Many apologies, I'm afraid I'm away from keyboard until monday. I was hoping to get ahead of myself with captions so I might have to use some old, janky captions that got scrapped for being kinda crummy 😢

Many apologies. I should be back on track by Tuesday.

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The trick to body-flipping for profit was making the merchandise look like it had never been lived in. Pristine. Tattoos had to go; piercings removed. Start a skin-care routine. Cardio, cardio, cardio.

Simon knew this one was going to be trouble before he even stepped inside her. He was trawling for mid-twenties females on the online marketplace when she appeared at a tantalisingly low price. Suspiciously low. She accepted his first offer of $25,000 without even asking what body she’d be receiving in return. Her loss, he thought, glancing down at his own chunky, middle-aged physique. They arranged to meet at the café opposite the Swap Shop.

His heart sank the moment she sat down across from him, twitching. Her photos were all five years and forty pounds out of date. Dark rings framed her bloodshot eyes, which flicked toward the door every time the bell rang. From the neck down, she was a patchwork of cheap tattoo work.

He didn’t even want to know what she was on. If he didn’t know, he wouldn’t be tempted to (or at least wouldn't know how to) try to procure it for himself once he was her, dealing with her withdrawals. Because she was still a good deal.

The moment the technician lifted the helmets at the Swap Shop, she bolted, skipping out the door in his flesh, never to be seen again. No wonder she wanted out. Being inside her brain felt like being stretched out across a live wire. He had just enough composure to crawl home, call his boss for two weeks off, and drop her body into bed. He didn’t need to know what she’d been addicted to. She was addicted to everything.

He vaguely started to feel like himself again by the third week. Feeling around inside his unfamiliar brain, he could sense shadows of the damage she’d done to it, emotions that came out of nowhere, impulses that weren’t wired quite right. The first time he ventured outside, he went full Karen, throwing a burger full-force in the face of a fast-food employee over… he still couldn’t remember. He set himself six months to have her body cleaned up and sold. If he lingered in it too long, he’d wind up like her. After a kale smoothie, he slipped into his girlfriend’s gym wear and hit the hills.

In the end, as he uploaded the photos of his body to the Swap Shop, he was proud of the work he’d done. He admired his pert, unblemished butt cheeks, displayed between white silk stockings and a bra to emphasise the change. The full-body tattoo removal had been painful—mostly for the guys doing the removal, whom he’d tried to bite several times.

He got $90k for her in the end. Not bad for six months’ work, but her fried wetware had cost him a job and a girlfriend. Never put your mind in crazy again, he told himself.