into the carpeting, until only a soft shadow of pinkish-pale flesh remained, dappled with a peppering of black in a couple of widely-separated spots...no blood, no gurgling rush of decayed flesh, just a wrinkling flattening, lessening of her body—save for the silvery studs and circles and fish-hook curving prongs of metal, and those limp chains of silver which rested in ripples and S-curves of unfettered metal links on the thick tufted carpet.
Loose, now useless chains of metal that somehow seemed...inviting to my pierced and decorated parts; inside, I was still reeling from what I’d seen, my heart thudding in time with my pounding brain (Some people claim silver’s a ‘dirty’ metal), but all those little metal-filled holes in me, all over me, they now ached with a different sort of pain. A pain that felt like little nips of longing, as if what had felt so complete to me only minutes before was now sadly lacking, sadly useless—
That the chains themselves were free of...her, or lingering traces of her, was somewhat a blessing in itself, but the worst part of that morning was knowing that even if they hadn’t been so clean, so pristine, I still would have needed to attach them to my own studs and circles of shining, dirty silver.
Not to have done so would’ve left me feeling so incomprehensibly incomplete, so deeper-than-skin-deep vulnerable—
—although lately I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asks me if being pierced again and again like this hurt, as if mere pain was the only fear on my mind.
AFTERWORD
Midway through the 1990s, quite a few of the markets where I’d been selling my horror fiction started to shut down or become so overstocked that they were only opening up to submissions every couple of years or so; I’d begun to experiment with harder-core erotic horror and sf, which I soon began selling to markets like Circlet Press. But every so often a story would slide through the cracks—not quite “hot” enough for the erotica publishers, but too erotic for more mainstream genre markets. “Little Nips” was one of these stories...it was also one of my first stories which dealt with body modification, a theme which has popped up in much of my sf from the end of the ’00s. It’s darker than some of my earlier work, but milder than stories like “Dark Ladonna” or “Yet Another Poisoned Apple for the Fairy Princess.” But for what it is, it works, at least for me....
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