FLASH FICTION — Miso Soup

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 in good time, we’ll take this nice and slow. Our preparations were not to give the impression of any ritualisation whatsoever.

We endowed him with some further follicles in fair exchange for the threshed pubis. 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 design. Maybe it wasn’t pity at all, maybe she knew we didn’t have the requisite impaling 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 first an ad hoc piercing of both ears. The chosen dangles were of sufficient mass so as to drag down into the fresh 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 trying to 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 omphalos 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. Or perhaps that was merely dread. We debated whether to overload the shaved 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 lavaliere 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.

We paraded this, our first serving of Misogynist Soup, up and down impromptu street catwalks where young studs gathered. None of his gender dared proclaim him a martyr to his sex.

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Marc Nash has published four novels and five collections of flash fiction. He lives and works in London. You can find Marc just about anywhere, including on his YouTube channel, Twitter at 21stCscribe, his Amazon page, and over at http://sulcicollective.blogspot.ca/

His fifth novel Three Dreams In The Key Of G will be published August 2017 by Dead Ink Books.