Epiphany Jones by Michael Grothaus

how to get what they want from men, without using tripods, or blackmail, or sharp little blades. And she inches up to me until we are chest tobreast, and she takes my hand and turns it over in hers. Even though her fingers are long, my palms dwarf her hands. It would take both of hers to cover one of mine. And as she works at the clasp of the watch, I feel the warmth coming from her body.
    Maybe it’s because I haven’t been this close to a woman in, well … that’s not important. But, her touch, truthfully, it arouses me a little. Her green eyes, from this distance they don’t look so wicked as they do inviting. She looks me up and down. And my resistance, it stops when I feel the tips of her fingers tickle my wrist as she unfastens the clasp, then slips the watch from it. And as Epiphany takes a step back, as she goes all cold again, she walks out the door and says, ‘Get started. We don’t have a lot of time.’
    Slam.
    I look at my bare wrist and think of my dad. Then I think, No, just do whatever it takes to get to the tape. The watch was gaudy anyway. Big and gold and not my style.

    T here’s a guy I know through a fakirs forum. And yes, that’s fakir with an ‘i’ . That’s just how they spell it. Like you didn’t know. This guy, he goes by the name Horny Halfling and he’s regarded as one of the best fakirs around.
    The way faking works is, first, you decide who you want to fake and what you want them to be doing in the picture. Let’s say you want Jordan Seabring getting it up the ass. Now you need to find a body shot. Body shots come from regular porn pictures. Google ‘tits’ or ‘fuck’ or whatever and you’ll find more body shots than you can imagine. So to create a fake of Jordan Seabring doing anal, you need to find a picture of some woman getting it in the ass.
    Go ahead, write this down. I’ll wait.
    What’s tricky is you need to find a body that’s as similar to the celebrity’s body as possible. If the actress is fair-skinned, putting her headon a tanned body wouldn’t look realistic. If the actress has smaller tits, finding a body with double D’s won’t look right. In faking you want to make it look as real as possible.
    After you find your body shot, you need to find a good headshot of the actress. Headshots come from scanned magazine photos or celebrity gossip sites. If you want a shot of the actress with her mouth open, so she looks like she’s enjoying it, you want to stick to candids as most publicity shots are closed mouth or beaming, white-teeth smiles that a person wouldn’t realistically be wearing if they were getting it in the ass.
    Once a fakir finds the head and body shots, he works on joining them. Sometimes the fakir can just paste the headshot onto the body if the two are close enough in size, shape and skin tone. But the real champs – like Horny Halfling – they paste the head onto the body and repaint the entire image in Photoshop to make it look as uniform and lifelike as possible. And the best images are. You would swear they were real. I once saw a picture of Audrey Hepburn double-dicking at Tiffany’s and there was no way I could tell it was a fake. Faking, it’s more of an art than anything else.
    Fakirs post their works to online forums where other fakirs critique them. The best fakirs rise to rock-star status in the forums. They have huge followings. They take the controlled fantasy that is Hollywood and present it to you in a more exposed, forbidden form.
    I log into the New Fake City forums and send Horny Halfling a private message. After years of critiquing and requesting fakes from him, we’ve become friends. Not real friends, mind you. Internet friends. Common-interest friends. The only real-life things I know about him are that he also lives in Chicago and he learned how to fake while working the boring overnight shifts at Kinko’s – that, and he’s paranoid as shit and believes that the US government is part of some New World Order