Miso Soup - Friday Flash

The preparation was not ritualised in any manner whatsoever. He writhed at the first touch of the razor's blade. He became particularly frenzied when the handmaidens were threshing his pubic hair. So much so that we had to warn him to be still, lest the acuity remove his sex altogether. All that body hair lying on the floor, did it serve to keep him warm? Well the poor lamb was shivering without his fleece, but there again that was just as likely through dread.

We endowed him with some more hair. Delilah weaved in plenty of extensions, doubling both the thickness and the weight of his thatch, tugging his neck downwards and making his muscles ache with the unfamiliarity of it all. We tried applying some false eyelashes with particularly effeminate curl, but the sweat teeming from his brow continually degraded the adhesive and so we abandoned the notion. Medieval torturers were wont to pull out their victims' fingernails, but we favoured the opposite approach. We attached acrylic nails to the bitten cuticles of his fingers. Then we painted them red. He moaned as they pinched the raw quicks like pilliwinks. We chided him that's what you get for a poor manicure regime.

Initially we plumped for clip earrings, but he screamed as the clamps bit home on his tender virgin lobes. One of our circle took pity on him and suggested some pierced earrings of post and clutch. Maybe it wasn't pity at all, maybe she knew we didn't have the  requisite instruments. Another of our colloquy offered the exquisite contrast of the stab against the squeeze, by having one pierced earring and one clip-on. We discussed the matter and it was generally felt that since men rarely wore matching pairs, we did not want to reproduce such ornamental miscegenation. We settled on the drop-pearl earring solution, necessitating fist an ad hoc piercing of both ears. The chosen dangles were of sufficient mass so as to drag down into the flesh groove and incrementally distend the maimed flesh further.

We draped bracelets, bangles and thick steel bands across his supplicating wrists, which were of so onerous bulk as to drive his beseeching hands apart and then prevent him from holding them up at all. Li-Yu knelt down to affix the filigree chain to bind his ankle, conducting its delicious agony of intangible tangibility, as the local skin's feedback sensors are sent into overdrive as they try and calculate whether there was in fact any material pressure present at all. We plugged his navel with a heavy but cheap gemstone that probably leached its impurities straight into the heart of him. We placed a faux gold chain around his abdomen, whose verdigris stained the flesh green. Penelope set a heart-shaped locket around his throat, but couldn't get it to sit flush for his protruding Adam's Apple. Nevertheless its porcelain chill made him wince and brought out a local rash of goosebumps. We debated whether to overload the décolletage with choker, necklace and pendant, but felt the unsightliness of such clutter was not representative. We allowed ourselves only one further adornment, that of a low slung lavalliere that impelled his neck to droop his head further down. However Mother would not let go of her notion, so while the bedecking continued, we allowed her to hang the pearl necklace from the man's genitalia, though she was charged with restoring it in place each time it slipped off its stubby mounting.

We idly considered a tiara crowning glory for our fashion queen victim, but felt it was a touch of overkill. Instead we opted just for the finishing layers of eye liner, rouge and lipstick. His labia were dry and cracked, so the lipstick wrought its gleeful toil of granulation reflexively drawing the response of the tongue like a spider to investigate a disturbance in its web; the chemical redolence assailing the nostrils immediately above, a constant rattling of the dragon's twin caves; while it coated and filled in those cracks with its putty that made the scaly skin squirm beneath its tyranny.

We paraded this, our first serving of Misogynist Soup up and down impromptu street catwalks where those fashion dog's dinner of the male sex gathered. None of his gender dared proclaim him a martyr.

Rebarbative Me - Friday Flash

I have spent a tender lifetime trying to efface myself. To purge the bovine features of my father that have conferred their genetic tyranny upon me. I may bear his loathsome visage, but none of the violence that leaches from his pores and creases every time the skin blazons his disgust.

Yet that same genetic despotism ensured I could no longer continue to shrink my presence from him, once I no longer folded into the nooks and niches under tables and in cupboards. The serpentine lash of his strop unerringly bit the small of my back and rump. Places where I could never apprise myself of the lacerating damage wrought there. Physical pain wasn't visual. Psychic pain was ineffably so. Triggered at the mere sight of him. At the vision of a slightly grizzled version of myself.

To compensate, as soon as I was able, I started to grow a beard. Praying that the bristles would be tensile enough to bury my flesh from sight (having had no modelling from my father who religiously shaved everyday, whetting his razors on the dread strop. And for those hairs adhering to me after a beating, like tiny porcupine quills to prolong the scourging).

My solitary daily ritual, far removed from any ablutions, was to raise my hand to my fluff and gauge its overnight growth. For I could not bring myself to consult a mirror. Partly for fear of the hair betraying me with its feebleness, but also because I might have to engage with my eyes. And see the defeat indelibly etched there. The melding of his sadism with my masochism, I must be heaping it all upon myself right?

But the follicles proved fecund and strong. In time they occluded both me and presumably my father from my features. He of course fulminated against the beard, but he had grown sick and weak, while my transformation only seemed to embolden me. I left home for a place without mirrors. Mirrors mirror only isolation. That and duality.

I was out of his immediate clutches, but I could build no kind of life for myself. I could never look people in the face. I could scarce lift my chin from my sternum. As if the skin there was made of velcro.

However today I have made the decision for the beard to come off. To celebrate news of my father's death and my possible rebirth. I went out and purchased a small round mirror that pivoted on a stand. It resembled a squashed globe.

I laboriously cut the hair with scissors until it lent itself to razor shearing. I was thrown when my face was completely eclipsed beneath a snowdrift of shaving foam. I stared at such wonderful inchoateness for ages, until the chemicals in the cream started stinging my flesh beneath.

I started ploughing, barely able to fix my face in the tilted concavity of the mirror. The white layer stained red in places. Yet more effacement.

But gradually, the alluvium bristles were swept away and the contours of my cheeks emerged. I peered hard at the tiny mirror, barely able to frame me as I leaned right into its purlieu. With difficulty, I looked into the doppelganger's sightless eyes. It wasn't my father, but then nor was it anyone I knew either.

Does the butterfly that metamorphoses from the imago of the grub have any connection to it other than what lies within its genes?