru instead to eat the usual quarter-pounder with a side of fries that crawl out of the box and across your lap like greasy slugs. The same taste, that McDonald’s mass-produced consistency, the magical uniformity of those golden arches regardless of the color of your skin. America, the beautiful.

The next day you’re clothed in the skin of an elderly Asian man, “Korean,” the tailor says, “anyong haseyo.” Yet despite your best, most educated, most sensitive and correct intentions, you fear becoming a caricature once more, end up at a Korean barbecue place for lunch sipping a cold Tsingtao and muttering arigato every time the young white waitress — Is she in fact young and white or just another patron of a skin tailor? How can anyone truly know these days? And what would knowing, or what passes for it, get you? — checks in on you. “Fuck,” you say out loud, realizing arigato is Japanese, not Korean. “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Korean?” you ask the white waitress in your white English. “How the fuck should I know?” she responds.

Afterwards, stand outside the neighboring Kumon staring at the children practicing arithmetic inside. Feel the connection, part or particle of the global majority during the Asian Century. For dinner, sit at the ramen bar trying to playact as old despite your young muscles rippling beneath the crepey borrowed skin. The loose lip skin flaps against your young teeth. Slurping noodles. Steaming broth. But your fingers beneath the skin fumble the food because you never learned how to use chopsticks.

“Arigato,” you say to no one.

The tailor is almost ready. One more day. The wedding is tomorrow so you’re cutting it close but he gives you a young white woman’s skin for the day. Your type or what you think your type is or what society has conditioned you to consider your type: sporty, fair, freckled. Stand in the parking lot fondling yourself, the stranger’s skin you’re currently inhabiting, running your hands up the deflated sacs on your chest and down the skin stretched taut across the muscles of your thighs, trying to imagine what it’d be like to fuck yourself. Men ogle you but is it because you’re beautiful or is your ill-fitting skin repellent to them or are they looking not because you’re attractive but because they’ve been told to look at women, because that’s what men do and if so, who told them that, their fathers, society? Or are their mothers to blame for birthing them, bringing them into this world in the first place, and not slitting their toxic little throats in their cribs? Where did they learn this? Who’s responsible for this behavior? The individual? The people who brought them into this world, the people who raised them? No one? Everyone?

Perch on a stool at your local sports bar waiting for someone to offer you a drink. To touch your leg. To fuck you. No one speaks to you until an old man sidles up and he’s shrunken and ugly — or is he young inside, really, young guts, young bones, or is he a woman? Or is oldness attractive and perhaps your knee-jerk interest in youth is a form of society-wide indoctrination? — but you figure you’ll fuck him anyway because you want to experience being fucked, experience a different side of fucking more fully than sticking your pinky in your ass, but he just says “you eating those?” and points at the peanuts next to you. Try to bat your lashes but your borrowed eyelids aren’t responsive enough to your muscles beneath them, a lag in the connective tissue, so to the old man it looks like a slow, grotesque, wink.

Later, take a few laps around the cul-de-sac for old times’ sake. Guzzle laxatives while staring at your ex’s dark window.

Spend the night, as usual, alone.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” you tell the tailor, sliding into your prepared skin. The fit is perfect. You’re stylish, handsome, the best. Pay the tailor and head to the wedding venue for the pre-ceremony whatevers. Drinks. Onion rings. Eulogies for the mythologized antics of bachelorhood. Chatting with your brother, his friends, his soon-to-be father-in-law. A room full of white men—or humans bedecked in white male flesh—drinking cheap beer in the corner of a nondescript country club and half-listening to each other, half to the sportscasters on the giant television behind them. So many humans, so much skin, such little comfort.

Hours pass like this as the bride and her friends prepare themselves. Make-up. Gossip. Sugary cocktails. Change into your orange tux but it feels wrong. The tux. Your skin. Your self. Wrong, all wrong. In the mirror your skin looks slack, borrowed, false. You’re you and yet you’re a fat Black woman and a frail old Korean man and a sporty white girl and nothing and this nothingness starts to grow, starting with your skin and emanating outwards, negating the world, its distinctions and expectations, rejecting its classifications and histories.

Strip. First, the tux. Next, your skin. Stay in the bathroom like that, staring at your skinned self. The fat. The sinews. Red blood, white fat, blue veins. Someone is banging frantically on the door. “The ring, man,” a voice says—white? Black? Asian? Human? You can’t tell but you understand. You understand.

Don your orange tux looking your best and carry your brother’s ring across the lobby, through the bar, and outside, walking past the gawking guests and leaving little footprints of blood as you feel the world meeting your inner self, its rawness prickled by the air.

“The best man is here,” you announce, a pillar of blood and bones and guts in an orange tux. A human. An animal. The bloody meat of animated matter, the fragile house of a temporary and nonsensical sentience. “Right here.”

You feel alive in your exposure. Flies flock to you, burrow in for a feast. The tux is sticky. A warmth envelops you: the meat of you searing slowly in the sun.

Jon Doughboy is a emulsified story meat consisting of scraps from literature’s slaughterhouse. Kmart realism, fabulism, metafictional satire, grotesque palavers, absurdist psychogeography—they’re all chopped and processed into the literary bologna that is Doughboy. Order it sliced thick @doughboywrites