The man who raped me was scared of snakes.

He slid into my booth with a forked tongue and slanted eyes, sandy hair slicked back tight to his skull and glistening with gel. Pointed at a group of men shooting conspicuous glances over their shoulders and told me they’d dared him to approach the most beautiful girl in the bar with a line about the snake in his pants. Then he admitted, in hushed tones, that he was actually deathly afraid of snakes, hideous as they were. Leant in close to whisper the confession, close enough for me to smell the venom on his breath like scotch. His eyes had fallen to my hair, and I had felt suddenly pinned in place by the glance, a deer frozen in the headlights.

Prey.

He twisted a strand of my hair around his finger and told me it was the glossy curls falling around my shoulders that had tempted him over. Said it looked like a wave of molasses rolling down my back before he buried his nose in my neck. Said it smelt sweet as sin too. I smiled politely and shuffled a little deeper into the booth, a little further away from him. He let the distance settle and then draped an arm over the leather between us like a python, fingers flickering against the bare skin of my shoulders, falling heavy to my thigh. I sipped my drink to calm my nerves, and poison burst across my tongue.

I don’t remember much after that.

I didn’t need to. His fingerprints still bruised into my throat, the soreness lingering between my legs, the itch trapped beneath my skin. It was written all over me. I was certain everyone could see it in my eyes, in the way they scanned for threats and jumped away before they could find any, or in the stoop of my shoulders, in the way I tried to blur the curves of my figure into something undesirable.

Something hideous.

I wanted to be hideous. Desperately. And Minerva wanted to help. I hadn’t told her what had happened, but she knew. Everyone always said she knew everything. I think maybe she just knew me. Could read me like an open book. And, well, the shaved head I walked into her shop with was probably a dead giveaway.

Minerva had opened her body shop the year we met. I’d helped her decorate the place, and we’d gotten drunk on Sedative Sodas as we stared at the grungy black walls like we were waiting for stars to appear. Over the years, she’d created constellations of her sketches, trinkets picked up on trips to the Junk Markets, skeletons of beloved pets, dead butterflies pinned to the wallpaper and anatomy diagrams torn from textbooks. Minerva’s was not what you thought of when you thought of body-mods.

Most modification artists called their places something pretentious like a parlour or a salon. They were luxury. Dazzling pink or startling white, decked out in plush velvet couches and fine leather seats. They served a flute of Sedative Champagne with every “beautification” procedure a client could afford. Women went in skinny, pale and translucent. They came out skinnier, paler and ghostly.

Body Salons were supposed to make you into what the world wanted you to be. Minerva’s Body Shop was about making you into whatever you wanted to be. She helped find the real you. However hideous it might be considered. Minerva herself was all dark blue skin with scales set into the softest parts of her – throat, wrists, waist.

I was in the right place. And not just for the friendly discount.

Minerva asked me what I wanted, and I set a box down on the counter. I’d picked it up on my way over, and the weight of it was almost enough to make me reconsider. But Minerva just peeked inside and glanced at the close crop of my hair to my skull.

She sat me in one of her crusty leather chairs and fastened a cape around my neck with gentle fingers. I hadn’t cried since the man had held me down and speared me in two – the before and the after – but tears began to prickle my eyes at Minerva’s tender touch. I had to pick at the flaking leather just to focus anything apart from the undoing sensation of her careful hands across my skull.

When the pain sliced into my head, the tears turned to joy.

Gentleness removes you from the battleground of your body. It takes you from blood-stained concrete and shell-pocked soil, setting you into a field of lush grass and wildflowers. I did not like to be out of myself after the invasion. Pain grounds you in the no-mans-land of your body. Barbed wire catching on your legs and bloody mud sucking you down.

I did not like to be out of my body, afraid it would be stolen from me once again.

  Minerva drifted over to her tape deck and rifled through the cassettes below for a long moment, plucking one from the shelf with a triumphant noise. She fed the tape into the machine’s mouth, and it swallowed hungrily, clunking and whirring in satisfaction before spitting out a soft melody of pipes. Only then did she open the box.

The snakes were beautiful. Kraits, the pet store owner had told me, incredibly venomous. I had been drawn to them for their colour. Striped yellow and black. I’d always wanted blonde highlights streaked through the midnight black of my hair. But they were not blonde. They were the colours of a warning sign on an electric fence.

Danger.

Minerva took the tails off them and began grafting them to my scalp one by one. The kraits hissed and snapped their jaws at the cut, but the music filling the room seemed to calm them on the way to my head. By the time we were done, they were all curled up asleep. If I squinted my eyes at the mirror, it looked like I’d just been to the barbers for a cut and colour. If I looked closer, I could see the blood – both warm and cold – drying around gnarly black stitches.

I was beautifully hideous. It was not enough.

The man who harassed me was not scared of snakes.

