by Poppet
“He's usually two States over, if you must know. God is in America, kisa, and yet he sounds so very British. I don't ask questions, I just listen to his orders.”
“Mikah,” I say, feeling as crazy as my Russian blood.
“Polina?”
“Um, I must insist on something if I'm going to be your open flower.”
“Are you insisting from God, kisa?” he says so softly it feels like a rape, like a death threat whispered over a telephone after a nightmare.
“I am, Mikah.”
He doesn't move, not even a blink, his eyelids don't twitch in reflex, he just glares at me like I am Lot's wife and already nothing but salt.
So I continue, even though my heart hammers so hard it shatters my vision with jolts of trauma. “When God gave Eve to Adam, Adam had to give something to Eve. It was so he paid for her, in blood and bone. So he knew what it was to give up something of himself to have loyalty and devotion, so she would follow him no matter what. Adam gave Eve his rib. I want yours.”
He takes a large step away from me, backwards, flopping onto the couch to stare up at me, his lips no longer pressed together, but slack.
“You want my rib?” he says as if I asked him to fetch me a ring from Saturn, a moon from Neptune, and the dust of the first rose.
“Yes Mikah. I will be good and true, but then you must make it right the way God intended. If you say we don't marry because of Adam and Eve, then I expect the same exchange they had. You want me to do what that woman does and finger myself so I become a woman like Eve, but Eve had a part of Adam with her always. She had his rib. Take yours out and make me a ring of beads with it. Let me put it on my finger so I never forget who I belong to. I will be your Eve only if you will be my Adam. Do it right, Mikah. The promise is made of flesh and sacrifice, not of loins and desire.”
He bursts out laughing, shaking his head at me like I'm mad. “You drive a hard bargain. This is one God hasn't heard lately.” He shakes his head almost giggling, standing suddenly, moving to the door like he's in a trance. “I'll tell you what he thinks after a meeting. Be good my little flower, be very good. I might even agree to this if I find a flower releasing fragrance when I get home.”
And then he's gone, and I collapse, my bones vibrating they knock together so hard. I thought he'd kill me, but he laughed.
If he expects to fuck me, I expect his blood.
The first thing Adam gave Eve was from right next to his heart. That rib bone protects the organ that keeps him alive, the one which without it he would have no strength and be weak. If Mikah gives me that rib bone he leaves himself vulnerable from that day forward.
Why has the world forgotten this? If a man expects to have the love of a woman for a lifelong commitment, the exchange is simple: He bleeds for her, gives his life protecting bone to her, he cuts a part of himself out and offers it to her so she can be whole, and it means he is vulnerable because of her.
Once he gives her the bone which protects his heart, he is easy to kill. He has to surrender his own armor for her, and trust that she will never use it against him because for her he makes himself weak, he is an easy target, not just because his heart is exposed to hurt and damage and trauma, but because it's the only trade which God ordains.
That's how it was at the beginning, so now why do so many woman have men who hurt them? It's because those men don't bleed, they aren't vulnerable, they don't surrender what was in the original contract. The first man and woman had a fair exchange. Adam had to make a sacrifice to have Eve. And not just any offering, but the one thing which could kill him, leaving his heart exposed. She knew it, he knew it, and it wasn't just emotional, it was physical. And now? Now women get a ring. A ring is bullshit, it is bought, it is not a true sacrifice for love.
For all the years we bleed so a man can have a legacy, so for a man to have my body and heart I expect the blood of his flesh, the bone from his rib, and to know he will always be vulnerable because of me, because he had to have me.
I won't settle for less. I expect that bone before I get the disgusting one in his pants.
~ Chapter 8 ~
Servants are dealt with
and told to also be submissive and under God's will
~ 1 Peter 2:13
I'm in the middle of fucking myself when the doorbell rings. Mikah told me not to answer the door or phone, so I ignore it, frozen with my fingers in my snatch, volume on the DVD turned down to mute, afraid to breathe until the stranger goes away.
But he doesn't.
I'm so close, the pleasure is too good, I don't want to stop, ignoring the door to play with that soft spot inside me.
