Heart in a Box

by Syra Bond

  I picked up the box and held it in front of them.

  ‘Hu...man or...gan,’ I said slowly and loudly. ‘Hu...man or...gan.’

  The woman laughed.

  ‘I don’t think that will help too much. Shampoo and makeup would be better, I think,’ she said quietly. She looked up at the nearest man. He shrugged dismissively. She turned back to me ‘They’re Russian anyway. Don’t speak a word of English! And their Czech’s not so good either! Left over after the Cold War ended with nowhere to go, I suppose. Take any job as long as it’s got a uniform - you know the type.’

  The official weighed the box in his hand and nodded knowingly. He put it back down on the floor between my feet and asked the woman for her passport.

  ‘Can we come to an arrangement? she said opening her red leather bag.

  The official bent down to it and removed a bottle of vodka. She turned again to me.

  ‘In this country, you can get anything for the right price.’

  She presented her passport to him. He opened the first page and frowned. There was a loose picture in the front with something written on it. He twisted it sideways and read the note. He looked at her enquiringly then back at the note. He rubbed his stubbly chin, smiled then nodded.

  ‘Anything,’ she said in my ear. ‘You can get anything for the right price in Slovakia.’

  Another thrill passed through me as again her fresh mountain breath wafted into my nostrils.

  She followed the first unformed official out of the compartment and, as if being escorted, she walked between both of them down the corridor.

  I pushed the box underneath the seat. It felt warm. I imagined it must be well insulated.

  I stared through the window. We travelled past flat, bleak areas of brown and green rolling countryside. I saw a white light on the horizon and couldn’t work out what it was. As we got closer I realised it was a mass of buildings - a massive estate of regulation height white blocks of flats, leftovers from a previous political era, testament to a now-lost time of purpose and commitment. After a while another one appeared and then another - all the same, indistinguishable, glistening prisons for their captured inhabitants.

  I felt bored and began to wonder where the woman in the pink dress had gone with the uniformed customs men. I left the compartment and wandered down the corridor looking for her.

  Passengers were keen to get out of the hot compartments and lined the corridors. Men laughed and joked with young women, smokers hung out of windows, dogs sat obediently outside compartments. I squeezed past them all, sometimes facing them, sometimes turning away. I walked almost the full length of the train until I came to the guard’s van. The train went into a tunnel and for a few minutes I was in complete darkness. When we emerged with a loud clatter onto a steel lattice work bridge the brightness was so sudden I couldn’t see anything clearly.

  As my eyes got used to the flickering light I began to make out what was in front of me. There was a steel mesh cage around a partitioned off area. Tattered parcels and torn postal bags lay around untidily in one corner. At the other end, barely visible in the flashing light and darkness, I could just about make out a figure. I could hear some voices but couldn’t see who they belonged to and couldn’t make out what was being said.

  Suddenly, the train was over the bridge and in full sunlight. The flashing stopped, everything came into focus. The figure was the young woman in the pink dress - the one who had left with the customs officials! She was hanging from a heavy hook in the roof of the carriage, her full weight slumped on her wrists which were bound together tightly by a rope lashed around the hook. Her right hip was dropped to the side, her toes, hardly touched the ground. One of her red shoes had fallen off and was lying on its side. Slightly to her side were the two men, their peaked caps shining in the shards of light that flashed through small windows in the top edges of the carriage roof. They both looked up and down her captive body - muttering, laughing, conspiring.

  She stared ahead silently - waiting for something to happen to her that was out of her control, knowing that her fate was being planned by others, that her destiny was still to be revealed.

  Her dress fitted her so closely - following the curve of her hips, the line of her waist and firm mounds of her breasts as if it was a second skin. Her mouth was slightly open, her full lips - glossy and luscious - moved in a slow shiver as if she was saying a prayer or reciting the supplicant’s part in a catechism. Her dress was so thin that I could see she was not wearing any bra or panties.

