Sweat Doll

A story about the rendering of particular services.

Things will reach a tipping point.

In the back of its throat it feels its mucus like a building. The building is brick and narrow and very tall. In the courtyard all the leaves have fallen off the trees. No one ever seems to come to trim the branches and they hang over the front steps like gloomy strips of rubber. The brickwork is all streaky and discolored. Young and local bodies will come and press themselves to the bars of the gate some nights and try to catch something moving in a window. They’ll hesitantly try to touch each other without eye contact. The clients are drawn towards the room by a different vector. They move in slowly decaying orbits, describe wide, sweeping arcs. It’s as though they’re skating on ice. Fog is spilling across the ice, but two spotlights stay focused on them. The arena they skate through is huge and silent and dark. A minor deity sleeps on their shoulder. When the deity awakes, they will be standing in the corridor. The Fabricator will be naming a price. The deity will pretend to not know where it is. Then the limbs and torso will be fitted into the armature, and the hooks will be slipped beneath the skin, and the head will be fixed, and the breath restricted, and the heating applied, first the dry and then the wet, and, if necessary, the slow boil, the sudden scalding, the bitter cold. In this manner, the minor deity will eventually be mortified, and, for an extra fee, mortified again. There is no light in the room. When clients come into the room they’ll spark a cigarette sometimes and in the brief orange flame see the panels on the walls. Then the panels will eat the light. On the floor are squares of moistened sandpaper. Shards of glass are glued to other mats and it can be arranged to kneel on them such that the shards of glass slice into it and the slices ooze a desired fever.