Finally! It took a few extra days for us to contact all the winners, but Weird Tales is now proud to present: the first place winner in the Weird Tales Spam Fiction Contest!

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LET YOURSELF LOOK SPINY
by Richard Howard

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

“Bone Exposure is sort of like paleontology,” said Connie, pulling her jumper down and turning around. “Your bones are fossils waiting to be revealed. The process takes about eight hours and involves picking away the flesh covering the desired bones with scalpels and chemicals. So far we’ve been one hundred percent successful. Not one single person has come back to complain about re-growth.”

She’d just shown me the option I’d selected: a total exposure of the vertebrae of the spine. It looked incredible.

I’ve had friends in the tattoo and piercing scene for years but have never been tempted to have my skin flayed or decorated. And when things got more extreme and people found that for an extra rush they had to get their skull pierced or have themselves suspended from chains with just the skin of their backs for support, I felt I knew that that world was one I would never inhabit. But something about the email intrigued me:

Let Yourself Look Spiny

I clicked in and was greeted by a photograph of an old-school punk with pole spikes flipping his middle finger at the camera — the alarming thing being that the flesh of the offending finger had been stripped away. I was shocked, maybe even disgusted at first, but when I clicked next and saw the photograph of Connie’s total spine exposure, that disgust became admiration. A week later, admiration had become a serious hankering for a spine like Connie’s, and I found myself in her studio in Temple Bar handing over a good chunk of my savings for the purpose.

As she prepared the chemicals and I waited for the painkillers to kick in, I looked around at the photographs of happy customers on the wall: a rugby player in full Ireland kit with exposed kneecaps; a male model with the most enhanced cheekbones I’ve ever seen; a fifty-year-old activist who had turned his ribcage into a critique of late capitalism. I decided that what attracted me to Bone Exposure was its inherent honesty. Whereas tattooing and piercing involve adorning the body with distractions that conduct the beholder’s eye away from the essence of the person, the Exposure concept of stripping away what is already there reveals the hidden depths and contradictions of the human condition. This is what led me to covet my neighbor’s spine.

Connie tells me that she’s ready, and I sign my name on a legal form, the painkillers probably making my handwriting illegible anyway. As I pull my T-shirt off, she tells me that if it’s good enough she might give me half the money back, on the condition that I make myself available to travel to a few conventions a year. I lie face down on the bed and she runs her hand down my spine.

“Wow, beautifully pronounced thoracic region,” she says, and I feel the first penetration through the numbness. “I can’t wait to see this one. This one is going to look really spiny.”