The door handle turns, a key makes a noise in the lock and it bursts open so fast I don't have time to react, caught in sordid masturbation when a big man bullets through the door, covers the six steps to the couch and snares my head in a plastic bag before I can even get my fingers out of myself. Scrabbling, naked, dragged off the couch over the back, I'm kicking and screaming when I see Mikah step to the threshold, blocking out daylight like the reaper of hearts.
Fighting with the bag, shoving my pussy stained fingers into the hollow of my mouth trying to break the vacuum seal, the inked man bends over me, gripping my hand and snapping a finger back so far my socket explodes with fire, agony searing into my wrist and forearm, making it limp, my eyes leaking tears of shock and pain and shame, the bag hot and claustrophobic, the sound of my hair rubbing against the synthetic polymer almost deafening, the world steaming and fogging and blurring, my blood compressing between my ears, my head feeling like its engorged and pressured.
No! Noooo! Stop!
His plastic noose is so tight that my throat hurts, the veins up my neck pounding. When I wriggle and scratch, the bombing of blackened fists detonate a red haze over my eyes, blood smearing the plastic tomb, the bubble of pain so fiery and humid and suctioning to my eyeball, clinging inside my nostril, penetrating my mouth, coating my tongue with a bag so disgusting I retch, my stomach spasming, my eyelids feeling acidic and raw, my eyelashes sticking together while despair desecrates my body into shards when grenades of torture dynamite inside my flesh with pyrotechnic obliteration.
Doubling over, frozen inside the nuclear shockwave of his angry knuckles, I can't process when blunt force trauma pinches the pillow of skin on bone, shunted up and in with the force, again and again and again. Rolling, forehead to floor, smothered with thick packet run pink and red and slippery, I hiss … heeeeeeelp!
I've been beaten before, I know a boot and fist like I know my hair is blonde, but its so severe that the napalm of brutality poisons my brain and I find it hard to think, to breathe, curling into the hurt, grabbing for the incendiary foot like a beggar pleading for ashes from his soul, beseeching the hand with my numb fingers to give me mercy, all while my eyeballs swell and my irises grow thick with blindness, my voice hoarse with terror, my leg growing hot when he pummels the piss out of my bladder, knocking my precious air into the plastic bag, bile breaking the blaze of agony like a depth charge imploding.
My fingertips scorch as if the nail beds have bent too far back, my legs burn against the rug, chaffed skinless with grazes on rug pile, my wild bucking breaking my hope when the strangulation increases and the beating cracks and slaps and buries me inside the casket of terror.
P-p-lease, oh gaaaaawd pleeeeease.
Crimson paints the world, I cough and choke on tears and vomit and blood in the hot plastic bubble, my face throbbing with pain, snot coagulating with split lips and bleeding nose, and I quake with panicked convulsions, using the last ignition of my cauterized synapses to scream for mercy.
Pleeeease! Mercy! Milost'!
I hear only the gurgle of air frothing against my teeth and the booming of my pulse in my ear. It tickles, hot and wet, when he kicks me so hard between my legs that I flex up –.
•
Mikah:
God turns to me, his chest lifting more than usual from the exertion, but not enough to
signify the expenditure of effort was taxing. “That's how you put a filthy cunt under your thumb. This coercion shit is wasted on them, it gives them delusions of equality. I reigned the tribes with fear of death, and so will you.” He points at me, our names tattooed over his hands, making them look sooty and dirty.
He is my master and I have never raised my tongue to him in rebellion, and don't plan to now, simply nodding, maintaining eye contact even though I want to look at her to see if she's passed out – or dead.
“Clean this up,” he orders, moving to the couch to inspect the dildo and instructional DVDs I left with her.
It takes me a moment to work up the courage, then dive into action, stabbing into the bag over her head, ripping it open and spilling out blood and mucous, holding my breath against the puke. I just ate, goddamit. Dragging her to the bathroom by her foot I shove her into the shower, blasting her clean with a thorough rinse, leaving her there to go back to the living room, rolling up the rug and leaving it outside for her to clean later. I have a rule I refuse to negate: If you make a mess, you fucking clean it.
