It started, as these things do, in a dim room where dust motes pirouetted in the slant of afternoon light. The place smelled of worn leather and faintly of sandalwood. A man named Gerald – Jerry to his pals, of whom there were precisely none – sat slumped in an oversized armchair whose upholstery bore the pattern of some unnameable tropical flora. At his side, a gleaming turntable spun, hypnotic in its silence until a stylus of ruby-tipped diamond met vinyl.

    Jerry’s head tilted with the opening chords: a metronomic twitch calibrated to the precise ache of the harmonies. There was a tension in the slack of his jaw, in the stillness of a hand half-raised towards the turntable as if poised to catch notes as they escaped. It was, he thought to himself, pure gold. Leaning closer, he bobbed his head to the bassline, one greasy lock of hair flopping over eyes gone wide with disco fever. 

    There was a hitch in the music. 

    Something yielded with the faint, moist sound of separation. A thread of pink – a mischievous tendril – peeked up from Jerry’s index finger. A hangnail, he realised, caught between the needle and the groove. The thread of skin traced a tightening spiral towards the record’s centre. It was an almost pleasant burn. A peculiar hum beneath the croon. 

    Enraptured, Jerry watched the skin curl away from his finger. Each rotation of the record tugged at him further, unravelling him spool-like. Flesh gave way to glistening sinew; then, the faintest gleam of white. Whorl by whorl, he went – down into the heart of the music.

    Soon, all that remained was a pale digit bobbing in time, and an LP etched with the final, silent scream of a man pulled bodily into a three-minute pop song.