Issue 141 June 2025 The Habit Issue

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This Island Toward Which I Row and Row, Yet Cannot Reach Alone

by Jennifer Lesh Fleck

June 2025

Friday night. My older sister points a beam at my bedroom ceiling so the sky appears: charcoal edging to violet, clouds in layered bruises, starlight peeping through the gaps. Claretta then directs a second beam at the wall. An impression of our city blooms there, trembling and unfocused as she fusses with the controls.

A silent view of the pulsing world outside. All of this is supposed to make me feel a part of things, less confined.

I don’t have a terminal illness. I have an interminable one. Decades still ahead, predictable ones in which my body fights with itself, breaks itself down. My joints are loose as a puppet’s. My skin’s hyper-stretchy, yet fragile as petals.

“Something’s not right,” Claretta says. She means the cityscape. “Sorry it’s fuzzy.” She zips her windbreaker.

Stay, sister, I think. Sit with me in the dark. Don’t leave me alone.

“Look!” I pinch the loose skin at my clavicle, pull it up like a beige turtleneck. One of my old carnival-y tricks.

“Quit it.” Claretta doesn’t laugh like she did when we were kids. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Can I have my visor, then?”

“Winnie, you’re getting way too obsessed with this skinshare bullshit.”

“Please. You don’t have to live a single minute like this. Like me.”

With a dubious expression, my sister fits the visor to my skull, slides the toggle into my hand. I stretch long against clean sheets to wait.

Claretta’s leaving is a brisk breeze against my spindly legs.

* * *

Not many choices tonight. Most don’t work this late.

But Squire0829 is a newbie, a blipping avatar sitting there with solid 4.9 feedback. Bio: buncha high school track medals, then the Olympic trials, doesn’t say what after. Pretty, too. Tall and strong-seeming.

I request a skinshare. Then I wait, wait.

My pain patch is straight weaksauce tonight. Discomfort erupts in three places at once. A migraine drills into my left eye socket. My clavicle—insulted by that earlier tomfoolery—registers its red-hot complaint. And my left hip, the one I nicknamed Wobbly, reminds me—twang by painful twang—why I’m a shut-in at age 38.

Finally a heralding tune trumpets.

Success! My knight has answered!

* * *

Squire0829: what do u have in mind 2nite?

WobblyWinnie: Shocked. Usually y’all are only around in the daytime for, like, hikes, tennis, golfing, boating…

Squire0829: yeah, ik. typical healthcore yuppie shit. i got windburn from sailing 2day. but rent’s due. extra hours help.

WobblyWinnie: My idea’s kinda stupid.

Squire0829: try me. upfront tho: if ur a weirdo I’ll block & report.

WobblyWinnie: I don’t want something fancy or sporty or weird. Can you just…take me dancing?

Squire0829: hmmm.

…

…

…

Squire0829: standby. linking in 5.

* * *

My pulse races. I’ve never asked anyone to go dancing before, let alone another woman who’ll now let me ride along, tucked inside her consciousness, tinier than a flea. 

But here we are.

Squire0829 has just sauntered into this nightclub I used to know. Pastel lights strobe against smoke. Music throbs, vaguely goth and mopey, last century’s depression reinterpreted, made uptempo. Ice chinks against Squire0829’s teeth as she drains the pink daiquiri I requested.

Then the sweetness hits me, chased by the shiver of vodka.

Some say skinsharing is wearing a person. I don’t like this line of thinking.

Yes, I’m inside Squire0829, sorta. But it’s not like a nesting doll tucked in another, bigger doll with cutouts for eyes and ears. No, I’m carried inside her mind, featherlight and safe, held. Shadowing her senses and proprioception, while her thoughts remain private, sacrosanct.

She squares her shoulders, then strides towards the dance floor. Loose-limbed, long-legged, confident. Everyone watches…she’s that kind of person. Magnetic, radiant, rare.

It always impresses me, what physical health feels like. I’m not just inside another person, but I’m in another place. A far-off island shrouded in mist, one I used to know, that I row toward daily but haven’t been able to reach for years.

