“The Herald?” Two bored, brown eyes looked through the thin metal slot behind the heavy door. Ostensibly, the entrance looked more like a bomb shelter than a simple shop, and certainly not the kind you’d see in a small town. It was the kind of place where the cliche statement would be made about townsfolk not locking their doors at all, let alone barring them with steel and locks. That said, the sign hanging outside was friendly enough, incongruous to the impenetrable frame; it carried an old ‘50s aesthetic, simple, clean and to the point. A thin knife, a slab of meat, and the same font and stylistic choices that would fit the kind they’d use for craft beers or men’s razors. Bones and Biters, it read. If I was nervous—and I can assure you I was—it was the contents, not the location.

“Yep,” I replied to the voice behind the door, surprisingly soft and feminine. “That would be me. Ethan Laurent, pleasure to—” The slot clicked shut, followed by an almost comical number of clicks and clacks, scraping metal and shifting gears. It felt like getting cleared to speak to the inmates on death row. It sort of was, in a way; just one stage passed. It was not the feeling one would expect to have from a place slipped in between a pharmacy and a bowling alley.

Finally, the door swung open, the weight of it enough for the petite woman behind the door to have to push with both hands and still have her feet slip slightly with the effort. “Pardon the wait,” she said. “The nature of the business calls for protections, as you might imagine. The town…tolerates us, I think that would be the right word. We make good money here, and plenty of it funnels back, but it’s not without its reprisals.”

“Strange choice to set up shop here, isn’t it? I can’t imagine you’re drawing much business from the locals.”

“The owner believes that to normalize something, every facet of the business has to be somewhat unremarkable.” She opened an arm up and did a mock showcase of the surrounding area. Dirt roads, old trucks, a coffee shop across the street. “I would believe you if you’d tell me you’d forget this place. Well, not this place,” she said pointing behind her, “but everywhere around it. Never thought I’d find myself in a place like this either, for what it’s worth.” Ethan wasn’t sure if she meant the shop or the town.

She was a severe looking woman. Hair pulled back tightly in a bun, a red-and-white striped button-down, fitted dress pants, and a simple black apron and gloves that would befit a gallery curator to top it all off.

“Julia,” she said after having closed the door and returned the locks to their proper places. She extended her hand after having removed a glove, and I was surprised to find it didn’t feel cold. “A pleasure to meet you. It’s been a while since we’ve had a reporter in.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I find that hard to believe.”

She shrugged. “What’s there to say after a while? We just had to weather the storm, and we did so with aplomb, if I may say so myself.” There was something about the way she said it—a haughtiness—that made her seem to me as fortified mentally as the room was physically. Such was the nature of people who lived in extremes, for better or worse.

But if her attitude was something to note, it wasn’t what drew me in the most. It was the store, I suppose you could call it, although it didn’t seem to fit that term precisely. It didn’t fit the expectation, not that I was sure I had any to begin with. Was a mad scientist’s lab in an old black-and-white movie really my honest hope? Instead, it was strangely warm, welcoming even, in spite of the heavy metal door. Colorful jars lined the walls, block letters denoting the contents, and the occasional slashed-price sign which felt distantly disrespectful. I noticed I had been lingering without a word for a moment, and Julia, to her credit, read my thoughts.

“We wanted to give the appeal of a supermarket tinged with old Americana. You saw our logo outside, hmm? The design was crafted off an old butcher’s shop sign, a hundred and some years ago.” She waved an airy hand behind her. “The boxes are meant to charm.”

“Hard to believe they’re really in there. And they are, right? Like, right at this moment?” Embarrassing, looking back on it, but you’ll forgive me given the circumstances. “Must be. It’s chilly here.”

She smirked, and I reddened. “Yes, they’re really in there. Twenty-seven in total, with about a hundred times as many individual products available for purchase.”

Twenty-seven, I thought, slightly aghast. I clicked my pen. Entering this strange place was enough to have almost made me forget the sole purpose for coming here. “Products,” I repeated, rolling the word around, suddenly discomforted by its usage in that context.