God rests his heels on the coffee table, smelling the dildo for evidence. “Mikah.”
I freeze, turning to face him instead of going to the bathroom as I was. “Yes Alpha?”
He stands, maneuvering to face me, wider than me by a quantum mile but not as tall. “Remind her, or I will.”
I blank, for the life of me I'm torn and can't string a single response together.
“Let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for a woman to speak in church. 1 Corinthians 14:34. I suffer not a woman to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in transgression. 1 Timothy 2:11.” He steps closer, his voice guttural when he sneers, “She shall be saved in childbearing. Fuck her already and be done with it.”
I nod, hyperaware of every nuance from my liege. “The rib?”
“She'll get your rib. For a simpleton she's already too cunning for her own good. Get her ready for my mark, I'll call your brothers to witness.”
Fuck! He's going to give her my rib? What the hell old man?
But I shut my mouth and stalk to the bathroom, checking her pulse, amazed at how quickly she bruises, her face and body swelling and marred with a puzzle of lesions. She's alive, but she'll wish for death now that God is pissed with her. I love God, I love the rage and wrath he's delivered on every sinner and smart mouth. Yes, I forgot my rightful place, the world has infected me with propaganda. Church will be so much better now that he's reawakened my bloodlust. Cleaning her up I lift her from the shower, drying her as best I can, but leaving her naked I carry her downstairs to the makeshift punishment chamber in the basement.
He's going to brand her, and it is holy. We all have it, a tattoo or brand so that we bear his mark. Each one will mark the name of the Lord on his arm and call himself God's people – Isaiah 44:5. Just as he has ours. I have written your names on the palms of my hands – Isaiah 49:16. But he ran out of space and now his body is almost black with his dedication to us. We are a legion, we span the world, and no sinner will stop us. We do not follow man's law, but God's.
•
Polina:
Scalding agony brands me alert. I wrench up and screaaaaaaaaaam! The inked man stands over me with a metal tip so hot it's white, the stink of charred skin secondary to the devastation claiming my mind, shredding it into acid rain and nuclear fallout.
I am obliterated, panting when I'm shoved down onto the padding, my body under siege for air and reprieve. Blinking pings agony like a sonar pulse of alarm through my nervous system and it takes all my strength to inhale, slowly becoming aware that there are hands holding me down. Lots of hands!
“No! Please God, no!” I screech, my body engulfed with a burning so severe inhaling is a blistering hell. Existing in this body this second is an eternity covered in razor wire and cigarette burns, sliced skin sweating and burning and corrosive and horrifying.
“Anoki, Polina. Or should I say, Kisha?” The man who beat me smiles, dropping the hot metal so he can touch my brand and I flinch into myself, the touch on my sensitive wound so excruciating I am raining tears in a deluge of suffering. “I am God, you summon my name but talk back to Mikah? Did he not tell you he works for me? He is a disciple, you will obey him. Understand?”
I nod so much my neck aches, hissing through clenched teeth until he releases my raw skin, “Yesssssss.”
“Yes who?” he demands, clamping a meaty hand over my mouth and needling his grip into my jaw. “Yes, father.”
Maintaining the brutal hold on my face, ramming my head tightly to what I'm on, he jabs two fingers inside my pussy. “I made this, Polina. You go to church, you should know my words by now, but as you're stupid I will give you the benefit of repeating myself. The life of every person belongs to me, the life of the parent as well as that of the child. (Ezekiel 18:4). You belong to me, and I remind you also that I said: If a man sells his daughter as a slave, she is not to be set free as male slaves are (Exodus 21:7). Your father sold you Polina, you are a slave and that means you will never be free. I did not make women queen, I made Solomon a king. I made only one man a king, because I favor men. That's why Adam was made first. Don't ever forget your place, girl. Men rule, women listen, that is how it was. Your ideas from a world rife with sinners will have you disciplined and punished, you must be corrected for your error. Women are born with sin in their minds and hearts, and you've already exposed you are as cunning as Eve with her love of snakes because you expect Mikah to pay for you. You will do as you're told, you'll open your legs and take what my son gives you. If you do not I will put you into a hell so severe you will beg me for death, but I have no mercy for you because you demand his rib as payment. You will get that rib, but that means he will always be your master and you will never have a voice to raise objection to his orders. Am I clear?”