* * *

Squire0829 dances with everyone and nobody, all at once. I catch the flash of admiring eyes, lips parting appreciatively to show teeth. She may not be an expert, but she has natural grace, creativity. She’s an athlete. Her heart beats steady and she isn’t winded. It feels like we can—if we choose—go all night.

She weaves in and out and around the other dancers. Soon they begin to part, drawing back, a dazzling tidal force.

I can’t believe it! They’ve opened the center of the floor for us! 

A ball plated in mirrors spins above, raining its confetti of lights. People clap and stomp, and a message lights up my visor:

Squire0829: ok, now it’s all you, girl. 🙂 git in there, show ‘em what you’ve got.

And I’m healthy and strong, and I’m dancing and cutting my own moves, and I do this until the roots of her—our—hair are wet with sweat, until beads of it spill down our back like a broken necklace, until everyone’s cheering and clapping us on the shoulders good-naturedly as the music fades, as we finally make our way out to head home.

Squire0829 limps, but just a little.

Still, I’m surprised by that.

* * *

WobblyWinnie: Real talk: I’m disabled so…yeah. Bed-bound. Tonight…it’s meant the world to me.

Squire0829: yeah, been down in the dumps myself. washed-up olympic hopeful. damn sprained ankle before the trials…it bunged up everything for me. I hadn’t yet found my footing.

WobblyWinnie: My destiny was set at birth. Shit DNA. Born too long back for gene edits…

So…

Listen, can we meet again sometime?

Squire0829: absolutely! 5 star review headed yr way. 🙂

WobblyWinnie: Back atcha. :)))

* * *

I lay the visor on my bedside table. The stars on my ceiling fade as morning materializes.

Claretta had so carefully made up my bed with her precise hospital corners. Now it’s a mess of tangled sheets. The tech usually dampens your ability to move, forces muscle atonia so you lie still and inert. 

Seems these frail legs of mine revolted last night, and my new friend and I? We truly danced.

* * *

Ⓒ Jennifer Lesh Fleck

Comments

  1. Michelle J. Diaz says:
    June 6, 2025 at 3:13 pm
    Beautiful writing!
  2. BDV says:
    June 6, 2025 at 9:15 pm
    So good, Fleck. Very moving.
  3. Summer Smith says:
    June 7, 2025 at 2:25 am
    This is such a beautiful story! I really hope something like that becomes available in the future too. I couldn’t imagine being able to do all of the things my body can no longer do, once again. It would be a dream come true. Thank you for this wonderful tale!
  4. Jeni Ouis says:
    June 8, 2025 at 5:01 pm
    This was truly a wonderful piece!
  5. Pete says:
    June 13, 2025 at 10:11 pm
    Beautiful.
  6. Victoria L Dixon says:
    June 14, 2025 at 7:24 am
    Well done! Beautiful tale.
  7. James Miller says:
    June 21, 2025 at 4:08 pm
    Really pretty!

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Things Elan Reacquainted Himself with After Being Broken Out of His Single-Day Time Loop

by D.A. Straith

June 2025

1. The colour ochre, painted by the city mageguard around his front door as a warning: do not enter, premises unsafe.

2. His parents’ address, which is where he tells the mageguard captain to find him while he waits for them to untangle the knot of curdled time living in his room. In four years of Mondays, he has visited his parents many times, and often wished he could forget their coordinates. But he can’t think of anywhere else to go: his flatmates are being temporarily evicted too, and he’d normally lean on them, but he feels guilty on the anomaly’s behalf—as though it’s his fault—and tells his flatmates he’s fine. He’s got somewhere to go. He’ll see them when it’s all sorted.

3. The cobblestones outside the townhouse, right in front of the stoop, which he vomits onto after the mageguard leave to address the next cross-temporal flare on their list.

4. Tuesday. Elan has not seen a Tuesday in more than four years.

5. The market on the way to his parents’ place. The fruit seller, who should have red apples on the left and green on the right, but who—confoundingly—has them swapped around. The pastry vendor, who for four years of Mondays has sold Elan’s favourite onion fritters as the day’s special, and now has apricot pastries for sale. This should, in theory, be exciting, but the sight of sun-bright apricots nestled in leafy pastry makes Elan dizzy with dread.