  One of the men shouted something at the captive woman. She responded slowly and in a low mutter. Annoyed, he shouted again, this time louder and with more aggression. She started again, making an effort but still not to his satisfaction. He snapped at her angrily. She spoke up this time, obeying his insistence, staring ahead, not looking him in the eye, speaking as clearly as she could so that there was no misunderstanding. It seemed to satisfy him. He nodded to the other man who nodded back.

  I crouched against the edge of the wire barrier that contained them. The echoing clatter of the rail tracks filled my ears. The shafts of sunlight flashing through the small windows in the roof dazzled me. I was hypnotised by it all - overcome by the sensation of rhythmic noise and blinking light, enthralled by the predicament of the captive woman, filled with anxiety brought on by my spying. I hung onto the edge of the steel framework that supported the large wire enclosure, pressing my face against it, feeling its coolness and the roughness of the small rivets that ran along it edges, kissing the raised points where the wires of the mesh crossed over one another.

  The man said something else to the woman. She replied again, this time insistently as if she was arguing against him. He spoke again and again she raised her voice to him. He squeezed his hand on either side of her cheeks - forcing her luscious lips into a pout - and brought his face close to hers. He shook her head from side to side. He released her suddenly and she shouted again, this time spitting at him.

  He turned away from her angrily, striding about, taking deep breaths, screwing up his lips and frowning heavily. Her spit dribbled down his cheek and the side of his nose. My heart was beating fast. I was fearful for the woman yet excited by her treatment. I was trapped - my fear for her predicament fed my excitement of what was happening to her, and of what might happen to her. My mind filled with the possibilities; they boiled over inside me in a turmoil of confusion, fear, and excitement.

  The pacing man suddenly turned and wrapped his arms around the woman’s hips. He lifted her off the ground. The other man dragged over a large wooden box. He stood on it, reached up and shortened the ropes that bound her wrists and led up to the hook in the roof to which they were attached. He yanked on the rope until it was tight again. The first man then let the woman go and she fell heavily onto the rope. She yelled out as the rope snatched tight. Her body hung well clear of the ground - her head dropped forward, her arms pulled up tightly, her feet twitched and crossed over each other, her toes stretched out in a vain attempt to find the ground.

  I pressed myself tighter against the wire mesh, harder against the rivets, harder against the raised connections in the intertwined wire. Seeing the weight of the woman’s body hanging on the rope, the stretched tautness of her arms, her powerlessness, combined inside me in shivers of fear. I imagined being in her place - feeling the pressure on my wrists, knowing what it was like to be another’s victim, feeling the power of another overwhelming me. I thought of myself as their victim - abject, humiliated, waiting only to be the subject of their wishes. That sense of subjection to the will of another was the greatest thrill. Of all the sensations that were filling me, this was the most arousing. I licked at the wire mesh, tasting its metallic tang and the thrill of its sharp flavour sent a wave of shivering delight that penetrated me from my toes and ankles into my neck and face. I felt the hardness of the wire against my teeth as I opene
d my mouth against it - licking at it, savouring it, luxuriating in its inanimate lifelessness.

  The man who had lifted the woman went to a bag on the floor and took something from it - a ball gag with a broad leather strap. He held it on front of the woman’s face and shouted at her. I think he was remonstrating with her for talking, or for talking too much or too loudly - it didn’t seem to matter. She shook her head, perhaps saying she did not mean what she had said, or did not mean to seem disobedient, or resentful, or contrary. He shouted louder - her defence only seemed to anger him more. Again she shook her head but I could tell that now she knew her efforts had been pointless, that it had only increased his anger and would only increase the vengeful way that he punished her. Yes, I could see in her eyes - still staring ahead but now vacuous and hopeless - that she knew she should not have answered back, should not have believed it worthwhile defending herself. Yes, now I could see that she knew that what would follow would only be worse because of her stupidity. At the same time I could see in her face that she knew in truth that no effort on her part would have altered her destiny - it had been sealed from the beginning.

