Mutilations

I

The pharmacy smells as pharmacies do; halfway between a health foods shop and a hospital, without the yoghurt raisins, Dettol and death. You're sitting on a stool, legs not even grazing the ground. Two dots are drawn on earlobes. A white gun is loaded with the chosen ammunition (gold studs with little white crystals) and the shots are fired. A sound not unlike a hole-punch, piercing flesh not paper. Feels like a bee-sting. A little white bottle is pressed into your hand - clean them with this, morning and night - and your ears burn red on exit. But it's okay, you can now wear the earrings your Grandma gave you, and you'll look beautiful.

II

The shop is full of tattoo art and illustrative rubber genitals studded with piercings. You're lead upstairs to lie down on a black leather bed. Dot drawn on the nose, rubbed off, replaced. No guns here. A needle is extracted from its hygienic packaging. Your heart beats a ragged rhythm over the nasal melody of the tattoo gun. The needle is coming, the pain is coming. It comes. The sharpest of pains. Snorting wasabi, tearing out nostril hairs. The stud is put in and the pain deadens but never goes, not for weeks. You spend the next few days cleaning away the encrusted blood with cotton buds and wincing every time you flare your nostrils (more often than you ever knew.) Beautiful.

III

First they take your bottom teeth. After that, the worst is over, the women say. You run your tongue over the awful, agonising spaces left behind, but you don't quite believe them. Then your mother takes your bottom lip and slices it open and the agony multiplies intensely, and the wooden plug pushed into the wound ramifies it into infinity. For weeks you mope and heal under the hot sun, pain only mildly assuaged by the jealous glances of younger girls. The insertion of bigger plugs is the worst. They splinter. You fashion your first plate from clay, and decorate it with care, and finally, finally, that long ached-for day arises and you are ecstatic with agony as it's pushed in, your clay plate, and finally, you are beautiful.

IV

This will be the worst day of your life. You knew it was coming; but they'll grab you from nowhere, these women veiled in black, and they'll drag you to a strange room and tie you to a table. And spread your legs apart. And you'll be powerless to stop them, these perpetrators of humiliation and agony. These broken women who do as they were done by. Aunts, sisters. Your own mother. The knife will cut in clumsily and the pain will explode into darkness and you'll pass out. When you wake you'll have been darned like a torn garment and the agony will burn on for months. This will never heal. You will be broken forever. The injustice and inhumanity of it will be unfathomable. This mutilation, whose idea was it? Not yours. You were beautiful.