Daniel gets sunburned on a September beach day with his wife and son. He forgets to reapply sunscreen. By Monday, the skin on his nose is peeling.
He pulls off the strip and looks at the skin underneath. It's his nose-but smoother, cleaner, somehow younger. The kind of skin you'd expect on a face that hasn't been in the world yet.
He tells himself this is normal. New skin is always different. That's what new means.
But he keeps coming back to the mirror. And the peeling spreads.
*Molt* is body horror about what happens when shedding becomes compulsion. It follows Daniel across twenty days as the sunburn becomes something else-something that doesn't stop at the boundary of the original damage, something that doesn't ask permission, something that has its own agenda.
