Zippergirl

Zippergirl

by

Bobby Derie

“Hey, check it. Zippergirl.”

It was a college party, and she wasn’t showing off. I picked up her seams, followed them until they disappeared into low-cut ripped jeans and a t-shirt, and where the outline of tabs were visible on her breasts, where the nipples should be. She smiled and laughed with her friends, eyes peering out from a horizontal flesh-seam edged with metal teeth, tabs jingling on the right side of her face. Wondered if that meant she was right-handed or left. She noticed me, looking at her. We stole glances, eyes catching as we maneuvered from conversation to hello, edging closer to each other. When there was a body’s length between us she sauntered over, green glass bottle in hand, girlfriends forgotten. Tiny metal teeth grazed my cheek as she stood up to whisper in my ear.

“You want me to unzip you?”

The bathroom was cramped and dark, the sounds of the party came through the walls and up through the floor, the only light what shone around the door frame. Her mouth tasted of Rolling Rock and pennies. She had her elbows up on his shoulders, they broke off to stare at each other. The zippers made a mask of her face, a caricature: the bald head with the almost-hidden central seam, the wide open gap above her nose where the eyes poked out, the crude gash of a mouth. Her lips were painted mouth within mouth, teeth within teeth, as she smiled and undid my fly. There was a gentle scrape along my length, then a line of hard metal things pressed into the flesh at the base of my crotch, and I didn’t know if they belonged to her teeth or mine. I placed my hands on the head, eyes closed. It was soft, like a padded leather cushion. My right hand followed that seam down, down to the side of her neck, and found the catch. She paused as I slowly unzipped her, hair spilling out. She looked up at me, on her knees, hair unbound, the zipper marking the point of her widow’s peak.

“I didn’t say you could unzip me.”

The zipper grafts were fragile, seams of synthetic bio-friendly synthetics woven into the skin, chained together with metal or plastic. Skin was elastic, but it needed time to stretch and accommodate. Too much force could cause them to rip or tear, and then infection might set in. Scarring. I asked her questions, let her talk about it. The culture, the people. Care maintenance. How she had to keep clean, what had happened to people that didn’t take care of it. The real perverts, the ones that gave the scene the bad name. We flirted. I asked about her first, and she showed me, on her shoulder blade: a secret pocket to hide a tattoo from the light, so it wouldn’t fade. We talked for hours; weeks and months went by. She let me sit with her through the next procedure. The fold had been prepared months in advanced, a prosthetic stretching the flesh across her belly. I held her hand as the artist made the incision, inserted the weave. He had a hand-held sewing machine that punched the thread in on each side, tested the action of the zipper.

“I wanted you to see how it was done.”

Sometimes she would dance for me, a complicated little burlesque, shedding clothes one zip at a time. She wasn’t truly naked or exposed, even without clothes. She could walk down the street topless, zipper-decent, offending nipples and vagina hidden away from the world. I learned she liked to be explored. To have hands run over the hard teeth and ridges of skin along the seams. She gasped when I pressed the tabs that hid her nipples and labia, grinding the buttons into the softe, shadowed flesh. Sometimes she wanted to be unzipped slowly, one tooth at a time. Then I would pull it open fast and she would squeak at the sudden exposure of hidden flesh. She shuddered when I explored those pockets of flesh, with probing tongue or finger. At times I would crush her toward me, arms wrapped around her, hands and all buried in her, my tongue fucking the zippocket on the side of her head to lick at her ear, and she would moan.

“So full…”

She started getting me into the harder stuff, a little at a time. Little zippers along each finger could be closed, leaving her only with grasping paws. An industrial double seam down her legs, to close them from the world, and I would have to take her bent over, from behind. Sometimes she liked it with her mouth and eyes and ears zipped off too, cut off from the world except for those sensations here and there where I touched it, penetrated her, zipped and unzipped her. There were special seams along her thigh that exposed living muscle, where every painful touch was like fucking a fresh wound, and we grew bolder, more elaborate. Sometimes I would lie awake at night and stare at her swelling belly, thinking how far she was along. Eyeing the great zipper that went along the ridge of muscle there, in front of the womb, huge flat metal teeth forming a mechanical highway down to the huge triangular tab hanging down over her crotch. One night as she slept I grasped it, toyed with it, pulled a little. The first couple teeth separated, and I felt something dark and wet by the hole. Her hand found mine, on the zipper, each finger edged with coiled plastic teeth.

“Don’t…”

###