Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Fiction
vr 3.00
2008-02-16
"Shippo's Little Asymmetric Dragon" by Abraxas | 2005-12-14
Chapter Six
Souten confesses that as much as she adored him the happiest day of her life came when she first held Shippo’s penis not as a woman but as an artist. It was during that time when the design was to be etched onto his genitals. And what a design it was – it must have taken months if not years just to perfect the technique of it.
It began at a soft, sunken point between his testicles, arching around his scrotum. It ambled across the shaft of his penis, coiling about his length. It ended at the course, sensitive skin of his glans. There, at the helmet-like head and the hood-like skin that cloaked it, a flourish of lines (and colors) was envisioned such that the flexible and mobile flesh lent the image a living appearance lunging onto the viewer, growing and unwinding as his arousal brought him into erection.
Transferring that design from paper to skin proved to be among the most difficult – and the most terrifying – tasks of her life. She was literally haunted by it; her every move, her every thought, was shackled by the fear of failure. She was creating an illusion and like all illusions it required an exact setup. Any little line or detail out of place would be enough to destroy the effect.
Yet, she says she kept a smile as she watched his expression as he struggled to maintain his stoicism through the tears forming in the corner of his eyes. She adds it was remarkable that he did not lose his erection despite the pain that must have been coursing through his body. Especially that day she applied the outline onto the underside of his foreskin.
He stretched his foreskin tight over his warm and swollen head while she applied the needle onto the smooth, silky flesh. The instrument tapped a low, wet sound like that of a drip. Earlier she explored the way his penis worked and now she gathered that if he tugged his foreskin backward – to expose his head as it was natural for it to do when became erect – it would have been an easier and safer way to work. But he did not want to do it that way and she did not press the matter – in fact, she says she enjoyed watching the way he was presenting himself. It was exotically awkward and intimate.
If only she had been firmer about her intuition, if only he had been more flexible with respect to his fetishism, I wonder if history would have recorded these events differently.
And then came the day Shippo’s penis was set to come to life – when color was to be applied onto it. He arrived at Souten’s castle – a little more early than usual – he bathed and entered the makeshift tattoo parlor. She waited amidst the lamplight; she watched as the fox disrobed and admired his body, his nakedness. He was on the verge of a new and different transformation wherein he would become something other than man, more, even, than demon. Something immortal. All that remained undone hung loosely between his legs, dangled perilously within her hands as he knelt and straddled before her – there, cradled by her fingers, were his genitals, hairless and crisscrossed by a web-work of black, shiny lines looking limp and out of place.
With her touch – she notes – the pressure of her eyes looking, probing and with the anticipation of what was about to come, the fox-demon grew fully erect.
At once the needle pricked the skin – and he groaned but it was not a wail of pain.
She recalls – with more than a little hint of trepidation – her tattooing of his foreskin. It was not possible to hold back the tears and by that time he did not try to hide it. She asks if she should stop, if he hurt too much. He shakes his head, he replies that the pleasure he was feeling was worth all of the pain. She smiles and he sees it –
At that moment – she imagines – he was taken back to that time when he snuck through the shadows and darkness of that hut to watch the man and woman. He returned to that kernel. And although he was a full-grown adult, with the fantasy becoming reality – being held by a woman mixing art and pain – she questions if could it have been too much for his fragile, delicate mind and body?
But what neither Shippo nor Souten realized was how that the fantasy-reality was flawed. Recall, he did not ‘hire’ a tattoo artist – as the man and woman were strangers – he, more or less, ‘created’ one. In the process he fell in love with her. Shippo loved Souten. It must be, she says she knew he knew they loved each other – and it must be, too, that throughout the sessions he buried it within his subconscious where it remained, lingering and simmering, waiting to be resurrected. And, again at that moment, it returned when into that unfolding, role-playing game intruded its feelings of a closeness whose intimacy was deep and inscrutable.