I can't help the hiccup and the torrent of tears, “I am slave?”
God sighs so hard, wiggling his fingers inside me. “I made Eve for Adam to fuck, to give him children because my first order to mankind was go forth and multiply. And you think you have the right to say no? I will cut out your tongue if you say no. Every tribe gave their children to me and often I allowed them to buy back their children, I sold their own flesh back to them. That's because mankind are all slaves, my slaves! Understand Polina?”
When I say nothing for even breathing is taxing and hurting and making me suffer, Mikah speaks from behind my head, “Children shall be bought back at the age of one month for the fixed price of five pieces of silver, Numbers 18:15. It's in the bible, Polina.”
I am broken, my heart ruptures in my chest. I came here to be free, but I never was. None of us are. Why did I get in that car with Mikah? Why!
God smiles at me, he's old and surprisingly handsome, his muscles filling his shirt so much he reminds me of the Governator. “Polina, the bible says to greet all brethren with a kiss. You will kiss the bratva whenever you see them, you will welcome them into Mikah's home, and the next time I catch you fucking yourself I'll cut your fingers off. The pain you felt was a simple dislocation, next time I won't be so merciful. He'll make you wet and you will be ready for him as I cursed Eve the same way. And if he fucks your mouth and ass and ears and hands and boobs and cunt, you will say thank you. You are his to rut until you bleed, that's why women bleed Polina, to remind them that your blood is mine, you have sin so I punish you every month so you will never forget that I am God. Listen to me Kisha, I will punish you like I do my loving sons if you ever demand to speak directly to me again. That is all.”
He pats my face so hard it feels like a slap, then turns and walks away, the hands holding me down lifting, and the bratva take their turn to kiss me, eyeballing my body. I feel dirty and ashamed, and horrifically afraid.
I've been this kind of slave before.
I'd rather die.
&n
bsp; ~ Chapter 9 ~
Sarah submissively obeyed Abraham
calling him, "Lord, who owns me"
~ 1 Peter 3:5-6
“I told you He had a bad temper,” murmurs Mikah when I open my eyes.
My head pounds like it's swollen, my throat too dry, my eyes puffy like I have cried for all the lives I've lived.
He smiles, looking happy. “Kisa, God is right, he is always right. I told you I'll go slow but he wants us to hurry up, so what must I do?” He shifts so I can see him better, the bedside lamp on and illuminating one half of his face. “It was very sexy walking in and seeing you so pleased with the sensation of your fingers in your piz'da (pussy).”
I look away, unable to believe he's talking of this now. Mudak. (Bastard.) “You said I could hide behind you, you lied. You didn't protect me.”
Mikah's congenial expression hardens, his eyes going blank. “You're the one who wanted my fucking rib, kisa. I had to tell Him everything, and he doesn't take kindly to a woman demanding anything. Eve fucked up and he's got anger issues over how she betrayed Adam. Before Eve he was married to Lilith, and Lilith left him. That's why Eve was made from Adam's rib, so she'd like his smell and never leave his side. Right from the very beginning women have lied and done as they please, never listening to God. I warned you, but you think you know better. Now you know that you don't want to anger God. Do as he says so he never has to come back to discipline you. I can't protect you from God, only from men.”
“Adam was married before Eve?” I murmur in confusion, my voice hoarse with dryness. I am so parched it gives me a headache.
“Yes, he was. The original texts state that, but no church likes to talk about the first woman leaving the first man. She didn't like how he smelled and didn't like Adam on top during polovoe snošenie (sex). She insisted she be on top, she refused to be dominated by a man. Because of her you bleed every month and suffer pain. If you talk back to me, or God, he'll wait for that pain to come so he can punch you in the stomach and remind you that he lives inside you every month, reminding you of the wage you pay for being disobedient. God doesn't talk to women, kisa, and he doesn't pay for what he already owns. That's why he's so angry with you, you expect me to pay for something God gave to me.”