‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ Hannah paused, giving Lou a moment to consider, her fingertips tightly pinching the edge of the paper strip.

With eyes tightly closed her best friend nodded. ‘Do it.’ As Hannah tore the waxed paper downwards Lou let out a shriek, the piercing cry of a doomed creature caught in a snare.

‘Told you it would hurt,’ said Hannah, suppressing a smile. ‘Do you want me to carry on?’

They both appraised the runway, a rectangle of white skin trailing from kneecap to shin, bounded by the remaining forest of chestnut hairs. ‘You’ve got to do the rest – I can’t go out looking like a half-skinned bear in a dress.’

Tracy Fells was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2014 and Phoenix and Marilyn won 2012 ChocLit Publishing’s Summer Short Story Prize. Read the rest of this story and others by Tracy Fells in Let me Tell You a Story and hear Tracy’s own narration by scanning a QR code on the page. Available from Lulu and Amazon.