He gasped, unable – unwilling? – to control the thrusting of his hips. His breath raced and his erection throbbed as she tugged and needled giving him her undivided love through torture, as he filled with the pleasure felt by a man nearing that moment of vulnerability. His unfolding biological function could not be stopped with his sex now so utterly over-stimulated.
If only that one, simple change had been effected – if only Shippo had listened and complied with Souten’s concerns – again, I ask, could the tragedy have been averted? We are left to wonder if at that point he realized the danger she saw in the way he wanted his foreskin tattooed – alas – if there were any such thoughts within his mind, at that instant they were overwhelmed and consumed by his inevitable penile urges.
Shippo shouted but Souten does not recall what he said – it could be that even the fox-demon did not know what he said. He ejaculated through her fingers, a burst of warm, wet semen splattered against her hands – she was startled and let slip the needle all the while his spasms squirted his essence onto her face, dribbled it down his jerking, pulsating length. When it finished, he fell into her arms – they remained sealed in a tight and silent embrace neither of them suspecting the damage the incident caused.
Souten recalls Shippo’s exhaustion to be very sweet and tender. They kissed, she says, but trails off into silence and we are left to believe by the sudden, unexpected discretion that more, much more might have happened that night. Curious that she would describe all of that then and would refrain any of it now.
Nevertheless, as they recovered themselves, everything seemed to be alright. He apologizes; she forgives. And then the lamplight was returned to focus its light upon the living canvas that became Shippo’s body.
It cannot be described – only felt – that shock that stunned Shippo when at last he saw the effect of Souten’s slip. It was not that ink had been misapplied or smeared – the image itself was as it had always been, as it was intended to be – but the tattoo had been designed to be constrained by the shape and contour of his penis and now its topography had been changed. As he rolled his glans’s cover back it became clear: the instrument sliced free his foreskin’s frenelum for his penis’s head and that portion of the figure’s mouth that been etched along where those two parts once met attained a permanent, malignant flaw.
What was supposed to be the solid, undeniable visual climax of the art was grotesquely and ridiculously out of proportion with the rest of the tattoo.
And here, here, exposed before us, we have the last, secret ingredients of the artist’s demise: for a fleeting, split-second of pleasure he was flawed forever. It was his own selfish impulse – that damned, detestable fetishism – that destroyed the dream to be perfect. Worse, it must have occurred to him at that moment, at that instant, that it destroyed her, too.
He cries into his hands; she rests his head onto her shoulder and whispers soft, broken words into his ear. But her love, so pure and unconditional, it could have only intensified the shame. He must have realized then that his body was her canvass – that it was not his crowning glory, not his artistic transformation, all along it was hers – and that his weakness again exposed ruined her legacy.
Hastily, he left. Worried, she followed him. But she did not have a Kilala and despite her speed she reached the village too late.
After the funeral, Souten reports feeling alone and isolated. She misses Shippo and all throughout these pages – those dark, autumnal times – she recreates him, over and over again, drawing his image along the margins. Months later she reports giving birth. Here the documents become less blatant and more subtle and we are forced to read deeply between the lines in order to gather that her daughter – whose names were Yanone at birth and Musashi at adulthood – was Shippo’s offspring.
She comments that her daughter never knew of her father directly but that she always knew of his art. Throughout those early, formative years, Souten shows her daughter what she says was his greatest creation.
Again, we must not judge, we must understand. Shippo could not bear the permanent marker of his perversion and because he could not erase the tattoo anymore than he could repair what had been done to maim it he removed it. And with it obliterated, is it not possible to see how in his mind regained for his lover a certain, iota of perfection for the rest of the tattoos were flawless. It was a small, insignificant thing – after all, how many valued statues of ancient art existed with parts broken off?
But she loved it for its personal and intimate imperfections.
And so, safe and sealed within a glass jar full of a clear, viscous ink, was preserved for the world the flesh that had been severed at the base, soft and limp, obscene were it not indeed by its flaw a work of art, Shippo’s little asymmetric dragon.
END
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