  I licked the crossed wires of the mesh, feeling my spit running onto them, flowing onto the intersecting points of metal wire, cooling and spreading across their surface before I licked it back and sucked at it like some delectable nectar. I ran my tongue into the joints until it pinched between them and was held fast when I tried to tug it back.

  The man pulled the woman’s jaw down and held her mouth open - wide, exposing, empty. He pressed the ball gag against her stretched lips - it was too big to enter her mouth. I watched him press it hard against her teeth for a second or two. Still it refused to go in, then as he lifted his elbow and brought more strength to bear, it suddenly sprang inside, fixed behind her teeth, and stuffed her mouth completely.

  Her mouth was strained so wide. I opened my own mouth - unthinkingly at first - mimicking her, seeing if I could do the same. When I realised I couldn’t, a shiver of fear went through me at the thought that her mouth was stretched so much and plugged so fully. I couldn’t imagine how the ball could come out again. I opened my mouth again, and felt the tingling of tightness in the corners of my lips, but still I knew it was not open enough to take the massive ball that was now firmly locked inside the woman’s mouth.

  The man tightened the leather strap behind her head. Her eyes were wide open, filled with terror. Her nostrils flared open as she sucked in air, desperate to inhale, terror stricken by the huge plug in her mouth and now by its fixing with the strap. She looked so trapped and fearful. I could see the depths of her fear in the wideness of her beautiful eyes and the openness of her dilated nostrils. I could see her terror in the limpness of her body and the inescapable proneness to another captured in her powerless stretched out arms.

  The other man spun her around. She whirled on the rope at her wrists, her eyes even wider as she fought to stop herself succumbing to dizziness. The rope tightened and curled up in a tight knot. It bound up around itself and pinched into the skin of her wrists. I could see she wanted to scream. Each time her face flashed in front of me, each time the image of her terror was caught in the erratic light from the windows in the carriage, I imagined her screeching cries as syncopations to the frantic clattering of the steel wheels on the tracks beneath our feet. Each time she spun around, the sound of her unheard yells kept pace with the pounding of my wildly beating heart.

  Her spinning stopped when the rope bound up in such a tight knot it would wind no further. For a moment she remained hanging there - silent, motionless, experiencing a moment of peace. Then, slowly at first, the rope began to unwind itself. Quickly her spinning gathered pace and, as both men helped rotate her faster by pushing at her, she eventually found herself hanging on the rope that was bound tight onto itself at the other extreme. Again, a pause, a few seconds of peace before the terrible torture began again.

  They stood back and watched her as she spun in decreasing revolutions first one way and then the next until, in the end, she remained still - hanging motionless on the rope. I could see from her eyes that she was giddy - her pupils wandered sideways, unable to fix on anything, unable to focus properly on a firm and dependable part of the world. I thought how she must be thinking of vomiting, worrying that her throat would be filled with it, that she would not be able to allow it out and that she would need to choke and cough but even that would be impossible. I imagined her panic and felt some of it myself.

  One of the men took something else from the bag. It was a heavy leather strap, about the length of his arm, as wide as three fingers and finished at one end into a rounded handle. He turned it through a wide arc. The flashing light through the roof windows of the carriage picked it up like a strobe. The highlighted strap seemed to move through the air in distinct phases, changing position without being seen and reappearing in the next position as if out of thin air. He smacked it down on his hand. It was heavy and loud. The woman stared at it - following its flight through the air, fixing on its sound when it slapped his hand. Even though it was impossible for her to show it, I knew her fear was increasing with every curving sweep and every smacking crack. Yes, if it was imaginable, her panic was being redoubled by every threat that was being put before her.

  I pushed my fingers through the wire mesh, folding them around it, clawing onto it like a prisoner hoping for escape. But I didn’t want to escape, I wanted to see it all, I wanted to hear it all, sense it all, experience it all.

