A Chinese Massage. No skin off my back!

 Not your normal massage, I think I was lucky to come out of this one alive, this was five weeks ago and you can still see the marks on my back.  I asked a friend to take me to a massage place and she said her family uses a really good one, which she took me to.  I was laid down and given a ferocious back rub and then told to take my t-shirt off, I remember thinking at this point ‘that was very painful, maybe I should just say I don’t want any more, pay up and scarper’, but for some strange reason I ignored this intuitive impulse, which I guess it was my survival instinct, and decided to continue.  I put my head back down in the little hole and got ready for the second wave.  I couldn’t see what he was using but it was sharp, and he pressed it against the back of my neck and scraped all the way down to my lower back, and kept doing this until it was red raw and felt like I’d been lashed.  After this I could hear him preparing some other form of torture and it took all my courage to stop myself from jumping up and running off half naked with no shoes on.  I heard what sounded like glass clinking, some kind of liquid and a lighter, followed by a little popping noise as he applied something to my back and then the kind of suction that Dyson could only dream of.  I was just happy that he didn’t chuck a Molotov cocktail at me as that would not have been surprising.  What he was actually doing was pouring ethanol in to jars, lighting it and sticking them on to my poor back as the ethanol burned and created a flash of heat, then an incredible suction followed by a cold pain.  He did this with twelve jars then left the room, the agony was intense and movement created more pain so I just had to lay there and wish I could have gone to Guantanemo bay instead of China for about fifteen minutes.  When he came back he ripped off the jars and turned on some insanely bright heat lamp which he used to warm up my back, which had got pretty close to absolute zero.  Then he removed the lamp and told me to put on my t-shirt as it was over.  I felt relief like nothing I have ever felt before and then got a shock as I sat up and looked over my shoulder to see one of twelve perfect circles of pure black skin.  These remained very dark for about two weeks then gradually began to fade.