The Flying Leatherthroats

THE FLYING LEATHERTHROATS
By Matthew Sanborn Smith

Leather was great but everybody had it, from hats to shoes and in every color you imagine. Leather pants, oo-la-la! The leather makers wanted to expand their market but it was saturated. Wasn’t it?

When they weren’t hanging with whores and gorging themselves at the buffets, the guys at the Annual Leathermen (Though they preferred to be called hideologists) Convention actually had time to squeeze in a conversation about leather that went a little like this:

“Where don’t people already have leather?”

“They have it everywhere, every square inch of their bodies. Have you seen our leather eyewear?”

“No, not every square inch. How about on the inside?”

No one remembers who said that last bit but everyone cashed in on the idea. Soon consumers covered their insides with the latest leather fashions, like esophagus linings, for instance. You needed a camera on a wire to see it properly but someone at every party seemed to have one of those. People had their tonsils and appendixes (appendices?) replaced with leather reproductions and then had them removed just to surprise the doctor. The craze got to the point where people replaced more important organs like their lungs. They died on the table of course, but their last breaths smelled like the interior of a new luxury car and who wouldn’t give up their lives for that?

One man in Switzerland had his everything replaced with leather, and although all of his old parts were still together and functioning, he had no legal status and was considered medical waste. The astonished (at his own stupidity) man crawled out of the hospital dumpster and joined a circus sideshow while his leather replacement was left to eat his chocolate, fuck his wife and wind his watch, which it most certainly would have, had it been alive to do so.

This sort of thing continued without regulation and the human race would have been wiped out, but they ran out of cows first. Thank goodness! But there were nights when a few of those last nine people sure could have gone for a cheeseburger.