  The clattering of the train wheels filled my head. The flashing of the sunlight through the roof windows blurred my vision. The fear in the woman’s eyes sent my blood pounding around my veins. I pressed myself against the corner of the wire mesh cage. I opened my legs and pressed the slit of my cunt against the sharp metal edge. I moved up and down against it, rubbing my soft flesh against the rivets that held the mesh to the frame. They caught against my clitoris - pulling at it painfully and filling me with wave after wave of delectable, cutting joy. I licked the mesh and spread my spit across it, imagining it running down to my crack, lubricating it and allowing it to slide even more easily against the hard angled rivet studded metal of the frame.

  There was a sudden crack. For a moment I didn’t know if it was the wheels of the train crashing over some uneven points, or the blasting increase of air pressure as the train entered a tunnel. I soon realised it was neither. It was the heavy leather strap being brought across the woman’s bottom. The men had lifted up the hem of her dress and twisted it around the waist of her dress. I hadn’t even seen them doing it - I had been so engaged with myself. Her bottom was bare, she had no panties on. It was a beautiful shape - a delightful smooth curve, a satiny surface of perfectly smooth skin slightly moistened by tiny beads of sweat. And the hard leather of the strap had already left its mark.

  It came down again. This time I followed it as it flashed from place to place in the flickering light from the windows in the carriage roof. Each of its positions was frozen, each of its positions was a surprise. Then, when it made contact with her taut skin, it seemed to hang there longer than anywhere else; as if it were allowing the pain to soak in deeper and longer. The woman flinched when it struck, she twisted away from it but she had nothing to purchase on. All she could do was spin randomly, twist sometimes in a way that allowed the blow to be lessened, sometimes in a way that only made it worse.

  Every time the sunlight flashed across her body I saw the red lines left by the heavy leather strap. To start with they were isolated - easy to distinguish and clear edged. After a while they were impossible to distinguish one from another. Like tracks across a crimson desert, they all smudged together into one angry red mass laced with purple stripes. I could see the strap was hard edged and every blow brought its hard edges down sharply against the woman’s skin. There was nothing to save her from the punishment, nothing to save her from the power of the strap or the cutting of its inflexi
ble edges.

  I hadn’t known how much I had pressed my crack against the edge of the metal framework. I only realised when I felt the pain. I pulled back and dropped my head. I dribbled my spit down onto my slit as I listened to the punishment the woman was having, all the time imagining the cries she would make if she was able. I watched my spit running into my crack - glistening in the flashing light that came in through the windows in the carriage roof. I was hypnotised by it all - transported.

  I don’t know when it all finished. I know I jerked against the metal frame as I was overcome with a shuddering ecstasy. I know that it hurt and that made the ecstasy continue. I know I licked the mesh as I watched the redness of the woman’s bottom increase with every savage blow. I know I imagined myself screaming in her place, and was not sure that I did not. In the end it was the strange echoing return to the clattering sound of the wheels on the tracks that brought me around. And as I listened to it I finally realised there was nothing else to come - the punishment had ended.

  I looked up and watched the woman. She swung from side to side, twisting slowly, completely used and utterly used up. She had no further pain to give, no more suffering left. It was all inside her, none of it had escaped, it had all been contained by the plug in her mouth. She had not given a single cry of pain, a single whimper. She had not begged for them to stop, or screamed out for mercy. She had not blubbered words that could not be understood because she was too confused and too terrified. She had not let any of it go.

  The one who had flogged her held her around the waist while the other man undid the rope at her wrists. They let her drop to the floor. She tried to curl up and hold her knees but the pain obviously prevented her. They pulled her dress down over her exposed cunt then tried to get the ball gag out of her mouth. It was too tight. They had to hold her jaw wide and prise it from behind her teeth. After some effort it came out in an explosive blast. Behind it her mouth and throat were full of spit. It ran down her chin and neck and over the front of her dress in a glistening stream.