6. His parents’ door, free of warning ochre and yet thoroughly unwelcoming. When his mother answers she tells him he looks sick and should be at home. When his father greets him it is with a nod; then he goes back to studying his own smoke-rings. They feed Elan, sure, but in all the visits he’s paid, in all the Mondays he’s lived through, he has never managed to convince them that their planet’s intensifying temporal decay has finally found their family. “If I can’t see it with my own two eyes,” his mother says. His father says nothing at all.

7. His mother’s cooking, which tastes like ash, because she’s so annoyed with him that she sets the plates down just loudly enough to steal his appetite.

8. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

9. His calligraphy tools, which he has lost touch with. Before this all started, he was skilled with quill and ink. But then the loop. In desperation to escape he abandoned the quill and spent two in-loop years learning how to build cross-temporal emergency flares; then, after failing to achieve the speeds necessary to build magical artifacts in a single day, he learned the art of burglary. In these uncertain times, flares can be bought as emergency supplies from any magecote, but someone of Elan’s minor standing can’t easily access those. And every morning things reset. Or they did.

Now he’s back to looking for scribing work, but his hands and attention have been irreversibly retooled.

10. The way his mother ignores him for days at a time when she’s angry with him for not finding work. The way his father willfully ignores this, or disappears altogether, like he always has.

11. The ochre-painted door of the flat, which is unguarded even by the lowliest mageguard recruit. All they have on the door is an enchanted security seal, and past that, a single magical observer eye. Easy.

12. His beloved, familiar bedroom; his beloved, familiar bed; the anomaly itself, which he cannot see or smell but which he is certain he can feel, and which he stands there, staring at the bed, waiting for.

Waiting for what?

For it to take him back?

13. The ochre-painted door. The cobblestones. The market. His own nausea. No, he can’t go back, except the loop is the only place that makes sense.

14. The pastry vendor, who catches him by the elbow when Elan falls against the strut holding up their stall’s awning. Time sickness? they ask, eyes crinkling knowingly.

Time sickness, Elan confirms.

The vendor nods. Took me months to recover when I had my first. Kept jumping forward and back. Strange world we live in, nowadays.—What kind was yours?

Elan swallows. Time loop. I lived Monday over and over again for years. He doesn’t add I kind of miss it; surely that would make him seem ungrateful.

Ah, well then, says the vendor, who has already been crinkling paper around an apricot pastry, and now offers it. Welcome back to a world that changes.

Elan almost refuses, terrified. What is the world if not defined by onion fritters? But the orange apricot glows up at him like sunrise itself, and Elan thinks, why not taste kindness for once, and when he bites through shattering crust and the soft cheese hidden in the centre, he feels the snapping grit of crystal sugar and the honey glaze, and the world blooms in his mouth. He catches his chin with his hand—catches drool and stray flakes—and swallows a moan, and the vendor laughs, pleased with his pleasure.

Good, huh, they say, and Elan smiles, and he thinks, maybe I will come back again tomorrow.

* * *

Ⓒ D. A. Straith

Originally published in Inner Worlds, June 2, 2024. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Comments

  1. James Miller says:
    June 21, 2025 at 6:28 pm
    I really like the “knot of curdled time” line and the play on words at the end. Clever format for what you’re doing here.
  2. Iris says:
    June 23, 2025 at 9:39 am
    This reminded me of coming back to work after being hospitalized for a long time, I had that same feeling of almost wishing I were still sick because the small world of the hospital bed was extremely familiar, and the real world seemed so much bigger. Being outside was my apricot pastry moment. This is a great little story, thank you so much.

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It’s Become a Bit of a Habit

by Elou Carroll

June 2025

You line the coins up in your palm and, when you think no one is looking, slip one between your lips. It rests on your tongue and your bones soften—the tension melts from your shoulders and you tip your head back, close your eyes. Copper is calming.

