butterfly

Kate Nerone

I didn’t know it, but I was always just one positive STI diagnosis away from getting a small, trampy tattoo. I didn’t have any tattoos. My sister tried to get me to get one with her after a Shania Twain concert when we were visiting our cousins in St. Louis. But the divey place she found was too upstanding to allow a fourteen-year-old to leave their place with a permanent body alteration. My sister and my older cousin left with matching horseshoes on their ankles, which they saran wrapped and covered with toe socks they bought at CVS to hide them from my aunt and uncle.

When my grandma died I considered getting a tattoo on my calf of her passive aggressive catchphrase “yeah isn’t a word. It’s yes.”

But my grandma hated tattoos. And I didn’t really like her that much.

But what brought me into the shop that day was that I got it. You know it. From him. Yes, him. We had sex, or something like it, and I’d woken up a few days later feeling pain, dull pain, then another pain, sharp pain, then itching, horrible itching, then panic, deep panic. I went to the clinic and the doctor stripped and stirruped me and then told me that I got it. But she said don’t worry, most people get it if they don’t already have it. And she said that she noticed that I also had some bruising around the area.

“Do you feel safe with your sexual partner?” She asked.

“Is there some kind of pill I can take for this?” I answered.

She nodded, pulled off her gloves, told me to wait there. While I was waiting I looked down, down at that pink plucked chicken between my legs all bruised and bleeding and I hated it of course. I hated having it and I hated seeing it and I most of all hated feeling it. I remembered my mother then, and how she had clucked about her bedroom when I was a child, running naked with her hair down and her bush wild, in my memory pulling chiffon scarves from the dresser and pressed shirts from the closet as though her aim were not to get dressed, but to paint the air with clothes. She never seemed to remember that she was a woman or that she was naked or that she was a woman or that she had a bush. I wish I felt like she did about my body and my bush and my being a woman.

But instead, I wondered if the doctor would give me a free husband stich when she came back in the room. I hadn’t had kids yet but I wanted to plan ahead. Like preventative botox at 25. But when she came back all I did was say thank you and I’m sorry and she told me the pharmacy would have my medication in an hour.

I waddled four blocks in the sun on my way to the pharmacy. I thought about the sex that got me here. He was hot at first, asked me out when I was hanging on the arm of another guy, a guy who didn’t have the guts to fuck me. He came up to me—or I came up to him. I usually am mean to guys to get them to sleep with me which I’m not saying because I think it sounds cool but just because it’s true. I don’t know why they like it but I like it because I’m already angry at them for wanting to have sex with me. But I’m angrier that I want to have sex with them. Either way I’m angry and that’s how it happened. That’s how I got it.

I was coming up on the pharmacy and I saw a girl smoking outside of a tattoo shop. She wasn’t smoking really—she was vaping, but she still somehow made it look cool. She seemed beautiful actually. I wondered if she’d ever had what I had. She looked beautiful but the vaping made me think she was gross. Just like me. So maybe she did get this thing that I got. She had a lot of tattoos obviously. I thought maybe I could be like her. She looked at me as I walked in. She looked at me and I wondered what I looked like to her.

I went in and was greeted by a man who was huge. He was fat and tall and his head was mostly neck. He looked up at me without pausing the video he was watching. It blasted what I think were hockey highlights.

“Do you have an appointment?” he asked.

I shook my head. I was surprised by his professionalism.

“How old are you?” He asked.

I answered.

He waited there while looking at me. I waited there while looking at him. I was wearing a t shirt under a short canvas dress. Which I’d chosen because I couldn’t put jeans on over the sorry state that was my crotch. I wished I’d chosen an outfit with more coverage, then he might assume I had more tats hidden under my clothes.

“So what do you want to get?” He asked.

“My sister died.” I said.

He looked disappointed and he nodded, like I’d given him the news that a family run restaurant had closed during a recession.

“My little sister,” I added. That made him talk.