He slithered up next to me at the bar and bared his teeth. The kraits lunged for him, but he only dodged them with a honeyed chuckle. He told me he loved snakes. Had one of his own. Long and thick. He asked if I’d be interested in seeing it. Giving it a stroke or two. I smiled and asked if I could tell him a secret. He nodded like a bobblehead, frantic and brainless, and I urged him in close with the crook of my finger. Turned my lips towards his ear.

“I fucking hate snakes.”

The kraits sunk their fangs into his neck, his jaw, his cheek. He howled in pain, ripped them from his face and cursed me out. The words slowed and slurred until eventually they choked off altogether. The man fell to the floor, convulsed for a moment and turned still as stone.

I walked away. Nobody stopped me.

This becomes something of a ritual to me. Every Friday night, reeling men in with hooded eyes, sharp smiles and coiled hair. It’s like pressing on a bruise. No. More violent than that. Like injecting yourself with small doses of poison over an extended period of time to build up an immunity.

My hideousness draws attention but never averts them.

The next man to approach me does not comment on my hair. Instead, he tells me my eyes are enchanting. Then, he says he feels a little like a snake caught in the music of a snake charmer. He apologises for the line, ducking his head and blushing when he tells me I shouldn’t waste my time on a guy like him.

I turn away and let him prove exactly what kind of a guy he is.

The kraits find the evidence. As my gaze wanders over the bar’s other prospects, the snakes’ beady eyes track the movement of his hand towards my cup. Before he can inject his venom into my drink, they clamp down on his forearm. Jaws latched onto his skin all the way from his wrist to his elbow. His head hits the bar, and he crumples off his stool.

Minerva opens her door half an hour later. She does not comment on the blood in my hair, only asks what she can do for me this time. And I do not know what I want, only that I never want to charm another snake again. She takes me down to the basement and buckles me into an unyielding chair. The straps do not make me panic.

Minerva gives bodies. She does not take them.

A needle slips into my eye and floods it with local anaesthetic. For a moment, I blink as if trying to dislodge an eyelash from my cornea. Then, she gets to work. It is an odd experience, feels as though it is happening to someone else, and I am just a curious observer. I feel the scratch of her tools as though through a hundred thick layers of reality, softening the scratch and scrape into whispers. It feels like –

But I chose this.

She winds bandages around my eyes when she is done and unbuckles me from the chair. Leads me over to the couch in the corner of the room and bundles me in a blanket. For a while, I listen only to the thud of her footsteps on the shop floor above me. The buzz of the doorbell, the muffled warble of exchanged words, the clank and click of the deadbolt. Then, the smell reaches me. Orange chicken and barbecue ribs and egg drop soup. Minerva does not feed me. She hands me the utensils and guides them to the correct containers, but I do the rest. For this, I am grateful.

In the morning, she dims the basement lights and pulls the gauze away from my eyes. My pupils have bled through my irises, through my sclera. I can still see perfectly, but nobody will be able to see me. Like tinted windows to the soul, I can see out, nobody else can see in.

The man at the club doesn’t even look at me.

I am female. This is all he needs to know before he slots himself along my back and grinds his cock into my ass, hands groping sloppily at my tits. Between one flash of the strobe lights and the next, every snake that can reach has latched onto his neck. He moans at first, thinking I have contorted myself to stake my claim on him, but it glitches into a groan that is lost to the throbbing music. I am halfway to the door when someone screams.

Getting home blurs into the darkness between alleyways. I open my eyes and find myself in the shower, temperature gauge turned up to the max. The water cannot burn the feel of his hands off my skin, but the pain steals my body back from his grasp. If only his touch didn’t linger in the bruises on my hips and chest.

It doesn’t matter how hideous I become. I am still a woman.

This time, Minerva doesn’t blink at my appearance. She asks me what she can do for me. I tell her that I want to be untouchable. She disappears into the basement again. I had not noticed the makeshift lab in the corner last time, locked in on the foreboding seat with the leather straps. Now, though, it stands out in the dinge. Tubes and flasks and Bunsen burners strung together in some complex pattern.

She does not speak as she works, mixing powders and liquids into pastes, distilling her concoctions over a furious flame. She produces three things: something cream-like that she leaves to cool, a powder that she decants into pill capsules and a murky grey liquid that she transfers into a syringe.

The liquid goes into me first. Shocking cold as it spreads beneath my skin, point of the needle just barely piercing my flesh. She does not apply the cream herself, telling me to apply an even but thin layer when I get home, to let it soak in completely before I wash. Once in the morning. Once in the evening.

I do this everyday for a month. I do not go outside as I begin to transform. Slowly, the dark grey of shale seeps into my skin. Each morning, I rub Minerva’s lotion across my body, and my flesh hardens under the touch. My softness fades into something unyielding. I am harsh and unforgiving.