“Would you like to see something we have available?”

Would I? How I could’ve been this woefully ill-prepared for the most obvious happening when visiting a shop such as this was beyond me. In addition to the light wave of nausea that passed through me from head to toe, this was another strike of embarrassment. “Yeah,” I mumbled unconvincingly.

She walked casually to a shelf labeled ‘Leapers and Feelers Sale!’ with graphics, font choices and colors that looked almost cartoonish. “You’re certain?” she said while unlocking the shelf, her head turning back to face me. I gave a noncommittal shrug, which she took as a yes.

The shelf opened and a cool mist fell lazily over the edge, now looking more Star Trek than Saturday morning cartoon. The moment I saw the contents, however, all semblance of peaceful, blast-from-the-past nostalgia disappeared, replaced immediately by a second, far more powerful rush of nausea that didn’t so much as wash over me but slap me square in the chest. Inside, placed delicately on a bed of cotton, was a human leg severed at the hip joint, and two pairs of hands, removed from the body at the wrist.

Time has a way of eroding human connection. We can look upon an ancient mummy and feel some semblance of a disconnect, knowing that they had passed so very long ago. The humanity is more vague, distant, and ultimately less repellent to our sensibilities. These, however, were far too fresh for that. They were real, the humanity unmistakable.

“Close it,” I asked in spite of myself. “Thank you.”

“Very well,” she said.

She breathed out slowly, and popped her thumbs in her pockets, rocking on her heels as if discussing how the next storm would affect the grain. “Well, we’ve got the whole body to choose from, save for pieces we’ve sold. But you can choose what you like. Some would prefer, say, a whole leg, and that comes with the foot, while others just want the latter, for instance. A head, or just a nose and the eyes. It’s all preference, and cheaper to buy more complete pieces, as it diminishes the cost of the whole once parts are removed.”

She must’ve recognized the look I wore. For this I gave her little credit, seeing as how I must’ve worn it with the subtlety of an elephant. The softening of the features, the looking away at the ground, the pale expression—there was little point in disguising it. Of her many hats I’d seen thus far, the next was the first I truly appreciated; she began playing the role of caregiving psychologist, and mercifully changed the topic.

“Your newspaper,” she asked. “I’ll be frank. Typically those coming out here are looking for a…is hit piece the correct terminology still?”

Well, what could I say? I wasn’t looking for a glowing cover story. To stick your neck out on something like this is to place it squarely in line with the blades of the guillotine. “I’m just looking to report what I see. I don’t have a plan for what I’ll make of it,” I said. Or lied. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted.

“And your newspaper—left-leaning, right leaning?”

“Central.”

“You’d be surprised how often I hear that. Almost never true, but that’s not that relevant anyway. Look, you’re going to search for one of two angles; if you’re left-leaning, you’ll play up the angle of abusing the poor. The beaten down, trodden on members of society, literally selling their bodies just to leave something behind for their families. The rich, quite literally picking the meat of the poor from between their teeth.”

My face showed no less disgust than when she spoke of the body parts. Perhaps that was the game and I was being played, distracting me with jabs at my professional integrity while the real boogeyman sat locked in pristine shelving underneath silly signs depicting discount prices. Still, I couldn’t help but take the bait. “Pretty presumptuous, to start writing my article for me—”

“Or, you’re on the right,” she continued. She seemed to wait for me to speak, just so she could interrupt. “Moral puritanism. You’re above this, and yet you can’t seem to tell me what’s holding up the pedestal from which you sit.”

“You know? I don’t know what the pedestal is made of, but it isn’t human heads.” I dared a self-satisfied smirk. I was bitter at her comments and sick with the situation, and I was glad to have said at least something in my defense. But if it was a barb, it didn’t seem to sting, and for the third time now I felt a sense of embarrassment having realized that she had likely heard these lines countless times before.

