legends · 5 min read ·
Skin Scan
A skin-health app flags three unrecognised marks that turn out to be a message the sleeper writes on herself.
**DermaCheck — Monthly Skin Health Report**
*Hello, Priya. Your monthly full-body scan is ready.*
**Overall score:** 94 / 100
**New moles:** 0
**Changed moles:** 0
**Unrecognized marks:** 3
*Unrecognized marks are often harmless. Consider a dermatologist visit if they persist.*
· · ·
My mother had melanoma at fifty-one and survived it. I have a lot of moles on my back that I can't see, so I use the app. Once a month it asks me to prop the phone on the bathroom sink and stand in front of the mirror while it takes sixty photos from different angles. It stitches them into a map and marks what has changed.
For eleven months the Unrecognized category was empty. This month it had three entries.
· · ·
**Unrecognized mark 1 — Left shoulder blade**
*Shape: irregular, 3 mm. Color: pale brown, darker at the center.*
*Please retake the photo with the room lit from the left.*
I couldn't see the left shoulder blade in the mirror, so I stood with my back to the wall, the phone on the floor, and braced myself to look over my shoulder.
The mark was there. It was about 5 mm now, and it was no longer a blotch. It was a row of very small marks, evenly spaced, like the holes in a sewing pattern. I counted seven. Each was the same size as the one before, and each sat a little further from the spine.
They were getting closer to the edge of my shoulder. I had not touched them. My arm had been resting at my side all night, and the sheet was not tight.
**Unrecognized mark 2 — Lower right flank**
*Shape: linear. Length: 22 mm. Color: none (light reflection only).*
*The surface at this location reflects light inconsistently. Please avoid direct flash.*
There was nothing on the right flank that I could see. But in the photograph a thin line ran diagonally across it, and when I tilted the phone the line caught the light. It looked like a scratch on glass. It looked like writing. I couldn't read it, and the app did not offer to read it for me.
**Unrecognized mark 3 — Back of the neck**
*Shape: tiny, 0.5 mm, multiple. Color: indeterminate.*
*This mark is outside the normal range of skin variation. Consider a clinical examination.*
I found it with two mirrors, one in each hand, under the hairline. A cluster of pinprick dots in a loose curve. They didn't look like a scar. They looked like a set of letters pressed in with the tip of a needle and healed over, very neatly, by someone who had done it many times.
· · ·
**Diary — Priya Anand, 14 October**
I called the clinic. The receptionist put me on hold for twelve minutes. A nurse came on and asked, politely, whether I had been sleeping well.
I said a little.
"Are you hearing a language when you sleep?" she asked.
I said I didn't know what she meant.
"Sometimes people write it on themselves and forget. The app helps us find it. Please don't scratch the marks."
I asked what the marks said. She said she couldn't tell me on the phone and asked me to come in. Then she said the clinic's name, and I could hear she was reading it from a sheet with my name on it. Under my name there was a list, and the list was long.
· · ·
**Diary — Priya Anand, 20 October**
The waiting room was clean and bright, and everyone in it looked tired in the same way. A man in the corner was drawing with a green pen on a clinic leaflet. He was drawing rows of small dots across the back of a stick figure, evenly spaced.
The dermatologist did not use the app. He had a magnifying lens on a stand, and he examined my back for a long time without speaking.
"These aren't moles," he said.
"What are they?"
"They're entries."
Through the lens I could see the dots on my left shoulder blade clearly. Each one was a single letter, pressed into the skin in a fine, regular hand. I knew the hand. It was mine. It was the way I wrote my grocery lists and my signature on the lease.
I had written a sentence on my own back, a little at a time, every night while I slept.
"What does it say?"
He looked sorry. "Read the last line first," he said. "They always start at the top, and they're always the same at the end."
I looked up at the mirror above the sink. Under my hairline, where I couldn't see it, the neat dots formed a last line I could read only in the glass.
*Please keep the mirror clean. We are still counting.*
· · ·
**DermaCheck — Monthly Skin Health Report (revised)**
*Hello, Priya. Your scan has been reviewed by a clinical partner.*
**Overall score:** —
**New entries:** 60
**Unrecognized marks:** 0
**Recognized:** 1
*Please take your photos at the same time each month. We keep the records for you.*
· · ·
I didn't take the photos this month. The phone was on the sink when I woke, face down, with the camera open. It had taken sixty photographs of me in the dark, and in the last one my arms were raised above my head, as if I were being measured for something.