It’s become a bit of a habit, this mantra of yours. You pretend the one and two pence pieces you have stashed away—in the empty two litre cider bottle he left behind, forgotten behind the sofa—are for the arcade penny pushers the next time you venture to the seaside. But you haven’t seen the sea in years. You don’t do it often, suck on pennies. No, not often at all. Besides, it’s not sanitary—who knows who’s touched them?

But what if you do? What if you do it every day? You could, if you wanted. Who would it hurt if you did? There’s no one to stop you now he’s gone—that husband of yours. Packed his bags, a duffel and a suitcase, without so much as a reason or goodbye just before your fourteenth anniversary.

You flip the coin on your tongue and it clacks against your teeth. The boy to your left, who was moments before shoving chocolate bars into his inside pocket, frowns up at you. He glances up and down and his frown deepens. You pull your raincoat closer—copper is calming. The boy purses his lips and pulls the stolen confectionery from his coat and flings it back on the shelves. Part of you wants to take them up, to slip them in your pocket and stride out the door; your fingers flex at the thought.

“What you looking at?” he says and you gasp. You hadn’t meant to stare at him, didn’t realise—

The coin is no longer on your tongue.

Your eyes bloom like morning daisies, their white petals spreading wide. Copper is calming—but not when it is lodged in your throat.

The boy steps backwards. “What’s wrong with you?”

He looks at you as if you’re an animal gone rabid, as if you’re dangerous, feral—as if you might bite at any moment. You reach for him and your mouth is open but only a rasp comes out. Copper is calming.

You ball your hand into a fist and thump at your chest—one, two, three.

“Oi,” he shouts over his shoulder. “Oi. I think she’s choking or something.”

There is a clattering from the front of the shop, a small display is upended and, after a pause, thick arms covered in wiry black hair rope around you.

“It’s alright. You’re going to be alright.” At the last word the shopkeeper thrusts you up by the diaphragm, and again. It hurts. His arms are too short to do it properly and for a moment you think you might die. It is the first time anyone has touched you in months—not the worst way to go.

The shopkeeper tries again and the coin careens from your throat and lands between two packets of off-brand biscuits. When he lets you go, you try to grab at his arm to stop him from seeing it.

But even still, your hand travels to your pocket. Your fingers find a coin and you want to eat it up. You take it in your palm and hold it there until it warms.

The shopkeeper and the boy exchange a glance. The two pence on the shelf shines with your spit.

“It’s become a bit of a habit,” you say as if it explains it—as if it’s enough.

* * *

Ⓒ Elou Carroll

Comments

  1. Guilherme Vieira says:
    June 16, 2025 at 9:18 pm
    I could taste this one. Great!
  2. Jacob says:
    June 29, 2025 at 3:00 pm
    The second person point of view is quite well executed, learnt something here …awesome!

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The Aftertaste

by Julia LaFond

June 2025

When my younger sister was still hiding in her room for the third day in a row, I couldn’t keep waiting for her to come to me. It took a bit of coaxing, but in the end she let me in and let it all out. I gathered up her tears and her heartbreak, swallowing it all down for her. Her sadness tasted like a heavy sea fog, thick and gray and salty, but the bitter aftertaste was a small price to pay for my sister’s happiness. It wasn’t long before she was smiling again, and so was I.

I’d just sauteed the onions when Mom got home, overflowing with the words she wished she could say to her manager. Red-faced, she paced back and forth, filling the air with burning indignation. Hugging her was like putting my hand on the hot stovetop, but I did, and came away with handfuls of righteous anger. I sprinkled it over my tacos. It wasn’t that much more spicy than the chili powder, and besides, it was worth it to see Mom at peace even for a little while.

When I woke up in the morning, salt was clinging to my tongue. I brushed my teeth twice as long as usual, washing it away with minty freshness.

My best friend sat next to me on the bus, back from her family’s beach house vacation. Her phone was full of pictures. With each swipe of her finger, rancid bile bubbled up my throat. Envy. I swallowed it down just in time to squeal and smile, sharing in her excitement the way I wanted to.

