Jonty was braver than most. He shucked his Primarni eight quid tunic and then only hesitated briefly before climbing into the cutter on his hands and knees. He snagged his Skin on a lower part of the chassis, a crappy weld I remember promising myself I’d dremel off and never did, scoring a painless weld on his shoulder. Under the harsh sodiums the Skin disappointed me as it always does. Despite the profound amount of technology crammed (nano-wise and micro-ways) into its 6mm dermis, it screamed Gov issue drab; they never did pin down the self-cleaning routines and dirt that wont wash away was tattooed into the gross creases under his shoulder blades and elbows. As he crawled under the lowest excision coil I have to look away as he exposed his partially seamed faecal flap and hairless genital pouch, blandly faux skin-pink and curiously more naked than banal dangling testes would have been. God. Help. Us. He negotiated the shimmering, hyper-scalpelled edges of the cutting surface and stood upright, assuming the prescribed Vitruvian pose. He threw me a terrified affirmative and I threw the knife switch. The current spiked, the sodiums dimmed to red and I skinned him.
Diary excerpt, hand written in pencil on homemade paper (off white, brownish stains)
I stroked his hair, his real hair. He was asleep at last; the seventh patch had at last taken the edge off the agony. He lay on the rug in the front room, a wheezing comma, like he had on winter evenings when he was a kidder, tired out from footy. He takes up more room now, and I can’t ignore the scabrous black-red stain that has obliterated the awful floral pattern of the carpet. His escape wardrobe is still piled neatly by the living room door where he dumped it when he got back. The front door had slammed open in the small hours, he had shambled in, swayed up the hallway, scaring me half to death - coal black eyes had stared out of a red Noh mask, a nightmare made dream; but I had been ready.
I get up to tidy his precious clothes, thick denim digging comfortingly into the backs of my knees. I used the chair to spare my spine and as I got up I looked down at my hands, at my own, older, scars – a silver tracery mapping out a new future for us both.