Julia only smiled. It looked mechanical, almost, less comfortable and fitting than her rigid expression of neutrality she wore from the outset. “Let me ask you a few questions. Turn the interview on its head, hmm? Is that alright?”

I blinked slowly. “Sure.” Finally, I felt the feet under me, and on a more familiar turf. The defensive always try this move in interviews. I’d be able to fire back. Although, even that thought irked me, seeing as how I never intended for this to be adversarial, and I wondered fleetingly that perhaps she wanted it that way. She must’ve had countless journalistic attacks under her belt, and her mere presence here showed she weathered them all. Perhaps it wasn’t my turf after all.

“You believe in freedom, don’t you?”

I chuckled. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that.”

“Indulge me, please.” She stood up straight, and placed her hands behind her back, as formal and business-like as she could manage. “Do you agree with the central tenet of our business: what two consenting adults agree to, as long as it harms no other living soul, is up to the decision of the two adults at hand? Because that, that right there, is the core of everything we’re doing here. Not one of these people—and believe me, we treat them as such, with the reverence and respect they deserve—”

“Oh, come on.”

“—with the reverence and respect they deserve, not one of them has been coerced or forced into signing the contract to sell themselves as they have. Selling one’s body is an act as old as time. This is just the new age of it. And in that, I carry no qualms or judgments.”

I took out my pen again, and to someone who thinks you’re writing a polemic, the click of it is like raising the proverbial pitchfork. “I don’t think you can compare this place, with all the blood—”

“There’s little blood, we keep it very clean.”

“—and body parts to some sort of…wait, are you trying to paint this as a human rights movement? Are you honestly comparing selling pieces of human meat to an expression of earnest and hard-fought civil liberties?”

“No, I am not,” she said emphatically, and for the first time, there was an iciness in her glare that she hadn’t brought out before. I took more satisfaction in it than I care to admit. “I don’t believe it’s fair to draw comparisons, and I don’t wish to. The purpose of this company is to deal with this very specific, very niche issue, without making it a broader reflection of political battlegrounds. I’ll repeat my question: do you agree with the central tenet of our business?”

“About the…the consenting adult thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well yeah, but there’s got to be limitations, right? I mean you can’t just…look, if two adults…” Much to my chagrin, I searched for a similar circumstance where two consenting adults choose a course of action not while under duress, harming no others, and nevertheless should not be allowed to follow in their course of action. I came up empty. I almost couldn’t believe it. The idea felt so ingrained, so indisputable, and here we were, me staring blankly at her frustrating and increasingly self-satisfied expression, unable to respond. “Look, I can’t think of a circumstance at the moment, but I shouldn’t have to.”

“No one ever does. The reason being is we’ve overcome our more visceral responses to such things, but this taboo struggles to reach beyond the initial moral panic.” She walked to one of the immaculate white shelves, the strangest and most serene enclosure for a house of horrors. She fiddled with her keys, eventually finding the right fit, and slowly pulled it open. It was cold, just below freezing, and a thin misty trail of water vapor rolled gently over the edge. Inside was a human torso, the head, arms, and lower half of the body removed.

As a child, I watched horror movies after my parents went to bed. There were moments, particularly gruesome or unsightly, where I could almost feel the image being burned into my skull, stored for later when I was trying to fall asleep. As an adult, it’s been a while since I felt that, reserved for the foolhardy moments of delving too deeply into the darker corners of the internet. I kept my eyes averted for a moment longer to settle both my nerves and my stomach. “That’s a body,” I said pointlessly, just to show I could still say something.

“His name was Terrance, and that is his chest. You’ll notice the scar that runs down the center. There’s no mistaking it.” Well, that was certain enough. It was clear that Terrance, by the look of it an overweight, older gentleman, leaving a rather sizable torso behind, had the telltale red line of heart surgery. I stared at it with a sense of surreal disassociation; it was just a large hunk of flesh, similar to his or anyone else’s, and yet difficult to look upon without fainting. The macabre scene, so further juxtaposed by the prim and proper woman in her red-white shirt and the cereal-box style coloration of the room, was so jarring that it made it difficult to think. Perhaps that was the plan all along; keep the rationale behind the honest, obvious misgivings buried beneath a pile of bright lights and nostalgia.

