The Skin Appreciates
Thank you to the Little Scorpion Press for publishing this story of mine. Also Monday evening creative sessions resume next week. And a look back, before the step forwards.
I stopped thinking about publishing things about a decade ago, it’s been a delicious relief; so I have been surprised and amused by how much it’s meant to have the very excellent Caitlin Magda Shepherd kindly put this strange little story thing into her inaugural zine for Little Scorpion Press at the end of last year. My copy arrived this week.
Zines haven’t really been on my radar but this one is so exquisite - wild and punchy, free and deep - in this over-algorithmed consumer zone of whatever’s happening on the planet right now, it feels incredibly fresh and renewing.
I’m enjoying every page, every contributor. My Instagram feed has got much more interesting since I stalked them all.
This first zine is a limited edition of 50 prints and not available to buy, so I’m sharing a copy of the story here. It’s something that came after life gifted me a reminder that we’re alive, not forever.
Monday Evening Creative Hours: 7.30-9.30 pm
Before I leave it with you, just a note that the Chasing Angels creative hours will begin again this Monday 19th January, at a slightly later timeframe of 7.30-9.30 pm.
Free for anyone to join who may appreciate some dedicated time to explore their own creative practice.
We meet for 10 minutes at the start to say hello and share updates and commitments, then turn off screens and sound until the final 10 minutes, when we do a brief check in on how the session went.
It’s been a very nourishing space so far, with a handful of dedicated attendees joining when they need, from around the globe.
Please feel free to join if you would find it useful. The link to sign up is here.
A brief realignment…
Whomever invented and so generously shared the wonderful Year Compass, I thank greatly. Flicking back over the one from the past year, it’s always uncanny to see which casual dreams came true in surprising ways, and the seemingly important priorities that shifted and realigned. If you’re still dragging your heels into the year, I highly recommend printing a copy and taking it to bed with you.
2025 wasn’t particularly easy. I was glad to lay it to rest. The Year Compass helps me loosen the narratives and make decisions about which parts are worth taking forwards. Creatively for me, these were:
Creative Highlights from 2025
Attending the New Writing South publishing day and meeting some incredible writers who have become friends. We now write together fortnightly in our Write Here, Write Now Brighton group. I am very grateful.
Returning to acting with the brilliant teachers at ACT. Which led to…
Acting in 2 very short films, and meeting some wonderful people.
Joining Scribe Lounge and attending their excellent 1-day screenwriting festival.
Starting to make my first short film with Mathew (with very sincere thanks to all who contributed here to our film camera, we are both so grateful).
Having this story published, and all the kind words that have come my way since to remind me that people appreciate it when you finish things and share them.
Getting to the 5000 words mark on my novel.
Commitments for 2026
After much thought, these are the creative promises I make to myself for 2026. Thank you for bearing witness. I will continue to share progress here, and on my Chasing Angels Instagram.
I’m keeping things simple and cutting back this year. In order of priority:
Finishing the first draft of my novel before my birthday in October.
Finishing the filming and editing for the documentary I’m making with Mathew.
Filming and editing the music video I’ve committed to for a wonderful friend.
That’s it. The only further promises are to my family, to be there for them as much as possible. Because life is short and precious.
The Skin Appreciates
By Agnes Davis, printed by Little Scorpion Press, 20th December 2025
It was round and smooth like a prize marble. Hard, a little tender. And it had been there, growing, for five weeks.
For a house of care, the building is shockingly un-cared for. I trace my fingers over the wall’s scars in the loo, where I’m hiding for another few minutes.
There are twelve languages on the soap bottle.
Why do places we are forced to be vulnerable in want us strung out on their own exhaustion? The striplights in the waiting room are like an inquisition. Daytime TV won’t shut up. Of all places, I think while trying not to stare at the other humans – all of us looking very peculiar under lights like these – this is where we need the scented, gold-label stuff of hotel restrooms. Free hand-cream. The silent gifts of comfort.
But this building seems to wear its pain openly, and under the glare I can feel myself unravelling. So much so that when I leave, I wish they had given me a sticker like when you come out of the dentist as a kid. I’d like them to hold out a whole sheet of stickers for me to choose from. They should say: still tender / don’t touch / mid healing / etc. So the world knows when you walk back through it. So you’re given a wider berth.
I find after that I do want my pain to be seen. I’m not ready to disappear into this street of ordinary Wednesday life. Pain likes to be held under the lights and examined. Pain slams doors. Pain shouts at children to be seen. I need to be seen.
But first, here I am still hiding in my monosyllabic answers to the robust lady doctor who has arrived in a tiny pale blue dress barely meeting around her mountainous womanhood, a Miss Trunchbull who has somehow squeezed into Miss Honey’s dainty florals.