After we split up for class, I belatedly noticed it wasn’t acid coating my tongue, but salt.

My backpack was overflowing with homework when I arrived for my shift at the local burger joint, only to discover we were short-staffed. While everyone else scrambled to keep up with the dinner rush, I was at the register, swallowing down everyone’s panic and impatience and frustration so I could keep smiling at the customers. Once things finally slowed down, I decided to skip my free meal combo – I wasn’t hungry anymore.

When I got home and realized it was too late to get any homework done, I swallowed that down, too, even though it nearly made me throw up. The last thing Mom needed was my worries on top of hers.

Not long after midnight, my sister’s screams pierced the air: another nightmare. I combed my fingers through her hair, collecting up all the shadowy wisps and tendrils of fear. They writhed around in my mouth, struggling to be free, but I forced them down in the end. The coppery taste left my mouth dry, but my sister was already nodding by the time Mom returned with hot cocoa; it didn’t take long to lull her back to sleep.

After tossing and turning for a while, I got up and did my homework. When I finally finished, I was too exhausted for mere aftertastes to keep me awake.

Morning brought with it the lingering taste of salt. No matter how much I brushed my teeth, it wouldn’t go away.

I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep in class until my history teacher was screaming in my face. My eyes watered from the acidic anger curling up my nostrils, but I kept swallowing and swallowing and swallowing until he was panting for breath. This wasn’t really about me: he was lashing out. So instead of landing myself in trouble by lashing right back, I swallowed down my own shame and indignation and appeased him with a heartfelt apology. He said it was all right as long as it didn’t happen again, and it didn’t. The fire raging inside my intestines was more than enough to keep me awake for the rest of the day.

When my best friend caught me skipping lunch, she took me aside and made I-statements straight out of our module on eating disorders. She meant well. She always meant well. The fear swirling around her was less appetizing than the cafeteria’s greasy pizza squares, but I feasted on it anyway, washing it down with my own exasperation. Smiling, I calmly assured her I appreciated her concern. The hesitant way she nodded was how I realized I hadn’t quite swallowed the sea fog wrapped around my tongue.

Mom was working late again, so my sister asked me for help with her math homework. It ended up being equal parts algebra and swallowing down her endless sea of anxieties like an all-devouring whirlpool. When she thanked me and hugged me tight, it made it all worth it. But when I was alone in my room, staring down at the incomprehensible jargon scrawled across the pages of my calculus textbook, there was barely any room left in my stomach for my own confusion and worry.

When I woke up the next morning, the salt was so thick I couldn’t close my mouth anymore. I swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until it stopped up my throat. As I writhed on the ground, gasping for breath, I dimly wondered whether it was mine or my sister’s or Mom’s or all of ours together. It didn’t matter. There was too much of it, and now I was going to choke to death.

My door flew open, and Mom was there, coaxing the chunk of salt out of my mouth. She tossed it aside, letting it shatter across the floor. More welled up from inside me. If I didn’t let it out, I was going to choke again. I swallowed anyway because otherwise, Mom might choke instead.

Tears shone in Mom’s eyes, but she didn’t let me wipe them away. She called the school, told them I was sick, and took me to the cemetery. Standing over Dad’s grave, I couldn’t hold in my tears anymore. We both cried and cried, coating his headstone in salt like powdered snow.

The aftertaste was strangely sweet.

* * *

Ⓒ Julia LaFond

Originally published in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, October 2023. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

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The Seal Wife

by Madeline White

June 2025

“Beware the shore, mo ghràdh. If a man steals your skin, you cannot return to the sea without it.”

Isla was warned – by her mother, her mother’s mother, and every mother before that. She was a maighdeann-mhara – a selkie. To shed her seal skin and walk on land as a maiden was her magic. To risk losing herself by half every time she did was her curse.

“Every man in the isles knows a selkie makes the best bride, and will want one for himself,” the mothers cautioned. Despair makes an excellent housewife. But Isla refused to lose her sea-life to men, or her land-life to fear. She loved the liberty of the ocean, the way she could be fully herself there, with the mothers, but she also loved the sunshine.

