Illustration by Mitch Duncan

The piercer first applied freezing gel all over Tora’s mouth, like sloppy lip gloss. Within 15 minutes consonants were impossible and her lips flapped around like jelly. She “chatted” with Shanna, her stylist, trying to be playful. Shanna only tilted her lips up.

The piercer coughed pointedly. He held the needle in one hand like a flag. He took her jaw firmly in the other. Tora fought the urge to jerk her chin free. She’d barely blinked when they’d sewn the strings of pearls into her hairline and around her collarbones. She wasn’t going to fuck it up now.

He started on the right side of her mouth. He poked the needle through the meaty part of her lip. He pulled the surgical suture thread through the new hole. The silvery thread glided through like wind. The piercer backed up so that the photographer could get a shot. Then he grabbed a flap of her top lip, pierced it, and pulled the edges of Tora’s lips together like reattaching a finger.

Tora’s numb lips burned. She could feel each time the needle hooked her lip, but the pain was like a spark: potent, but so minutely pinpointed she could pretend it didn’t hurt. The piercer gradually stitched a webbing of pearls around her lips, stabbing the bouncy tissue over and over, pausing intermittently for the photographer. Tora posed accordingly. Shanna held up a mirror.

The right side of Tora’s mouth was pinched shut. Her lips were stained blood-red, as if she’d anaesthetized herself with red wine instead. Her lips tasted iron-salty and utterly authentic.

*

The billboard stretches between a Macy’s and the Financial Centre. It showcases a woman looking over her shoulder, challenging the camera. Ribbons of pearls weave in the burnt orange hair like leaping schools of fish. Strands of pearls wrap around a supple neck. They glisten in twos and threes on the naked shoulder, hanging there like rock climbers attacked by vertigo. The woman’s forehead is dotted with the white drops. They form subtle geometric designs and wavy lines that trail back into her hairline.

Invisible studio fans have whipped her hair around the corner of her face so it partially obscures a plain pink mouth. It looks like the woman has been blessed by a rain shower of pearls. Sticky skin has greedily caught them in odd clusters, like sprinkles on a thickly iced cookie. The caption for the advertisement reads: “Cecilia’s Jewels: Any way. Anywhere. Always.”

*

Two angry people, a room, a deadlock.

“No. No explicit shots. No needles. No blood.”

Tora shook her head. “Harry, I don’t want a sterile series of photos for the album. They have to be edgy to really communicate.”

“It’s shock value and the label won’t go for it. That’s not what they want to market.”

“It’s not shock value. I’m doing this for a reason. It has a message.”

He snorted. “What, masochism?”

“Don’t be an asshole. The pictures will be authentic, but disorienting—a little bit disjointed. Shuffle the chronological order, maybe. It’ll make everyone pay attention. It’ll be very dramatic.”

“You can’t bloody well be anything else.”

“But not like this, Harry. Not like this.”

A heavy, painful silence.

“The idea’s good,” Harry finally admitted. “It’s provocative. But do you want your new cover to be full of bloody needles and self-mutilation? Tora, think about it. If it were on TV it’d be censored. You don’t need to have everything actually sewn into your skin. Stop being a fucking artist and use glue.”

The déjà vu of it all: producers, promoters, other songwriters she was supposed to collab with who took over a session instead. How many times had she had this argument? In how many ways? “I’m trying to make a statement. People expect women to just take their pearls and white-picket fences and shut up about it. The perfect woman: beautiful and silent. Can your male brain not handle that?”

For a moment, her vision hazed. Then a deep breath.

“I can’t fake this,” Tora whispered. “Life isn’t glue guns and wash-away makeup. It’s graphic. And in real life, when your voice is taken away, it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens stitch by stitch, slow and painful, while you watch.”

He chugged his scotch, then dragged his hand across the back of his mouth. “Well then, thank God we have you, Tora, to tell the world exactly what’s wrong with it.”

