clean

The woman stepped into the bathroom, slightly sweaty from the last two hours cleaning. She was in very good shape from all the cleaning she did, she worked two hours every morning making sure everything was just so. The shower was always the hardest part. You could scour a sink until it shone, but the human body was always full of the most disgusting germs and bodily fluids. You had to shower two or three times a day just to get rid of the grime long enough to tolerate it. The woman looked at her slim naked body in the mirror. She became frustrated at the sight of body hair growing back, she couldn't understand why all those removal systems that cost a fortune and promised permanent hair removal wouldn't work. She decided it was the fault of those Satanists working in the tv business, and resolved to call her pastor when she had a moment. She poked at her ribs, satisfied with the anorexic look of herself. Fat meant grease, and food, and so many unpleasant things. Fat meant you were a dirty slob. Sometimes when she went to the supermarket to buy more cleaning supplies and her vitamin supplements she saw those incredibly fat people. The first time she saw them she almost fell over. She had thought that 200 pounds was a lot, she saw a man that must have been over 400! He was twice the size of those horrid women in the church choir, four or five times her size, and even bigger than the cookie display behind him. She had almost vomited, and had gone running home as soon as she could to make sure she was still slim. She feared his fatness may have rubbed off on her. She scrubbed herself extra hard that day. She pinched herself, turning this way and that as the water heated up in the shower. She looked into her mouth and ears and eyes and was revolted. There was so much....the words themselves even sounded dirty. She hopped into the shower and turned it on herself, making a small whimper at the heat. Her doctor had told her not to have such hot showers, so she submitted and turned on the cold a little bit. She picked up the loofah sponge, unwrapped it from the packaging, and poured some anti-bacterial soap on it, and began to rub herself with it. She pressed hard on her arms, leaving little red marks. She scraped the stiff sponge over her legs, her stomach, her feet and hands, she tossed it in the garbage and grabbed another smaller sponge, taking it out of the package to get into her ears, her genitals. She hated washing that area, it was so dirty, so dirty. She hated the way it felt, and how no matter how hard she scrubbed, it was always filthy. She scrubbed it hard, felt that horrible good feeling and muttered a prayer to herself, scrubbing hard enough to hurt. When she was done with the small sponge, tossing it in the garbage, she picked up the shampoo. As she ran her hands over her shaved head, she noticed a small flap of what felt like skin on her forehead. She screamed, flailing her arms. What if she had caught some kind of disease? Maybe it was from that new grocery store she went to when the usual one was closed. She knew it had looked dirty, and the staff! Disgusting! One of them had a ring though her nose! She had avoided that line. She screamed for a short while, tears pouring down her face and mixing with the water from the shower. She took a deep breath and stood shakily, forcing herself to calm down. She wiped har face, ashamed and disgusted by the tears, but she had more important things to worry about. She didn't dare look in the mirror. She reached one hand up slowly, tentatively to her forehead. The flap hung there, defiant, unclean, ugly. She tugged at it a bit, satisfied when it started to move. When she pulled a bit harder she realized it was pulling at the skin around it. She stopped, unsure. She decided to just pull it off and go to the doctor as soon as she could. She pulled hard but the flap was resilient and pulled off more skin across her forehead. There was no pain, and it actually felt kind of good to pull it off. She pulled it down, and felt the skin peel off her entire forehead, pulling at her eyebrows, peeling off over her ears. She reached to one side and pulled at the ear flap, it tugged even the inside of her ear. Curious, the woman pulled at it and felt the skin come off from inside her ear, and all around the outside. She winced, expecting pain but feeling none, only this strange satisfaction, like when she finally got the last bit of soap scum off the shower curtain. She pulled the flap around to the front of her face, feeling it tugging off the skin of her cheeks. She gagged when she saw the disgusting mess in the shape of her ear, a three dimensional relief of all the dirt she had just peeled off and out of it. There were fine hairs, earwax, that vile white stuff she could never seem to get rid of, all attached to this strange semi-opaque sculpture. It wasn't actually her skin, she thought, or was it? She was reminded of those nature shows where snakes (the vile, evil creatures!) shed the top layer of skin to emerge new and clean. She gagged again, choking on her own bile, but somehow she knew this was the answer she'd been looking for. She dropped the ear, feeling it dangle at her side, tapping her shoulder. She grabbed the flap on the other side of her forehead and pulled, feeling it peel the grime off her eyelids, then her eyeballs themselves. She screamed quietly, the feeling eerie and uncomfortable. She resolved herself and kept tugging. The skin came off the bridge of her nose, then the inside of it. She kept her eyes closed, her imagination enough to let her know what it looked like. She pulled the skin from her other ear, and back over her cropped hair. She felt the skin taking the layer of oil off her two-inch long hair, peeling off the dirt on her scalp, destroying any awful fungus or mites or insects living on her. the woman smiled triumphantly to herself, but when she pulled the skin off her lips and felt it pulling at her teeth she gagged again, and this time threw up. She felt something ripping out of her lungs, bile and mucus and other things too horrible to be mentioned came flying out of her mouth, followed by the skin pulling anything left on her teeth and tongue off and out. She bent over, gasping for air for a few moments, until she could feel the bits of strange skin hanging off her. She tore at them, now resolved to remove this vile mess from her body. Her home, her temple. Her temple must be spotless. God was watching. She flailed wildly, no longer feeling as nauseated by the feeling of grime being pulled from her orifices. She pulled the slough over her waist, feeling the body hair she shaved so strictly being pulled out by the roots. It was not at all painful, only the deepening sense of suffering for perfection. A tranquility came over the woman, but she could not slow down. She pulled and pulled, almost laughing with joy as the rank mess of her genitals was finally rid of the hair and messy fluids inside it. She peeled the skin off her legs, feeling the hair finally going away forever. She pulled it off her back, her buttocks. She felt so good she thought she might not have the enema today. She pulled it off herself, stepping back from it, watching in fascination as this snake-skin of herself dissolved in the hot, clean water of the shower. She watched that filthy self swirl down the drain, the mouth open in an eternal scream. The woman stood there until it was all gone, the turned off the shower. She stepped into the sunny bathroom and wiped off the mirror with a paper towel which she immediately threw away. She stood back and looked at herself, her skin gleaming, she couldn't smell a thing. She was finally all she wanted to be. She was clean.