what remains of celeste

The office was silent now.


The maggots were gone. The stench scrubbed away. The woman who bought the bag—the first bag—had been escorted out hours ago, still weeping into silk sleeves.


But Adeline remained, her knees drawn to her chest in the middle of the room, the bag laid before her like a relic. Her eyes refused to blink. Her breath was shallow, ghost-thin.


It was her.


The bag was Celeste. The tint, the scent, the softness that could never be replicated—it was her. Adeline had never sold it. She knew she hadn’t.


Hadn’t she?


She tried to retrace the years, but everything between then and now had grown soft, muddled, dreamlike. When had the showroom expanded? When had the vault been rearranged? When did she stop keeping inventory herself?


She blinked.


A flicker—faint and slow—rose behind her eyes like a breath held too long. A memory.


Her hands. Holding the bag.

Opening the vault.

Closing it again.

Opening it again, weeks later.

Running her fingers along the leather, whispering its name like a prayer.

Celeste.

Celeste.

Celeste.


The memory shifted.

She had held the bag on a sleepless night. Not out of grief. Out of compulsion.

Her knuckles ached from clutching it. Her lips murmured secrets to it in the dark.

She couldn’t remember why, but something told her—she had wanted to share it. Let someone else see. Just once. Just for a moment.

Maybe she’d meant to take it back.


Maybe she never did.


She clutched her skull now, nails sinking into her scalp.

Had she? Had she? Had she?


A sudden vision: one of her assistants. Smiling. Holding a wrapped parcel.

"One of the old vault bags, miss. You asked me to wrap it , I think it would make a nice auction piece."


No. No, no, no, no—

She had nodded.

She had nodded....


Adeline dropped her forehead to the floor. Her breath came in ragged gasps.


She had let the world touch Celeste.


Not in malice.

Not in intention.

But through the slow erosion of time, of detachment, of fame—

She had betrayed her.


The bag sat before her, still perfect in its ruin. Maggots now only in memory.

And in its soft decay, it whispered:


“You let them take me.”


---


But the bag... the bag should never have rotted.


Leather, once tanned, once cured and sealed from decay, should endure for lifetimes. It should resist time like a fossil resists forgetting. But this bag—Celeste—was different. She had not been harvested like an animal. Her skin was never meant to be processed. Adeline had preserved it not just with lime and oils, but also with memory, with guilt, with obsession. And memory does not tan flesh.


Perhaps it was her sorrow that lingered beneath the surface, a final resistance that refused to let her rest as a remembrance. Perhaps the skin remembered love, betrayal, and the soil it was never buried in. Whatever the reason, the bag began to change.


It rotted not like leather—but like grief.


Not all decay is visible. Some rot starts in silence, in the hidden pockets of a soul, until one day, it bursts open—fresh with maggots and guilt and truth.



Adeline had discovered, in the deepest marrow of her craft, a truth both hideous and holy:


Nothing matched the beauty of human skin.


She had tried— it came out meaningless but she had tried. She tanned the finest calf hide, massaged oils into supple veal, polished every inch of cowhide until it glowed like pearl beneath candlelight. But it was never enough. No hide captured that elusive tone—that impossible warmth, that living softness.


Only once had she touched perfection.

Only once had she held it in her hands and stitched it into something divine.

Celeste.


But time is a fog, and obsession a quiet rot.

She forgot Celeste—not entirely, never entirely—but forgot the why, the who, the terrible cost.

All that remained was the feeling:

The thrill of stitching beauty into being.

The ache of chasing that tint, that scent, that warmth again.


And so she searched.

Then stalked.

Then selected.


Her hands, once calloused from humble tanning, grew precise. Surgical. She began to hunt—not with blades at first, but with eyes. Eyes trained to detect the smoothest skin across a crowded street. The fairest tone beneath the glow of a café lamp.


Adeline was no longer a tanner.

No longer a leathersmith.

She had become a curator of flesh. A murderer.


Perfection demanded sacrifice.

And so she gave.

And took.


And in her pursuit, she forgot the face that first taught her love.

Forgot that her art had once been a gift.

Forgot Celeste, until the past returned rotting in silk, maggots kissing the seams of a long-buried sin.

To be continued.......