Encounter the Ex

Encounter the Ex

944 words

4-minute read

The alarm screamed across the bedroom, and neither moved.

Remembering last night, the hangover was appropriate because she slacked out for some of the night. She finally swept the blankets off herself and sat up. Rubbing her eyes, she thought she would snooze until the alarm went off the second time, but in her head, she knew she'd be irritable all day if she let the alarm wake her twice.

He was lying spread eagle on his back on the other side of the bed so that when she threw the blankets off, she uncovered his legs from the knee down. The tattoos of a nude woman, one on each leg, stretched out on his shin bones as if they were lying sunning themselves. The right leg was a blonde, and the left was a redhead.

The move to throw the covers off had broken one scab so that from one, the blood was oozing out of the tattooed image's mouth. She leaned down and ran her finger over the tattoo and smeared it with the blood, casting a fuzzy finish to his skin.

She looked down at her crease and saw the blue and yellow tattoo of a snake crawling out one side of her labia. She remembered approving the tattoo but didn't remember any pain while having the tattoo inked. The image was about seven or eight inches long, and had its mouth drawn so that it appeared the snake was about to devour her belly button. The eyes were blue with yellow and red flecks. The fangs were menacingly long and dripping with a clear liquid. (How do they tattoo clear on her?)

She, at first, was delighted with the tattoo. Then she realized it was a permanent alteration to the appearance of her vagina. She reached to touch herself above her clitoris, but it appeared that the snake's eyes followed her fingers as they approached the tattoo. It seemed so real that she decided not to touch herself.

She'd heard only of poisonous snakes and was certain that a yellow and black-banded snake bite was lethal. Her fear was complete, and the scream she uttered woke neighbors all through the apartment complex. She jumped out of bed and found the snake was with her every frightened step of the way. It was still menacing her naval when she stopped fleeing, jammed in the corner of the shower, against the cold marble walls. She couldn't go any farther.

Eventually, she stopped crying, and decided that since she was in the shower, to take one. The hot water felt good, but she could barely run the bar of soap across the lips of her vagina due to the pain of the swelling. But the tattoo didn't come to life and bite her, so she was more resigned to the reality of her permanent disregard for her own body and the disgusting fact that her ex-husband had convinced her to do the tattoo.

She looked at the tattoo in the mirror, bent over to look closer, used her cell phone to record the image, and realized while looking at the slithering look of the snake body wound from the opening of her vagina and poised to strike her naval that she didn't accept the responsibility for the tattoo, but blamed her ex-husband for allowing her to do such a nasty thing to herself.

She got out of the shower, told her ex to pack his shit and leave.

He attempted to discuss it with her, but she was hysterically firm that she would have him arrested if he didn't leave right away.

After he was gone, she looked again at her newly shaven crotch, the tattoo that seemed to move, and the swelling of her labia, and decided to apply ice to reduce the swelling. It was an exciting sense of relief, but it also was painful enough to not be worth while for pain relief.

Then she realized her real world depended on her to handle the fallout.

She would no longer be a desired swimsuit runway model. (She made about two hundred grand a year on the runway.)

She might lose her modeling career completely because the other models were so available and not inked.

Any attempt to reconstruct the night before was difficult because she had been using mushrooms, switched to edibles, and then finally to leaf and Scotch. She still had the hangover from such fun, and when she looked in her purse, she found the credit card slip for the tattoo. One thousand dollars! An additional seven hundred was charged for his two nudes, all on her credit card!

She was applying skin lotion when she discovered the other tattoo. The tail of the snake was tatted on the side of her ass cheek, about three inches of narrower bands of yellow and blue color poking from her ass.

She screamed again when she cleared the glass rail of the balcony, the crowd around the swimming pool three floors below scattered. She landed at the edge of the pool, opening her skull, which immediately started turning the pool water a macabre color.

Her autopsy revealed that she had been high on an illegal chemical from her ex-husband's inventory at the lab where he worked. He was sentenced to psychiatric evaluation for an indeterminate length of time,  pending an undetermined class of murder charge.

The tattoo artist disappeared, and no one knew who she was or how to describe her. She was referred to as 'Snake' among the tattoo artists. She hadn't appeared, and it had been seven years since she disappeared.