Slipping bare-footed from her spotted pelt, she was always careful. She saw the red-haired man from a safe distance and darted to her skin, clutching it protectively as she eyed him.

He held up his hands, broad and work-worn. “I’m not going to take it, I just want to talk.”

He was a fisherman, and his name was Thomas. He’d seen her from his boat.

“I ken the stories my kind tell of yours, and am sure those yours tell of mine are less flattering,” he said apologetically. “I don’t want to be like that. I would know you, if you’d let me, but I’d never take your freedom.”

He seemed earnest, and kind, and despite herself, Isla liked him.

In the beginning, she always kept a toe in the water, eating bread and oysters with one hand and clutching her sealskin with the other, ready to slip into the sea and bolt home at the first sign he’d cage her.

He never mentioned it. Never pushed her. They shared dinners and kisses first on the sand, and then the rocks, the only touch of the sea the occasional ambitious spray as the tide licked the cragged shore. She drowned the call of the surf in the murmur of his voice.

When the last scraps of autumn bundled into winter, she asked to see his village.

It was simple and charming – not home, but not frightening. Wreaths hung from doors, and people bustled cheerfully through the streets. Thomas took her to a tavern.

After, he returned her to the shore, removing his boots to wade into the frigid water. That night and every night after, he walked as far as he could without the tide soaking his kilt. They kissed in the surf and he stood as she pulled her skin back over herself, not leaving until her body cut through the waves and she was gone.

Still, the mothers worried. They’d known many men, and warned they were all the same in the end. Thomas was waiting for weakness, that was all. But Isla knew him, and the mothers didn’t. She knew what sort of man he was, and he wasn’t the sort to corner injured prey.

One night, while Isla and Thomas were in the pub, deafened by drink and music, a gale blew in. A creature of the surf, Isla was unbothered, but Thomas shivered badly, and the sea was a mass of roiling black waves with frothing tops.

Isla couldn’t stomach the idea of Thomas being pulled under, but she knew he wouldn’t let her leap into this hostile ocean alone. So she suggested they go to his house, and when the storm lasted three days, it didn’t make sense to leave in the middle of it.

She kept her skin close, but she needn’t have worried. Thomas cooked her battered fish and steamed clams, and stoked a fire to warm her, and cleared a table beside his bed for her to set her skin within reach as she slept. She dreamed of the ocean, of the way rain hammered on the water and her mothers sang in the sea caves, but she woke to him.

When the storm cleared, Isla returned to the sea to say goodbye to the mothers. It was like ripping away a part of herself; gutted by a fish-knife. But she was in love with this gentle man, and she disowned her fear.

For two years, the spotted pelt lay lovingly folded on the bedside table. Isla would reach out and touch it when the sea sang her name. She imagined she could always slip away, return home. But then she’d roll over and Thomas would pull her close in his sleep and she would tell herself that perhaps she would go tomorrow.

When they married, Isla moved the skin to the linen closet. It felt disrespectful to their commitment to have it out in the open. That night, she dreamed of the deep black of stormy water.

She bore a daughter, slipping from the womb naked and pink, without a pelt of her own. More followed. Isla moved the skin to the highest shelf so they wouldn’t find it and ask questions. It still smelled like home.

The skin has remained there for years now, shoved between an extra blanket and Thomas’s great kilt. It’s mostly hidden, untouched and remembered only in dreams of sliding through the waves.

Still, every so often there is a winter guest, or a ceilidh, and when Isla goes for one of the woolens her fingers brush the lush familiarity of the pelt, her nose catching a whiff of fish and saltwater. In those moments she pauses; listening to her girls laughing in the kitchen, and remembering the mothers in the ocean; the way they swam together, sleek bodies sliding past each other, and barked laughter on the rocks at night. Mothers her daughters would never know.

Her body and soul ache to step into the skin and become that which she has left behind; this aging human skin a prison of comfort and regret.

“Maybe I’ll go tomorrow,” she whispers. She tucks the pelt further into the closet and shuts the door.

