text: Back in '08, me and my friend both got jobs as scrapers. We'd get a call, get an address, and drive on over there to scrape off whatever needed scraping. We'd be scraping off old stickers off of car windows, mucked on poop off of sidewalks, berry splatter off of siding... you name it, we scraped it. We learned quick that you can scrape off just about anything with a 3" metal scraper and a little hard work. Summer was going great and business was booming as we scraped our way across the tri-county area. Hell, we were making nearly $10 a scrape job which was pretty decent considering we could scrape up the plastered-on messes of ten to fifteen houses in an afternoon. Word started to get out about how well we scraped up and how quick we scraped out. Soon we started getting some calls for some scrape jobs way out of the tri-county area, but the guy offered $12 a scrape and promised there'd be at least 30 scrapes for us to scrape. It was like an hour and half drive and me and my buddy's scraping hands were itching for some quality scraping. The whole time I was driving, he was twirling his scraper with his gnarled, scrape-hardened fingers and just staring blankly ahead as our back-country road gave way to a single lane gravel path. I would have given up and turned around thinking we must have been going the wrong way, but then I saw an absolutely humongous farm house just scraping the horizon. My buddy gave me a scrape on the thigh, and I gunned it. We both had such huge smiles on our faces, our scraped white teeth glistening in the afternoon sun. We parked the car pretty much right at the front door since there's no real driveway and got a good look at the outside of this guy. Paint peeling everywhere, windows gunked to the frames with bird turd, moldies and oldies creeping in every crack and cranny. It was a scraper's wet dream! It was maybe even a scraper's wet daydream judging my how my buddy was acting. His eyes darted all over the exterior as his idly scraped what little hair he had left off of his forearm. It was hard not to imagine what kind of amazing scrapes needed scraping on the inside with how many scrape jobs we were eyeballing on the outside. I rang the doorbell with my scraper and the door swung open before the ding finished donging. No one was there, but we heard a voice upstairs tell us that the whole house needs a good scrape down. And he really emphasized the “whole” part. Money was no object, just scrape as much as we could scrape. So that's exactly what we did. Without hesitation, I'm on the ground scraping up the peeling linoleum tiles. My buddies on the walls scraping of the wall paper. These scrapes jobs were pretty stubborn, and we had to sharpen our scrapers more than a few times. Chips of tiles, flecks of paint, ribbons of wall papers, shreds of veneer, speckles of plaster and glue, nothing was safe from our scraping and we were so focused that we didn't realize twelve hours had passed and we were barely out of the foyer. We scraped and rescraped and overscraped and superscraped through the night until all we there was nothing but bare concrete foundation and drywall. The massive piles of scrapings covered the floor and as I shuffled through them like fallen leaves, I told my buddy that I'll be back with the vacuum. He nodded, but never looked up and never stopped scraping. Out in the cool breeze of another great summer night, I snapped out of my scrape frenzy and started to realize how weird it was that some guy we never saw just had us scrape up his whole first floor down to the bare bones without ever checking up on us or even really telling us what to scrape. We just went at it. I grabbed the vacuum and tried to tally the number of scrape jobs in my head. I licked my chops looking at everything that needed a good scraping outside. There was going to be a lot of cash coming our way. With my vacuum armed and ready, I plowed through the door hoping that my buddy had scraped everything into one central pile to make things easier for me, but instead he was nowhere to be found. Upstairs, I heard the very distinct sound of scraping and then giggling. Did this guy really think he could start scraping upstairs without me? I decided to let me have his fun while I vacuumed up. Over the speckly sound of the vacuum sucking up our pile of scrapings, I heard some louder giggling and some moaning. I turned off the vacuum to listen closer, but it stopped. As soon as I turned the vacuum back on, I heard the laughing and moaning again. I had to go upstairs and check it out. Scraping is fun and all, hell it was my life that summer, but I never once heard him be that jubilant when scraping. As I'm walking up the creaking stairs, I'm seeing a trail of scrapes along the way. It was nothing major, just a small scrape here, a peel back there, but it made for a trail leading into one of the rooms upstairs, the same room where the moaning was coming from. All the way upstairs now, the moaning and laughing and giggling was nonstop. What could my buddy have possibly been scraping that was so much fun? Finally, I get to the door and scrape it open with my scraper. Inside my buddy has his shirt scraped off and he's sitting on the back of some guy, maybe the owner of the house. The guy was the one moaning with pleasure. He was moaning and giggling because my buddy is scraping his back. Now, everyone loves a good back scraping, so I chalk it up to some sort of little extra side gig my buddy was lucky enough to secure, but then I see him scrape and pull a long ribbon of skin up and above his shoulder. The man moaned with delight, almost howling. Then I saw more back-long ribbons of skin on the floor in a bloody heap. My buddy doesn't even turn to look at me, he just digs his scraper in again as the man giggles with ticklish delight. I hear the skin loosen and peel like the rind of massive orange. I backed away slowly thinking that if I just leave them to it, we can collect our cash and leave without ever discussing this scrape job again. I wouldn't have even cared if he got a little extra skin scraper money on the side. That's when I noticed that the walls were covered in flesh ribbons like those, hanging and long since dried like thousands of old belts. From the corner of the room, I heard another giggle. It was a man or woman. I couldn't tell because this laughing person had no skin whatsoever. It had been scraped off and made part of the skin belt collection. The person gestured over to me and mimed a scraping motion along their back where it seemed fresh, but very thin skin had started to grow back. They looked so weak, so frail, so exposed. This person kept beckoning me and giggling while my buddy scraped off another ribbon of the moaning man's skin and tossed it wetly into the pile. I dropped my scraper and it scraped right into the blood-soaked floorboards. My buddy stopped scraping, the moaning man stopped moaning and the giggling person stopped giggling. They all looked at me like I was the weirdo, like I wasn't doing my job. My buddy wiped his sweaty brow with his blood drenched hand. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Looking down at the man's raw back and then back up to me, he said, "Well uhm, these guys are paying my $50 dollars a ribbon, so uhh..." He wiggled his scraper, "What do you think?" Out from the shadows of the back room, several more people with varying degrees of skin coverage shambled into the light coming from the hallway. They all just looked at me with wanting eyes. Hey, $50 is $50.