A Pound of Flesh

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The throbber on the phone screen pulsed jauntily on the white background. She leaned her elbow on the chest-high desk at the front of the shop, wondering with vague irritation how much longer it was going to take. Her stomach rumbled faintly, and as her shoulder moved to accommodate her lean, plastic wrap crinkled in her ear. The ache was good. She was going to have to do a funky set up with a photo timer and her phone stand to get a picture once the wrap came off, but she was pretty sure she could apply aftercare cream on her own. 

The artist passed behind the desk looking tired, plugging his drink bottle directly under the spigot on the staff water cooler and filling the bottle with a loud glug, glug, glug that echoed across the empty studio. The front of house lights were shockingly bright in contrast to the dark outside.

“Sorry for keeping you past closing,” she said, belatedly. 

He shrugged. “Better than making you book another session. I’m outta here tonight. Got an expo in Sydney.”

Error! Beeped her phone.

She snarled and plugged the amount details again. “This always takes forever after end of business,” she complained, rubbing at her temple, and dropping the phone on the counter. 

He hummed, checking the time on his phone with a small furrow between his brow. “Do you have fast transfer? Or a credit card?”

“What’s that?” she asked absentmindedly as the transfer failed again and she refreshed app, rotating her debit card in her fingers. 

“Never mind,” he muttered. 

The fifth error told her to call her local banking representative or try again after open of business the next morning and then barred her from her account for too many attempts.

“Shit!” she snapped. “I don’t have a credit card, is it okay if I come in tomorrow after I call my bank?”

He scowled, crossing his arms over his chest. “No? I’m not here tomorrow, I’ll be in Sydney. You knew what this was going to cost up front, you can either pay now or I can take the tattoo back.”

She snorted, rolling her eyes. “Right, but I’m the one being unreasonable. I can’t predict service outages, and if I transferred in advance I would’ve gone over my budget. If you give me your account details I can send it straight over first thing tomorrow.”

“Yeah, right up until you have another service outage.” He came around the counter, uncomfortably close, a lot faster than she was expecting. “Come on.”

“What?” she said, looking up as he hooked a hand around her elbow and steered her back over to his station. She stumbled a little as the backs of her thighs bumped into the cool leather and sat on automatic, craning her neck to try and see him as he moved around her. 

“Hold still.”

“What’re you—”

The first slice took her by surprise, a white-hot line of fire down her shoulder blade.

She gasped, arching her back away. His hand clamped down tightly, a jagged, tearing feeling following in the wake of the incision. “Hold still,” he said patiently, with an air of focus, identical to how he’d sounded when he was inking the art to begin with. 

She gulped air desperately. Her chest heaved and saliva caught at the mouth of her trachea. All of her instincts screamed, her muscles trying to pull her away from the razor edge as it curled around the spur of her shoulder, but between his hand and her force of will she stayed put. 

It was bad enough as is, she didn’t want to entertain what would happen if his hand slipped.

A thin, thready, sobbing noise tore from her throat, raw and wet like the blood she could feel sliding down her back. There was less of it then she’d expect if she’d had half a mind to expect anything. It was like the tip of his scalpel had caught in a loop of fishing wire that run under her skin. 

She could feel it moving all over her back. Under her skin, the dreadful tugging and tugging and sliding pain—

And then the cutting was done, and compared to what came next, she almost wished for it back.

The reprieve was a brief, cold, gasping shock to her system, but then there was a strange cold air crawling up her back as the edge of one cut was peeled fully away. She flinched, jerking her arm up and biting down on a squeal as the flat blade of the scalpel slid under the edge of the incision, tiny sawing movements as he separated her skin from the layer underneath—it felt so much deeper than she’d ever have thought. There was a removal from the feeling, a numb throbbing that was somehow worse than the pain for her awareness of movement. 

Every so often he’d nick a raw nerve ending and she’d shudder. Tears leaked down her face and onto her arm where she’d feel it in pinprick drops, a stark contrast to the removed mutilation on her back. 

She couldn’t quite tell how long it had been. It simultaneously felt like seconds and hours, the space between the desk and the chair and his knife dilating into one eternal moment of hot pain and dull agony. 

The yellow eyes of the tiger on the wall in front of her bore down on her through the reeds, stripes blurring into the space between the plants. It was a gorgeous poster of the owner’s art, one that had drawn her to this studio in the first place.

There was a horrible pulling sensation accompanied by a burst of pain so strong that when she clenched her eyes all she could see were bright triangles of green and red. Her throat clenched as she tried to scream, forcing a horrible gurgling noise out. 

It felt like the million teeth of the velcro of her body releasing, and then an icy cold sensation of the studio air conditioning over her raw back and she slumped forward, acid in her mouth, gagging on air. 

“Not bad,” she heard him say distantly, and then the thwipping noise of plastic sheets slipping together through his portfolio, and a wet thwack. “I’ve left a message for the owner; your deposit’ll cover the services fee. If you want it back that’s no issue, but I’ll be out of the state for six months, and you’ll actually need to have the payment upfront.”

She nodded weakly, not even looking up as he deposited a plastic cup of water next to her knee and walked off, his footsteps slipping away from her ears into the empty studio around her.