Headcheese

by Jess Hagemann

The day that Lorrie “accidentally” cuts off her little toe, she discovers what it’s like to be able-bodied and not want that body. After Bartholomew loses his left arm to a landmine, he’s inspired to start a new kind of church-one where both amputation and sex are types of performance art. Trice, a prosthetics engineer, receives the assignment of a lifetime when he’s asked to rebuild his son’s crippled frame. Haunted by the memory of his dead wife, George must take the ultimate measure to excise her ghost. For good. From sexual fetish to the clinical diagnosis of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, Headcheese makes the first cut, peeling back the epidermis to peer inside the minds and hearts of 26 people navigating the topography of flesh.