You want a woman like this. Doctor has breasts like sofa cushions.
If I were a small child, I would fold myself up and sleep on them. Yes, I want this body like a mountain range to sleep on and learn how to be a mountain. So unlike my own scrawny ancestors whose little apple breasts never cease sighing, whose pokey bones are never still.
When I gave birth, labour took forty hours and for most of that time my midwife was a gentle bird flitting in to check on me, asking what I wanted in her thin, thoughtful voice. I didn’t know what I could want.
Her shift ended at the very moment my daughter was finally ready to arrive and in marched another great Miss Trunchbull-shaped human – all forearms, with a brow like the Welsh hills.
These are women you can succumb to.
In some ways this is a nonstory. I don’t have cancer. I don’t have cancer. I do not have cancer.
Yet.
Each time I say it, my central nervous system whispers, yet.
Because I’d never sat with death until this last month and now she is everywhere around me. A wind at the edges of my skin. Beautiful death.
Beautiful oneness.
I walk out into the street and a woman in sporty shorts holds her tiny son up high, not using her hips, her palpable lifeblood, his lifeblood, holding them both upright as they cross the road into the day. Embodied on this earth together.
I think, I will go home and kiss my daughter.
I feel like I’ve been defiled by the touch of death. The way when you lose your virginity your whole body is given back to you like an empty crisp packet. Redelineated. Unpeeled. I have new margins now and new internal measurements.
I lie on the bed and blue gloves move across my surfaces. Swift and oddly tender. Touch blossoms.
Her fingers, so practiced, are moving over the left breast without hesitation. The skin appreciates. Now over the right breast where, as confidently, within seconds they locate the little creature.
Miss Trunchbull in the tiny china blue dress has the instinct of a sniffer dog.
There are her fingers, where my fingers have been all this last month. Seeing. Naming the silence with her touch.
I spill out of my face and hope they do not notice.
Miss Trunchbull in the dress like a china plate is smoothing gel on my little apple now and has got out a scanner. I swivel my head and she swivels the monitor so that I can just about watch her grey screen fill up with the white marbling lines of my flesh tissue. There, right in the centre of the whorls is a huge round hole. A black hole.
It moves across the screen and nearby she finds two more smaller ones.
‘Cysts’, she says.
Oh.
‘I’m not worried. You can just leave them if you like, or I can take a bit of fluid out to test?’
Uh.
‘I’d prefer to take a little fluid, as there is this bit of an irregular shape up here.’
Her assistant brings the local anaesthetic and my eyes stay fixed on the screen.
My very own cyst babies.
Then comes the needle’s invasion.
It’s an oddity of pressure on the cusp of pain – a solid idea of pain – but I keep looking at the screen as the biggest of the babies moves around and around and then before my eyes Miss Trunchbull is sucking my baby up – the baby is sucked up through her needle – the black hole is growing smaller and smaller, smaller, and smaller… gone.
‘Can I have another green and another blue please, Sue? I’ll just get these last bits out.’
Then her arm passes over me on the bed – they’re about to try and hide it but Miss Trunchbull can see I need to know and so for a second the plastic syringe tube containing 8ml ish – a dose of Calpol – pale brown transparent liquid – is there in the air above my body.
She’s going in for round two. I close my eyes.
‘What is that?’
‘Secretions from the milk duct mainly.’
This time it does hurt.
-
Outside is cold. I am alone and think of stickers and navigate the pavement. I have been sent out with something. But I can’t get hold of anything while knowing I need somewhere to sit down.
Having death take up residence under your flesh like an ugly pet, keeping it a secret from life all this time and now – no pet –
They took my pet death away.
I am not grateful. I would have liked to say goodbye. I am quite ridiculous.
Ridiculous. I want to go back into the lights where they look at you up close.
I want to go back and ask –
All these weeks I’ve been walking the streets and looking at the other humans. Gathering into the arms of my mind like flowers everything I want to live for. There are piercingly personal questions I want to ask strangers who have cancer. What is it like to live with the yes of it? What is it like to say yes to death?
I want to ask, how many of your precious days are you wasting tidying up so you don’t leave secrets behind? Have you done your tax return? Do you erase lines in journals? No one will have patience to wade through my handwriting, thank God I’m sure of that. I’d rather they lived their own lives. I think of the story of Yeats’s wife who made his biographer decipher her husband’s scrawl like a labour of Hercules before she would trust the poor disciple with the real task.
I find a café. It is so warm.
I order coffee.
In this quiet corner, I sit and try to handle it, the thing I have been sent out with.
