There are rumours about them – that they take part in orgies, that they intentionally mortify their flesh because the sight of blood, at least, is real – but they do not need to be true to disturb us.
"It is hard to use ceramic colour to imitate the colour of weapons and flesh, because it involves different kind of colours from different temperature ranges.
A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine says I was a waste of flesh because I was against 401ks.
"In my nightmares," she wrote, "I saw nurses digging their long nails into my flesh because they accused me of trying to seduce the doctor.
"I think the first reaction from some Republicans will be to take a pound of flesh because in many cases the labor movement went very strong against Bush and other Republicans," said Representative Jack Quinn of New York, who heads a group of 30 labor-friendly Republicans in the House.
Her "quality of mercy" speech is not recited as airy poetry, but as a desperate conversation with Shylock, as she tries to persuade him not to claim his pound of flesh because "earthly power" is closest to God's "when mercy seasons justice".
Everybody in Britain knows who Baby P was, but who has heard of (say) Parkside House in Northampton, where five elderly people were found with great open wounds of rotting flesh because they hadn't been moved in weeks?
I know women in India whose faces and bodies are a mass of burned flesh because they did not bring enough dowry.
Others have argued that it involved a form of crisis cannibalism in which people ate the flesh of others because all other sources of food had disappeared.
The bullet caused only a flesh wound, probably because of the tough leather of the knee-high boot, Denney and his trainers said.
