Finger Lickin' Good

      I turned and looked over my right shoulder. It always seemed to me that the scales on this side were slightly greener than on the other, but my most recent lover had assured me otherwise. "It's not your scales," he had said, "Each of your eyes just sees colors differently." I think he envied them. I knew I was lucky to have such weightless symmetry on my back, solely there to adorn my wings, to complement their translucency and then merge into smooth, olive-toned skin that gradually grew paler. Still, sometimes I wished they would extend further down than my back, making the expression 'thick-skinned' a literal reality.

      I was quite sensitive in those days. I took everything personally. But I was also sensitive to how I affected others, and I played on my uncanny perception as much as I could to my advantage. I knew that my scales, for instance, especially with oil rubbed into them, could easily charm a man's pants onto my floor, the money out of his wallet, perhaps even a car into my garage. I knew my wings, once let out from under my gown and spread into their painfully perfect arc were quite an impressive sight, especially for the first time. Wrapped around a quivering, excited torso, they had a soothing effect. The powder I worked into them on a nightly basis helped to pacify the senses, not mine, but his.

      I flexed my back again, and my wings finally spread for a brief moment and then folded around my shoulders like a comfort blanket. I swept my hair out in front to hang over my collarbone, and wished for the millionth time that it would grow out thick and long enough so that when I stood naked, I wouldn't really be so. I admired myself in this little cocoon for a moment. It was part of my nightly ritual. I always needed a few hours to myself, especially after a night out.

      I uncoiled myself from my own embrace then, and went to fold my white linen dress, the one responsible for my wings falling asleep. Some of my girls teased me about it when I initially began donning it out, but I told them to shut up because my now dead grandmother had made it for me. That was a lie, though. It was a hand-me-down from an older cousin who had grown out of it when we were 11 and 12. I had kept it, but it only started fitting me properly around age 17.

      I don't know what made me keep it then. It's as if I had had a premonition about it. It was so plain, just barely off-white, with delicate, slightly shiny also white, stitched flowers growing from the bottom around my calves, up to my knees. It fit loosely along the length of my body, giving me slim, diluted curves. It tightened significantly from the top of my ribcage to my shoulders, stretching five buttons up to the base of my neck that gave me the option to show off a little of what was hidden beneath. Oh how I did on some nights, just to mess with them.

      I knew the effect of this dress. I didn't need the glittery chandelier earrings or the sheer, polyester dresses that the other girls chose. I knew what I was doing. You see, the dress made men uncomfortable. It made them remember secrets that were long forgotten, passion that lay dormant, youthful urges that were suppressed by an uncompromising society. My dress reminded them of their childhood. It reminded them of their first inkling of sexuality, of the girls in their sixth grade classrooms who they gradually started looking at in a different way, suddenly cootie-less and budding into women. Perhaps it reminded some of their first love. The innocence, the trust, the adolescent craving to discover something new, something they'd never encountered before.

      It made me appear younger. With little make-up on, I knew I could look as young as sixteen if I added a sweet little smile. They knew there was not a single wrinkle to be found under the white linen that flowed down my body in loose yards of fabric. My girlfriends stopped giving me grief about the dress, and suddenly linen became a lot more popular among them. I knew they didn't know what it was, but I knew they saw that it worked.

      I let my wings droop down again to touch my knees. I was getting increasingly accustomed to the tickling sensation that had only appeared recently since they'd come into their full size. I turned again to contemplate the shades of green on both sides of my back. My lover's conviction about my eyesight was a possibility, I thought. He had been one of the few to notice that my pupils were actually an inky purple instead of the common black. He had been a perceptive one.

      I sat down on the bed and let my toes touch the cool floorboards. There were a few fingers that littered my ruffled, dark brown floor mat. They were graying, limp, and severed at the tips. One of them had a platinum band clasped sadly around its tattered base. In one motion, I swept them under my silver dresser to be rediscovered at some point in an unlikely cleaning expedition. I shook myself out of the grim weariness that had set in, and flashed my best coy smile at the vanity mirror. Anyways, I had much preferred his lips to his fingers.