I thought to put that night aside like a beautiful dream. I realized that my body had changed. I was stronger, quicker. My hands learned to spin the fine webbing. The better to bind you with, Little One.
She passed her genetic materials to me and then, I suspect, died somewhere alone.
I have always been patient. I wanted my first time to be special. Months passed before I found you. You have everything I could ever want. Baby blue eyes that remind me of my first kiss; soft lips and skin that smells of baby powder.
Do not struggle, Little One. It will only make the experience more intense.
KILLER NAILS
MP Johnson
Some men kept their fetishes in their closets, where they remained unfulfilled. Chelz Dobbs chose a different route. He turned his into a career, into an art. Foot fetishists got jobs at shoe stores. Chelz’s fetish may have been a little less conventional, but a career path existed nonetheless, and he followed it. Long fingernails turned him on, so he became a nail technician and manicurist. He became a nail artist.
He hadn’t become just any nail artist, though. After years of making sacrifices and struggling at grimy West Hollywood salons, he had become Leilani’s manicurist. Yes, that Leilani. The blonde diva. The nineteen-year-old, leather chaps wearing, four octave belting singer of
Leilani wandered through his studio, examining his work. His skillfully designed nails graced the fingers of disembodied mannequin hands, some of which were frozen in stiff pageant waves, others as if reaching to pick ripe fruit from a tree. He followed her, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking more like a college kid hired to paint houses in the ‘burbs than a beauty school grad getting paid to tend the talons of celebrities.
The studio lights had been painstakingly arranged to maximize the gleam coming off the surface of each curved nail. In fact, his work—displayed museum style on a dozen short white pedestals—was the only thing in the room that gleamed. He had chosen off-white matte paint for the walls and hired people to dull the hardwood floor. Nothing else in the room could catch light, nothing to distract eyes from his art.
Leilani zeroed in on one design. The color on these nails stood out from the rest, a rich gold and wet green that blended perfectly, yet somehow remained distinct. It had a metallic sheen, but not as coin cold as the minx nails technique his peers had recently fallen in love with. He still had trouble describing it, the closest match he had seen being the shell of a tropical beetle on display at the museum. It seemed unworldly, and rightly so, considering its source. He hoped Leilani would keep walking.
She clapped her hands and exclaimed, “These are perfect. This color is totally unreal, but it will go with my dress for tonight’s show. I want!”
“No!” Chelz snapped. Catching himself, he softened his tone and added, “I’m all out of that color.” He hoped she’d buy his bluff. He had forgotten to take the piece down after designing it for a porn star he had worked for a few days before. She had declined in favor of pale pink, the boring bitch. He couldn’t give the design to Leilani. She had been good to him and his work. He needed to keep her around.
“Chelz-ee,” she cooed. “Remember when I found you working in that sweatshop of a salon in West Hollywood?”
Chelz nodded. He knew where this was going. She had held it over his head before, this idea of hers that she had made him. She hadn’t made him. If she only knew.
“Weren’t there others working there? Aren’t there, in fact, thousands of nail artists wandering the streets of Los Angeles right now who would kill to be in your position?” she asked, hands on hips, smiling a smile so true it had to be fake.
“Fine. Whatever will make your pretty little hands happy,” he said hesitantly, avoiding eye contact. “I’ll get everything ready. Go over to the station and make yourself comfy.” Chelz pointed to the table in the corner of his studio.
His studio also served as his apartment. He unlocked the door adjacent to his bedroom and opened it just wide enough to squeeze through. Locking it behind him, he looked at the pig lying on the hardwood floor. Chelz called the creature, covered in fine hair, a pig because of its bulk and its pink flesh. But the similarities ended there.
When he found it, he had been chasing his escaped cat through the alley behind his old apartment. Chelz thought he had stumbled onto a pile of dead dogs stripped of fur, until he noticed it breathing. Through one of the many tuberous pustules lining its back, it choked a glob of fluid onto his cat’s paw, fluid unlike anything he had seen before. Chelz had known right away what to do with that fluid, even before the pig had told him—in its wordless way—that it could help him, as long as Chelz helped it.
The pig had been smaller back then, able to use its six stumps to carry its weight up the steps to Chelz’s apartment. Now, it couldn’t move on its own. Couldn’t even lick the sweat and grime from the wrinkles of fat at the bases of the tubes, which drained into buckets on the floor. Chelz grabbed one of those buckets and frowned. Empty. The spigots had all but dried up. He only found one bucket with enough liquid in it.
Chelz didn’t like the idea of using it on Leilani, but he knew it needed to be done. If he waited any longer the pig might starve, might stop fulfilling its end of the bargain. And then Chelz would find himself back at Do Me Nails with the chirping Koreans. They didn’t get him. Like so many of his clients, they thought he was gay, gave him sideways glances and whispered, not that he could make out anything they said.
“I’ll feed you soon,” he whispered to the pig.
The pig snorted through a single cavernous nostril. Dislodged from the hole by the vibrations of the noise, a gob of dry muck tumbled onto the floor. When the pig’s tongue came out to reclaim what had been lost, Chelz left the room.
“What’s in there?” the diva asked.
“Trade secrets,” Chelz said, holding up the tin bucket of his special polish.
He sat across from Leilani at the manicure table. Holding her pale hands in his, he removed the chipped candy apple red polish he had applied last time. The look didn’t suit her. She had passed through a phase that involved covering herself with as much bright red as possible, from hats to heels. The acetone smell of the nail polish remover crowded the air between them. He hated that smell.
“I’m so nervous about tonight’s show,” Leilani said.
“Why? It’s low key compared to your usual shows.”
“That’s the problem, Chelzee. There’s no production to hide behind if something goes wrong, no dancers, no video screen. All eyes are on me.”
Chelz carefully filled the gaps between her cuticles and the bottoms of the inch-long acrylic nails, gaps created by the inevitable growth of her natural nails. The smell of ethyl methacrylate swirled around him, much sweeter than the nail polish remover. He loved how gorgeous his work looked, how much better it looked than the cheap press-on nails he had talked his girlfriends into wearing back in high school, before he talked them into giving him hand jobs, usually successfully, thanks to his clean cut, athletic looks.
He remembered the first and last time he had tried to explain his fetish. Kirstie Mickelson had asked him why he never wanted intercourse. When he explained, she had called him a fucking weirdo and punched him in the neck before jumping out of his car. After he graduated from beauty school, he made
Shaking the thought, he asked, “But isn’t the crowd only a few hundred people?”
“That makes it worse!” Leilani started to gesture, but Chelz held her hand tight so she couldn’t move while he worked. “In an arena, I see the crowd as one mass, like the blob or something. With small crowds, it’s too easy to focus on faces. If I see someone not smiling or looking distracted, I start to wonder if I’m off, and if I start to wonder, I risk losing the song, which is possible since I’m mostly going to be doing new stuff that I don’t entirely know yet.”
“Come on. They’re there because they love you,” he said. “You’re there ‘cause you’re the best and you know
