Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (5 page)

She was flying.

She was free.

Tina was everything and nothing all at once.

Around her, everything became instantly silent and dark, her mind totally absorbed in the moment. She felt the pain as she rose in the air, but only so much as someone is aware there are other planets or galaxies above them. To her, the pain became her air; a tool of necessity to get beyond the physical.

She closed her eyes, began to breathe meditatively and flew on her physical and spiritual plane.

It was glorious.

Then, suddenly, the feeling was lost.

“Shit!”

Tina opened her eyes and she looked down at James, fifteen feet below, standing at the crank and looking pissed off.

“What is it?”

“Something is wrong. You’re jammed. Damn it!” He looked up and the problem was clear. “Looks like there’s something wrong up top. If you want higher, I have to clear it.”

“Make it fast!” Tina called out and bit back laughter. Her body was filling with endorphins and she was feeling a huge natural high. Light-headed and giddy, the pain was evaporating.

“I’ll try.”

Tina’s body hummed with an electricity she’d never felt in her life. Each nerve ending seemed to pulse, to throb with its own pleasant heartbeat, slowly moving toward a unison that she knew would be the final key to finding her true self.

Throb. Throb. Throb. Throb. Throb.
Close.

She could sense it, feel and see in her mind’s eye, her dream coming true. Her own inner heaven was about to be seen.

Then, James screamed.

Loud and abrupt.

Her eyes shot open in time to see her boyfriend of three years, the man she loved and trusted—hit the concrete almost directly below her. 

His body smashed into the ground hard, and he let out a grunt that was nearly drowned out by the thudding sound of the impact, and the awful sound of many bones breaking. She screamed his name, shaking the cords and hooks that held her in the air, but the only thing that came out of him was the blood that pooled under his body.

Tina began to scream for help right away, and it took her nearly fifteen minutes to realize and remember that they were nowhere, out in a part of town lost and forgotten. Abandoned. 

She felt hope drain from her as time passed, a feeling of doom setting in. Losing the high meant losing the endorphins, too. Pain came slowly at first, seeping in as it had faded out only minutes earlier. The shadowy ache quickly became brighter and more intense. Those pleasantly throbbing nerves were now like small bombs exploding, burning with stronger and stronger intensity.

Within the first hour, the generator died.

Then the last of the fading sun went with it, leaving her alone and terrified in the cold open space. 

The night was clear and the moon spilled just enough of its pale light for her to see the floor as the first scavengers, dirty gray rats, found James’ body and made tentative plays at him. She could see them nibble at his fingers, their fat bellies smearing the blood into a fuzzy shape, streaked at the edges from their tails.

She turned her face away, trying to keep herself apart from what was happening to her lover’s corpse below, but that only made her aware of her own problems.

She was cold; naked except for her panties. She had to pee. There was no food. No water. No way down—well, no safe way. No help coming. No hope.

Tina told herself to calm down. Meditate and take herself away from the hopelessness and fiery agony. She sucked big breaths in, and slowly pushed the air out in a rhythmic cycle. Four counts in, six out. And for a while, it worked. She took herself to the woods, to a warm, soothing setting and let her mind move away from where it knew she was. 

Then, she felt things.

At first, she ignored the sensation. She often got tickles or itches when meditating and they’d go away. This was different, though. There was something on her back. More than one something. It tickled like crazy. 

Tina moved, swaying on the frame as she twisted to see. It was completely useless. The farthest she could see was where her right shoulder blade was buried under a mountain of skin punctured by a metal hook. Her arm couldn’t begin to come close to touching the tickly spots, and the shift in balance only made the pain worse.

The tickling sensation on her back was persistent. She tried not to panic, but her mind filled with the possibilities of what they could be; flies? Cockroaches? Beetles? Whatever they were, they made her itch all over.

Tina could feel their small, hairy legs moving up and down her bare skin, moving around the burning holes where the hooks were punched through. She tried not to think about it, but those itchy things made it impossible. She could feel them and, in her mind’s eye, see them all over her. She thought of them burrowing into her open skin, eating before laying their eggs deep inside her so when their larvae, their maggots, hatched, they’d have something to eat.

Panic filled her and that swelling feeling made her thrash about. All she wanted was for them to get off her, leave her alone, but no matter how much she moved, they didn’t get off. They just crawled.  Ate. And mated.

Hours passed, the dark turning to light. She pissed herself, panties clingy and damp, chafing her sensitive skin. It seemed humiliating, but hardly the worst of her problems. The agony was constant and the day was timeless but for the sun dipping and her growing hunger and thirst. Again, sunset.

As the hours passed, Tina thought about how resilient skin was, even though it appeared so fragile. She had been hanging by ten hooks through her skin, yet they didn’t just tear out.

As easy as a bullet or a knife or even paper can cut through it, her own skin was strong enough to hold up her one hundred plus pounds.