Tora locked her eyes on the crest of his left ear, since he wouldn’t look at her. “Oh, right, sorry. I thought I was still talking to the Harry that cared.”

A pause, a scowl, a crumpled forehead.

“Tora, you know shit about business. The producers won’t agree.”

“What the hell are you my agent for? We’ll make them agree.”

“You can’t head-butt your way through this.”

“I’ve booked the studio for next Tuesday.”

“You can’t afford to fail this one. They were close to cutting you off after your last record’s sales.”

She clenched a fist behind her back. “Right. I’d completely forgotten.”

Silence. Silence. Sigh.

“Fine. Be a bloody pincushion if you want,” he said. “But I get final call in the editing room.”

“Thank you, Harry! It’ll be worth it. I’ll make sure of that.”

He cupped her elbow. “Just know when to call it quits, all right?”

A kiss, a compromise, and a door.

*

They shot about 50 frames of the final product. Tora examined the photos over the photographer’s shoulder and found the one she wanted for the album cover: her hair whipped into orange cream and the bizarrely placed seed pearls winking at the camera as she looked over her shoulder.

A draft blew in and the particular bubble of studio sounds broke. Tora turned around and saw Harry standing behind her. She threw him a smug smile, her lips still puffy and clamped shut. His eyes flinched. “God, Tora,” he said.

Smiling hurt like hell. She breathed sharply through her nostrils.

“Look. This is a shitty time, but I just talked to Mac. He’s taking his decision back. Says the other producers think it’s too extreme for your image.”

Tora just stood there, not allowing it to sink in. She snorted quick breaths through her nose, which suddenly seemed like a fraction of her necessary air. She grabbed Harry’s lapels. She tried to grunt-yell at him in some kind of English—Listen!—and to shout at him with her eyes, this fucking coward. He clamped his hands around hers and pried them off. “Tora, calm down. We’ll still use the shot. But it’s going to be pretty. All we need to do is Photoshop the mouth into something normal again.”

She grabbed his shoulder. He took a step back.

She needed needed needed to speak. Shanna! Piercer guy! She waved to them and to her mouth. Everyone rushed to her and no one did anything. She couldn’t wait. Harry was leaving. She ran after him.

“Come talk to me about it once you’ve gotten over your tantrum,” he said over his shoulder, before grudgingly stopping to look past her. Not at her. “Look. If you don’t want to use this as your cover, I have one more idea. We could probably sell them to a friend of mine, for a series he’s working on. That’s it, though.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, Tora, but I told you it wouldn’t fly.”

One knife stabbed in her back. Twenty hands pulling her away from him. Thirty-two teeth ready to chew into his retreating neck. Dozens of tiny pearls weighing her down with irony.

She stood there, speechless.

*

Her mouth is completely sewn shut. The freezing gel is starting to wear off and her lips are stinging. Her lips are bloated, but delicately cobbled together with seed pearls and a few metal rings. A headache is eating away at the base of her neck. The strings of pearls pull and tug at her scalp.

It aches deeply. If she turns her head, or flips her hair out of her eyes, it pulls on the heavy surgical thread and bites deeper into her skull. The skin around her shoulders and neck is inflamed, angry, pulsing. But despite the discomfort, Tora finally lets herself be content.

In a few minutes she’ll take a look at the shots. She’s confident that they’ve captured at least a piece of what she imagined. She takes a moment to lean back in the tall folding chair. She closes her eyes, only vaguely aware when someone blots at the pools of blood that have formed in the corners of her mouth.

“Beautiful,” someone breathes, almost too quiet to hear, and she smiles.

KELSEY HUTTON is a Métis author from Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation (Winnipeg, Canada). She was born in an even snowier city than she lives in now (“up north,” as they say). She also lived in Brazil as a kid. When she’s not beading or cooking, you can find her at KelseyHutton.com, on Instagram @KelseyHuttonAuthor, or on X @KelHuttonAuthor.