“He passed away at the age of sixty-four,” she said nonchalantly, a deliberate and obvious attempt to show just how calm she was with the limbless torso looking like an empty barrel lying in front of them. “That scar came ten years prior. Have you an idea why I’m showing you this product in particular?”

“Product,” I repeated with a nauseous gulp. “No.” I bit my lip and pushed down my revulsion, part of it coming from her too-casual comfort with the dead.

“He’s English. Or was. Still is, I’m sure he would tell you if he could. It was surgery that saved him. We receive a dossier on each body that arrives, and for this particular gentleman, it gave him another decade of life, allowing him to see his daughter’s wedding and to meet his grandson. Centuries prior, in the same city in which he lived, the idea of cutting into the human form for medical purposes was seen as so abhorrent that it was prohibited even to the medical profession. Now, it’s a life-saving procedure, and something of which the moral question is one I’m sure you’ve never even considered.”

“Please close it,” was all that I could muster. I wanted to scream out that it was a false equivalency. It was a massive leap to compare such disparate issues, but again, the colorful room, the smell of a hospital, the cold, the shock of the images—it was overwhelming.

She pushed it closed and locked it, once again returning the room to something more akin to a supermarket. It did little. It was there, fully in my mind’s eye, burned in as I knew it would be, right down to the sewn sections where the arms once were to the conspicuously empty space where the head should’ve been.

“Do you see the purpose of the story I told you? It’s all just societal misgivings, and nothing more. That’s all that’s holding you back.”

“Holding me back from what? From eating Terrance?” I said, my voice rising slightly, and I’ll tell myself now that it didn’t tremble although deep down I know it to be false. It was easier, so much so, to be angry than whatever wretched feeling I otherwise felt.

“From allowing others to indulge in the macabre. The harm is nothing. The gains can be substantial.” She tented her fingers, looking suddenly more akin to a banker, the third or fourth of her many hats.

“What gains could possibly be worth this?”

Much to my spiking heart rate, she walked across the room to another box, unlocked it, and pulled open the compartment. With the level of care of an archaeologist having found a skeleton, she lifted out an arm and held it aloft in front of her. “The formerly living owner of this arm sold her physical form for enough money to pay for her own funeral and send her six grandchildren to the universities of their choosing.”

I stared aggressively at her forehead to avoid seeing what she held. “You’re telling me that an arm will cost enough to—”

“Not just the arm. Remember, the pieces are sold individually or at a collective cost.”

“Right. So she sold her whole body and her…I suppose it would be her estate that made enough to do all that.” Again the notepad flipped open, but it was less of a weapon this time and more of a cataloguer. It felt wrong to write down whatever numbers she’d say. “And who’s purchasing an old man’s nose and thumb to…what, make into soup?”

Her eyebrows raised, giving her an aristocratic flair. “The exceptionally wealthy, almost exclusively. Millionaires. Billionaires. I have spoken, directly or indirectly—often the latter considering the business—to a tremendous number of high-profile individuals. There’s no other place in the world that allows this service safely, which means that demand for our product runs globally through this very source and nowhere else. Our product is exceptionally niche, but that plays into the price.”

Images of well-heeled, suited gentlemen and long-dressed ladies inspecting corpses was a new, different form of revulsion. “And the appeal…do they believe it’s medicinal? Is it sexual?”

“Undoubtedly both,” she said dryly. Uninterested, apparently. “We ask no questions, but occasionally they’ll tell us what they’re hoping for. A few see it as a kink, others are battling incurable cancers and hope it’s some mystical cure-all, others are superstitious…you’ll run the gamut of people from all walks of life that come through these doors, and the only communal, collective aspect they share from one person to the next is they are capable of affording the exceedingly high cost.”

