Content warning: strong stuff in the horror genre





Her dog tags plumblined under her head towards the floor as if they were divining. Dowsing for unadulterated blood. The metal tags had been fashioned from razor blades, dangling among her cascading tresses like Medusa’s serpents as her body swayed casting its spell over the audience. The divining had worked, her thong strap corralling a plethora of banknotes like a cotton hula skirt. Crisp verdant tender that had only recently pupated from an ATM, clenched stiff-backed in febrile flapping hands so that they tapered between tensing fingers, but now cocooned against her hot skin the currency had wilted and shrivelled. The men snapped them at her, like cobra’s fangs. Hoping to cop an illicit fondle of her flesh. It was hard to determine who was the charmer and who the entranced snake. It was only when she was fully distended against the indurate embrace of the steel pole that she felt sure of who she was. And who the vipers coiled in the audience were. 
A hissing, guttural whistling and applause broke out as she slid down the steel for the final time. But she did not lap it up. It was always the worst moment for her, when her naked skin broke off communion with the unyielding metal. No matter how hot the club was under the lights, her exposed skin flared up in goosebumps. Her spine no longer reinforced by the steel brace sagged and curled in on itself. She pelted off the stage and passed the next dancer with a live snake wrapped around her shoulders. She shivered. The lights dimmed to shroud her newfound modesty as she bent down to recoup her faux military costume, her tags taking a last bow of their own bouncing around her temple as she gathered her far flung attire. As she held the clothes clump to cover her breasts with one hand, her other swung the tags back into place cresting her decolletage. The touch of the metal sent a charge through her that banished the goosebumps as the blood resumed coursing through her veins, coming up to the surface for its feed at the mouth of the razor blades.
In the dressing room, she slipped her feet into her crocodile skin mules so that her flesh was no longer chilled by contact with the floor. She threw the fatigues under her dressing table before plucking the banknote fronds from her thong, wadding and stuffing them into the gaping maw of her snakeskin handbag. She extracted a lizard skin jewellery case from its scaly bowels and opened the clasp. She tipped the box upside down and a pile of metalwork clanged on to her dressing table. She started slipping the charm bangles, bracelets and wrist bands over her hands and sliding them up the length of her forearms. She moved to complete the metal-ringed concatenation with some filigree iron cuffs. As she cinctured one wrist with the band, the circlets above began their segmented slow shuffle down her arm. 
Satisfied with an inspection that verified there was virtually no pink skin visible beneath the metal carapace, removed her thong and replaced it with a chastity belt forged from iron. Next she compressed herself into a metal corset. She pulled the wire ties like ligatures as she welded herself into the callous embrace of the garment. The metallurgy made an ingot of her body as she proceeded to pour herself into a metallic mirror dress. Her torso now fully scourged and pressed behind the unbending, she sat down on her chair. She slipped on a pair of metal anklets which resembled those of an Indian temple dancer and strapped on a pair of steel shin guards that gave her the appearance of an ice hockey goal tender. She stood up, without a shred of skin being exposed beneath her ferric sheathing. Modern day chain-mail for confronting the world in, and particularly the unchained male with his tongue hanging from his mouth, she felt emboldened to step outside the skin bar and return home. The venomous vipers might have been held in check by the in-house rules but outside, even though there were a myriad of laws, there were fewer rules and considerably less illumination. Fully armoured, she offered them no purchase on her flesh to sink their fangs into.
She marched straight through the bedroom and into the ensuite. She gathered up some fresh dressings, swabs and surgical alcohol. She returned to the bedroom and set the articles on a bedside table. She went over to her mirrored closet which had been covered up behind sheets stuck over the reflective glass. She opened the door and sunk stiffly to her knees as she foraged around the floor of the closet. She emerged with a husked snakeskin all of a piece. She started to pare it carefully with a scalpel. A groan was emitted from behind her as soon as the scalpel’s scratching started up. “Not much more now. We’re nearly done” she intoned absently as she concentrated on her close work. When she had fashioned several reticulated squares of snakeskin, she turned towards the bed. She approached the quivering body and surmised that it was silently weeping.

She started unpicking one of the pressure bandages that adorned the man’s shin. Beneath lay the muscle, ligament and bone denuded of their flesh pellicle. The bandage had a smeared blood stain on its lint, but she discarded it into the corner of her room where others lay stacked up like a termite mound. She placed a few of the squares over the man’s bare leg. He started whimpering louder. She turned to the drawer of her bedside table and extracted a thick bodkin needle. She pierced one of the snakeskin patches and ran some thread through the needle’s eye. She would mark this particular snake in all his true colours. He would never shed his skin again.