Vashti beat at Paula’s arms and shoulders. Her long legs drummed against the studio floor. The girl she had taunted, called not even a kitten, had turned panther and was strangling her. Paula stood, lifting Vashti’s upper body knee-high, and dragged her, to increase the crushing pressure on her throat. Vashti’s hair hung in her face and over her shoulders to the hardwood. Paula shook the noose she had made. Vashti’s hair rippled. Her bare breasts rolled on her chest. The blood pouring from her nose filled her mouth and sinuses. It began to trickle from the corners of her mouth. Joe’s camera captured the moment that her face relaxed as she fainted.
Paula let go of the camera strap, and Vashti’s head simply fell to the floor with a dull crack. Unconscious, the dark girl immediately violently coughed, spraying blood, and drew a deep shuddering breath. Paula walked around her, listening to her sobs. She lifted one of Joe’s tripods. It was lightweight aluminum, a single rod that branched into three legs at its bottom. She folded the legs closed, clicked the lock that held them there. She turned back to Vashti.
Vashti lay on her side, her breathing still racing in harsh gasps. Her head throbbed almost as if she were taking punches to it to the rhythm of her heartbeat. Paula stood over her for a second, then with her foot flicked Vashti’s top arm so that it fell behind her back, opening her shoulders a bit. Vashti’s breasts lay stacked, her right atop her left, gleaming near ebony with her sweat.
Paula asked, “Joe, did Etruscans fight with spears?”
“I don’t know, love,” he said. “But Etruscan harem girls fight with anything in reach.”
That was a satisfying answer. She smiled, and drove the tripod down into Vashti’s left breast.
Vashti shrieked as the metal pinned her breast to the floor, grinding into its core as her dark titflesh pancaked. Paula spread her hands wide on her weapon for stability, spread her feet wide for balance, and leaned into it. Vashti’s scream spiraled up in volume and desperation. She did the only thing she could do, which was to shove the tripod away. With Paula’s weight on it, it ripped a path of internal destruction from the center of her breast to her thick nipple. Blood vessels, milk ducts, lymph glands tore and burst. Vashti pulled free but her breast was already visibly swelling, her skin tightening. Still screaming, she tried to scramble away.
Paula followed. The tripod smashed down on Vashti’s shoulders and back and ass. Vashti collapsed, next to a glass coffee table on which sat a cup, coasters, papers, a candle. Paula swept it all away and made her rival into a new display. The Indian girl lay dazed across the table on her back, her shoulders just off its edge. Her henna-tattooed arms sloped down to the floor, her head back, throat exposed, hair spread in fan across the floor. On the other side of the narrow table, her flat belly with its pattern of tattoos angled in an erotic curve down to her wide hips and ass at the floor. Her loin covering was still askew, her pussy bared. The centerline of the table ran below her shoulder blades. Her upthrust breasts were the focal point of the tableau. As a model, Paula knew scene structure.
Paula allowed Joe to photograph this as she turned three things over in her mind. The stab of insane jealousy she had felt as Joe had described Vashti’s breasts to her, leaving no doubt that he preferred them to her own. That Vashti had mockingly called her breasts little-girl tits. That Vashti had clawed her breast, marking her with bloody slashes that would in time heal into scars. Paula's painted lips drew back from polished teeth.
She raised the tripod. Vashti’s body jerked and jittered as Paula beat her breasts, beat them until both were as torn and deformed as the first. Blood flowed from the cones of Vashti’s nipples like slow-moving lava down the sides of sister volcanos. It rolled down her ribs to pool on the glass, it spattered on her belly and her collarbone.
Vashti begged. She pleaded. Screaming at first and then in whimpers. Paula didn’t care. Finally, Joe put down his camera and held her arms, and took the tripod from her. By then Vashti had fallen limp and silent.
Some art that Joe made, made millions of dollars for him and for the women he photographed. Some art Joe made was for a very select clientele, few in number but glad to pay dearly. His book of the harem girl battle was just such a collector’s piece. Paula cherished her copy, often studying it when she was alone, looking for the tears she had made.
All dark fantasies are rooted in brutal reality.