“Damn,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear that. For real.”

“Thank you.” I said. “Yeah so that’s why I want the tattoo. To commemorate her.”

I wondered if the horrible energy I was giving off from recently finding out that I had an STI was passing as “dead little sister” grief.

I wondered if my sister would use my fake death to cope with an STI diagnosis. But the exercise fell apart because she never would have done this—gotten herself here. She almost never had sex, that’s why she had a boyfriend for so long.

My lie made me happy, like I now had a reason to be there. A good reason. A reason a normal person would get a tattoo, like that girl vaping outside. I bet half the tattoos on her sleeve were for dead people. She seemed like a really good person.

“What do you want?” he asked again.

I knew I had to be sure, like I’d thought about it.

“I want a butterfly,” I told him.

“Right here,” I pointed to my right thigh.

He looked down at my thigh. Too close to the danger zone.

“For your little sister?” He asked.

“Actually,” I said, trying to make it conversational.

“I have been going back and forth about whether I want it there or here.” I pointed to the back of my left elbow.

“My sister used to pinch me here. On my arm. During family roadtrips. To Lake Michigan.”

“What do you think?” I asked him, “Thigh or arm?”

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. I felt I’d upset him.

“Whatever you want,” he said, getting out some supplies to draw what he called “a stencil”. He said it so cavalier, as if he didn’t basically just say that my upper thigh wasn’t special.

“Yeah,” I said, “I think my arm. My arm for sure.”

He looked at me for a little while longer.

“Okay,” he said. I was relieved.

The whole time he was doing it, methodically drawing out the butterfly as I sat twitching and fidgeting in the corner, as he said “alright” and gestured for me to follow him back to the table without even checking to see if I was excited to come, the way he whipped out his instruments, smelling of alcohol and miming polite apathy, and holding his gun to my skin and waiting, waiting to pierce it, stain it, mark it, temper it, soil it, ruin it, all that time he didn’t know where I was. I was cast, dangling, as though floating above my body which was being touched by his body which was being held in this shitty shop which was being beaten down by the sun which was only a few blocks from the pharmacy which probably had my medication by now. And he was nowhere but dangerous, and I was gone. Gone.

I told him to stop just in time.

I swallowed and said stop again and he did. I got up and my thighs made a slurping sound getting unstuck from the table. He still wanted his money. I gave it to him. And as I left I looked at the wet, purple impression of a butterfly left on my arm. He was a shit drawer.

I left the tattoo shop, the girl vaping was gone. I had to stop myself from running to the pharmacy. The stinging between my legs slowed me down, but not much.

I was almost inside, so close I’d already set off the automatic doors when I met the gaze of a girl I knew from a thing I went to a couple weeks ago.

“Oh, hi,” she said, turning mid stride.

We side hugged.

“Hi,” I said, “What are you up to?”

She held out a white paper baggy and shook it lightly. A dull rattle came from the bag.

“Oh you know,” she said, “I’m a Lexapro girly.”

“What about you?” she said, as she said it she looked me up and down. Before I could answer she interrupted. “I like your fit. Really early Tumblr.”

I said thanks and laughed a laugh that was just me saying “haha” but breathier. She kept looking from my shoes to the hemline of my dress. Measuring something.

“I got a tattoo.” I said, she looked up and met my eyes.

“Just now?” she asked. She tucked her hand with the baggy in it into herself, crossing her arms and jutting her head out, searching me.

I laughed again, this time a real laugh.

“It’s in a bit of a compromising place,” I said, allowing my voice to trail off.

“Let’s just say there’s a reason I wore a short dress today.”

She laughed too, her eyes wild and bright, like a child’s.

“But I can still show you,” I said, beginning to lift my dress, “if you want to see.”

Kate Nerone is a writer and actor based in Los Angeles. She has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and she now works in film and TV. You can find more of her work on substack (katenerone.substack.com) or instagram (@kate_nerone).