I am stone.

Perseus is the first man to tell me his name. He does not ask for mine. He is six foot and blond with blue eyes and too important to worry about my name. I feel like I know him. I assume I just know his type. His hand settles on the small of my back, and he whistles low. Asks if I work out. He does not wait for an answer. Tells me, instead, that I feel like a statue. Look like a sculpture.

There is only one statue of a woman in our city. Salus Aesculapius was a pioneer of health. She created several vaccines that saved the city from epidemics. Her brain was fundamental to our survival. Now, she is just a smiling face set in bronze. Not stone. The corrosive oils of men’s hands turned her breasts from brown to gold. From woman to trophy.

Perseus does not get close enough for the snakes to bite.

Instead, he invades the corner of the bar I have staked out for myself, pushes me into it deeper, carefully angling himself away from my head. His eyes are a piercing blue, cold as the metal blade he holds against my stomach, colder even. I glance down at the knife. It does not dimple my skin as it would have before, but I am not as unyielding as I had hoped I might be. My skin is stony. Not stone. It is hard. Not impervious. His knife would slide into me with only a bite of resistance. My insides are all too soft. They would yield to him easily. Panic gets its grubby fingers on me, but I do not let it take hold.

“You ugly fuckin’ bitch,” he hisses, glancing over his shoulder. All at once, I realise. “I don’t know why he wasted his time on you.”

I wonder if Perseus is scared of snakes too.

“Call me ugly again.” I bite my lip, looking up at him from under my eyelashes. “It really gets me going.”

A snarl twists his face. I cannot see my snakes without a mirror. I have never seen them hunt. Somehow, I know his is the exact face they make before they strike. The blade sinks a little deeper into my stomach. A drop of blood beads between grey stone and silver steel. I guess I should be glad for the way Minerva’s treatment dulled my sense of touch, and I am. For all of a moment. Then, you appear, squealing.

“I didn’t know you were coming tonight!” You pull me into a hug, and I wish your warmth could seep into my bones. Perseus huffs as he backs away. Your voice drops into a whisper, “is he bothering you?” I nod, and you give my shoulders a squeeze before turning to him. “Sorry, man. I haven’t seen her in a year. Hope you don’t mind if I steal her.”

You don’t wait for answer, and Perseus does not try to intervene. You simply guide me over to the bar.

“Thank you,” I breathe. “For saving me.”

“Well, it’s kind of my job.” You shrug. “I’m an ophiologist – study of snakes.” A gesture to my head. “I work in conservation.”

“Oh.” I think I would be blushing if it weren’t for the slate of my skin. “They don’t need saving.”

“Yeah, well, he looked like a real asshole.” You aim half a smile at me as you take me in. The moment of consumption. I have never wanted to be devoured more. But your eyes catch on the blood streaked across the skin of my stomach. I wipe at it absently, thinking of a child scraping their knee on the pavement. Would you kiss it better if I asked? “Did he do that to you?”

The venom in your voice cuts through the warble of the bar. I can only nod.

You flag the bartender down and order three shots. He sets them down in front of us, and you swallow half of one before pulling the material of your sleeve tight over the top of the glass. You reach for the snake closest to you, and it curls back, baring its fangs.

“Sorry,” you whisper, eyes finding mine. “May I?”

“Knock yourself out.”

You grab the snake right behind its jaw and bring it down to the glass. It bites into your sleeve, and I watch the milky venom curl through the clear liquid below. When you release the snake, I grimace, waiting for the strike, but it only curls back into my head. Your touch is enchanting, calming. I wonder if it is the ophiologist in you, or just you.

The bartender flits by and you catch him with a doe-eyed smile.

“Sorry, I’m like so totally air headed. We were supposed to ask you to send this shot to the guy at the end of the bar.” You jerk your head over at Perseus and his friends, sliding the poisoned shot glass back towards the bartender. “But could you tell him it’s from that redhead over there. We’re shy.” You giggle, and it cinches the deal. The bartender scoops the shot up and drifts away.

You hand me one of the shot glasses, and we knock ours back in perfect unison. The bitterness melts on my tongue when you smile at me.

“We should go,” you say, dragging me away with a hand wrapped around my wrist. I cannot tear my eyes from the softness of your skin against the stone of mine.

“Will it kill him?” I ask as we pass Perseus.

“Unfortunately, no.” You grin over your shoulder. “But it’s not gonna be nice either.”

We stumble outside. The cold air hits us like that one drink that sends you over the edge of tipsy into drunk, and we fall into each other, laughs wracking our unsteady bodies. Your laugh is sunshine. I want to bask in it like the cold-blooded creature I have turned myself into.

“I’m Medusa,” I say.

In the streetlight above us, I see you properly for the first time.

“Helen.”

You have the kind of face men go to war for.