Scribbles on a paper. “And the sellers?”

“The agreement made by the product in their time of life was that they were selling their physical form for the purposes of purchase, and there are no caveats beyond that. Those that sell to us care little for what happens to them after; typically atheists, or surprisingly, strict religious fundamentalists that believe their body is a shell and little more. Occasionally sellers are artists or, frankly, the economically desperate.”

I snapped my fingers. “That’s exploitation. That’s it.” Right away, there came a rush of disappointment. The comment was overeager, as while I certainly was searching for a reason to be up in arms, I didn’t directly intend to show it. I knew I was meant to be objective, but as the interview went on, I knew why I was truly here. I wanted to be the reporter who took the prize. A head for the journalistic mantlepiece.

I cringed at the metaphor, considering the circumstances.

Evidently, it wasn’t a strong or original attempt. She tented her fingers once more and carried on in the most expert and difficult public relations challenge of all time. “Would you rather they live in poverty while actually walking and breathing? There is no physical harm done to a living person in this business. How can you call that exploitation when it’s strictly your own preconceived notions of a supposed horror that’s so terrible for reasons you struggle to provide?”

I ran my hand through my hair, felt the all-too-familiar thinning, but also the distinct sensation of the skin of my scalp, and the warmth of it, the smoothness, the oiliness. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be disgusted by someone eating another person. I’m sorry. I just…the notion makes my skin crawl, and I know saying so is throwing my journalistic impartiality out the window, but really, it’s vile. It’s horrific. It’s on-its-face awful.”

“To you.”

“Yes, to me.”

She smiled slightly, tilting her head up as if in joyful reminiscence. “There are any assortment of things I find to be disgusting that don’t hurt another. I once had a friend that, when making sandwiches, would lick the mayonnaise off the spoon once finished. It made my stomach turn. I also wouldn’t wish for it to be a criminal offense. Would you?”

“Okay,” I said, once again finding anger to be the simpler response, and almost consciously leaning into it. “Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse. You can’t really conflate the two, and you know that, and now you’re just insulting me.”

Her features softened, feigning looking struck. “Let’s keep it civil, shall we?” she said, and that inflamed me only further, knowing full well that no part of this whatsoever was civil, no matter how bright the walls and formal the experience, and while I sensed I was playing her game to some respect, there was a part of me that wanted to. I wanted to be angry with her. I wanted to show her how disgusted I was.

“No, actually, I don’t think I will,” I said, throwing up my hands. “This is disgusting, you should be ashamed of yourself, and I’ll take no more part of this. I can’t believe I have to come up with a valid argument against a chop-shop for human remains.”

She stood at attention, seeming somewhat military, somewhat hotel concierge, and somewhat politician, but not quite any of them at all. “I prepared something for you,” she said, ignoring my efforts to leave and my outburst altogether. She took out a small box, not dissimilar to one in which a wedding ring would fit. “Inside is the end piece of a human finger, the nail removed. Consider it a parting gift. It’s exceedingly valuable. Consider it a peace offering on this meeting that turned…unfortunate.”

“Oh, no, I’m not—”

“Just take it. Deliver it to your editor if you wish, for the purposes of the story. Do that at least, will you?” The request seemed so earnest, and that just confounded me further.

“Fine. Yeah. Just…put it in my bag.”

“Lemon, salt, pepper, honey, and slow cook, supposedly,” she mused.

I was out faster than I knew I could move. The understanding of why there hadn’t been many stories featuring the place lately was in full view for me now. Through it all, I had no idea what to think, what to say, or what to do. I knew it was wrong. I just knew it. I just couldn’t say why.

Isaac Bouchard spends most of his time reading, writing, playing soccer, and catching insects in his backyard. The same description of him could be given for the past two-and-a-half decades, and it likely won't change much in the future. If you want to follow him on social media, you can find his very quiet X account with a handful of other stories over at @BouchardWriting.