How much longer
could
it hold? How much more could it take with the bugs on her, nibbling and mating in and on her skin, feeding on the exposed fat and muscle? Was it resilient enough to keep her in the air? Would that even matter?

She looks down now at James, dead below her, and wonders how long until her flesh admits defeat and resigns her to the floor next to him. She wants to cry over it all—losing James, the pain that makes her want to heave, and knowing that, before the next twenty-four hours have passed, she will likely be dead.

Dying is bad, but anticipating it, counting down the minutes and seconds to it, she thinks, is the worst part.

The bugs feel as though they are swarming on her, as though the maggots are outnumbering the adults. She feels the itchy legs and worse, the small bites up and down her body. She can feel wiggly things working in the holes that even she can smell now. 

Death may be better than this
, she thinks.

The raccoons are still busy with James, and she wants to yell at them, scream at them to get away. Her voice is gone though, throat too dry, thirst making it sore and scratchy. Swallowing hurts and the dust in the air makes her mouth gritty.

I love you, James. You fucking idiot.

He was dead. She would die. The bugs and scavengers would probably clean up long before anyone entered the warehouse again.

Tina’s body is rattling from the cold. The cords vibrate between her and the frame. Tina knows death is coming, and she knows it comes down to a choice. She can die of starvation, thirst, or shock from the extended trauma. Maybe even exposure. It could take longer than she wanted to think about.

Lose-lose.

Without fear of death and bracing herself for the worst, she begins to thrash back and forth, kicking her legs, rocking side to side. Ten explosions make her eyes stream with salty tears and a guttural hissing rushes through her gritted teeth. But she can’t stop. She knows what she needs to do.

Hysterical, she is determined to make it down to where James is.

And finally, it happens.

One of the hooks rips through, tearing open her flesh. The pain is blinding. White-hot. But she can’t celebrate the first one. It’s the first of many, a small victory.

A second goes, in her left calf. Then a third, at the small of her back.

Each one is awful. Her adrenaline is in overdrive. She’s crazed and smiling now, dangling fifteen feet above the concrete by the only two left; one in her left thigh, and one in her right lower back.

It’s only a moment of the awkward drape of her arms and torso to one side before the last two hooks give way, nearly at the same time. 

Falling, not flying. But free.

THE HUNGER ARTIST

BY LISA MANNETTI

“The ultimate effects of starvation are identical whether the process be gradual or rapid, occupying days or years, and death results when the body has lost six tenths of its weight.”

~William Gillman Thompson, 1905
 

“Many serial killers are pathological liars.”

~Dr. Jack. Levin, Criminologist,

Northeastern University, 2012

1973

All this time and there were still the dreams. Iva heard the wind soughing in the pines, heard the pines themselves creaking, listing like shipboard masts when they swayed. It was summer, but it was terribly cold; the damp that settled on everything—tables and blankets and floorboards and skin—fled inward to her bones.  There was never any moon lighting up these dreadful nightscapes, but she always saw her sister, Callie, standing barefoot by the lake, white gown plastered against the skeletonized frame of her body, hands rapidly opening and closing like a pair of gobbling beaks.

“I’m hungry, Iva,” she mourned. “I’m so cold and so hungry.”

And it was always a shock when Iva went toward her, and—moonlight or no—underneath the white cotton gown, she could clearly see and count her sister’s ribs.

Then Iva would wake shivering under the hospital blanket. Sometimes she rang for the nurse; sometimes it was enough to turn on the lamp and watch her fingers pinching the healthy flesh of her own hip or arm. Knowledge—certainty—that she was no longer the prisoner starving in the New England woods sixty years ago was balm that warmed her—to a point. Nothing, no one could soothe her completely; after all, her beloved Callie was dead.

Everything had gone wrong back then; two years that Iva still envisioned as a meager handful of dull, feathery ashes. No gust or exhalation ever stirred or scattered them. Sometimes she might forget the hideous physical ordeal when scenes from the trial intruded on her consciousness. Sometimes, recalling the shame and the heart-pounding fear that surrounded the weeks in court—when she was afraid Gretchen Burkehart would be acquitted and win—upset her equilibrium so badly, that visions of her own suffering and Callie’s extremis seemed almost benign by contrast. Both events were terrible. And the memories that were ashes lay eternally unmoving in her palm, she thought, because one day when they laid out her body (her elbows crooked, snugged to her waist, her hands crossed) they’d be pressed against her heart: that had been burnt past charring, too, during those black, seemingly endless two years. Ashes to ashes.

1912 

“Just tell us in your own words, Miss Fredericks ...” Thomas Vining began, one hand gently curving the rail in front of the witness box—as if just by standing close to Iva the prosecutor could steady her nerves.

She swallowed, but there was no spittle to moisten her throat and her voice was thin. “I saw an ad in one of the Boston papers for what sounded like a wonderful rest cure. Callie—she—maybe I indulged her too much, but she was my baby sister and our parents were dead; Callie was only twelve when Mother died, still a little girl ...”