* * *

Ⓒ Madeline White

Comments

  1. Iris says:
    June 23, 2025 at 9:05 am
    That’s a wonderful twist on the tale, and mirrors my experience. Thank you.

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Skinfluencer

by Zeke Jarvis

June 2025

Cammie didn’t really like the product, but she understood that her opinion wasn’t part of the job. Instead, her job was to make it look good, desirable to the target consumer, so that’s what she’d do. Like always.

Cammie laid out the box on the table, and checked her camera. Cammie took a deep breath and hit record. “Hey everybody, thanks for being back here. Today, I’ll be using Light Touch’s new line of body mods to get a gorgeous new look.” She took the top off the box. Inside were a series of narrow, metal tubes. She took the first one out and held it up to the camera. “Here we have the Color Transfer and Peeling Tube. It’s very portable, lightweight, and, as you’ll see, very easy to use.”

She pushed the first of three buttons, and a narrow blade came out. She smiled hard and slid the blade underneath the skin on her left forearm, making sure that she didn’t flinch as the piercing began. “You can see that the blade goes in smoothly, and there isn’t much spillage.” Cammie made sure that she didn’t flex her left arm at all so that the blood didn’t leak out of her arm. She touched the second button. She could feel the blade undulating slightly, and she could feel the straw drawing blood out of her forearm. “It really does all of the work for you, pulling your blood and carving out the space that you’ll need if you use the microbial inserts. I’m going to skip that in this video, but I’ll probably try them if I go out later.”

Cammie pulled the blade out. She pressed the blade to her lips and pressed the third button. The blood came out slowly but steadily. When it finished, she smiled again at the camera. “As you can see, the coverage is even, and it really pops. You can see that it’s quick, simple, and easy to use.” She paused the video, then she put a transparent band-aid over the wound. Later, she’d edit in some music and a quick fade.

Cammie wiped down the blade and used the table to push it back into the tube. The taste of blood on her lips was unpleasant, but she knew that she’d need to leave it on or the comments would speculate on it being gone. Cammie took a breath, smiled, and unpaused the recording. “Now we’re on to the Sparkle Tube. It’s my first time trying it, but I’m confident that it’ll work really well. So, let’s try it out.” She took the second tube out and held it up to the camera. “This is a little heavier than the color one, but I think that, when you see what it does, you’ll understand what that weight is there for.”

Cammie unbuttoned the top three buttons on her blouse. She didn’t usually have it buttoned that high in the first place, but the effect would be better if she made the gesture. This tube only had two buttons. She clicked the first, and another blade came out. She took a deep breath, then she plunged the tube into her chest at an angle. It hurt and felt heavy. She folded two little legs down to balance against her chest. “It’s a really fun and easy bit of body mod that you’re going to want to get it on while it’s still fresh and new. And now,” Cammie touched the second button, “the sparkles.” A series of fiberoptic lines came out of the tube. They glowed brightly and cycled through a variety of colors. “It’s sure to make people notice, but it’s not overly showy.”

Cammie thought about wearing one to the club. It would almost certainly get bumped a number of times, and that would be painful and horribly messy. And that wasn’t even starting on the fact that it ran on the electricity that courses through the wearer’s body. Cammie wondered who the hell designed these things.

“It hasn’t been even two minutes, and already I’m totally used to the weight of it. It’s also pleasantly warming.” Cammie let herself prattle on a little bit more about the possibilities and how romantic meeting someone with this thing in your chest might be. When she finished her bit of a monologue, she paused the recording again. There was one more tube. This one would peel back her skin and plant a series of slim, sharp diamonds underneath, leaving them to protrude through her skin. It would be incredibly painful to do and to later undo. But this was her job. It was what she was good at. She took one more deep breath, looked into the camera, and smiled.

* * *

Ⓒ Zeke Jarvis

Originally published in Backchannels, December 12, 2023. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Comments

  1. Paul says:
    June 30, 2025 at 8:19 am
    Awesome work! I love the kind of sci-fi vibe and how you really dug into the influencer part. I feel like in most sci-fi settings influencing and advertisement like this ought to be commonplace.

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