by John Everson
“You two get started,” Kerstin said, and pushed off the bed as I slid my hands over Alexis’s chest, cupping one beautiful breast, and then one ruined mound, its nipple cut off and clumsily stitched back together. I’d learned why her scars all looked so pronounced. She never went to the hospital after her sado-masochistic exercises, but stitched them at home, these days with Kerstin’s help. Hence the hospital-supply chest in the bath.
Alexis’s finger-shy hand was kneading my butt when the electric whine of a circular saw broke the silence of the room. I jerked away from a kiss, but Alexis only grinned, and pulled me back. “It’s just Kerstin,” she said, pressing my head to the scars of her ruined breast. “She gets off on the sound.”
I relaxed then, remembering the time in my apartment. The sound got closer, and when I looked up from Alexis’s embrace, I saw Kerstin sitting next to the bed naked on the floor. The smooth steel handle of the circular saw was kneading her crotch, as her fingers revved and relaxed on the trigger. Not your usual vibrator, I thought, and went back to using my own brand of vibrator on Alexis. She was wet and more than ready, but after I entered her, she turned her mouth from mine to say to Kerstin, “My turn?”
“I knew you wanted it.” Kerstin grinned, and stood to approach us with the saw.
“What are you doing?” I said, freezing my rhythm.
“Don’t worry,” Kerstin said. “Just be still. All she needs is a little lubrication. Just a taste.”
With that, her fingers tightened on the saw and she moved the blur of the blade closer and closer to us, a centimeter at a time. I could feel Alexis’s breath on my neck; it was coming in shorter, faster gasps, and I started to pull away, but she hissed at me, “Please don’t move.”
She pressed her mouth to my shoulder and I felt her teeth clench hard on my flesh as the edge of the saw finally kissed the skin of her thigh, just an inch from my own skin. Her body tensed and trembled. She gave out a slight moan as the blade bit, and blood welled instantly to stream down her skin. And then Kerstin dropped the blade and began masturbating herself on the floor as Alexis rolled me onto my back and mounted me savagely, grunting in both pain and pleasure with every movement. I could feel the wetness of her blood lubricating our act, and she reached down with a hand and smeared the red across her chest and my own before falling down hard on me, climaxing, her motions spastic and desperate.
I felt that same sick feeling as I had after the coffin incident on the following morning when I woke up in the red room between them and I saw the ragged wound on Alexis’s leg. The perverse pleasures of the night before came back in a rush. I should have run. But in some sick way, I loved them both even more. I didn’t even think of leaving.
The next night, Kerstin handed me a black leather flogger, its multiple leather strips tipped with small shards of metal. Then she pressed her hands onto two rings suspended near the far wall of Alexis’s bedroom. “Lex can’t do this very easily anymore,” she whispered. “Don’t be gentle. Tonight you’ll make your mark on both of us.”
I took the flogger from her and turned it over in my hand, shaking my head. I didn’t want to hurt her. But I knew she needed to feel it…she needed the pain it gave. I flicked it against her naked back a few times, and Kerstin laughed.
“Hit me like you mean it,” she said.
The next stroke was harder, and she flinched. The crack of the leather on her skin sent a thrill down my lower back. I hit her again, and I could see the skin reddening already from the last slap.
“That’s it,” Alexis encouraged, from behind. “Punish her.”
On the next crack, I felt the ends of the barbed leather catch slightly on her skin before pulling away, and beads of blood rose on the skin between my girlfriend’s shoulder blades. Kerstin moaned, and twisted in obvious pain against her cuffs. “Don’t stop,” she begged.
Sweat was beading on my forehead. My armpits were damp. I felt something raw coursing through my groin. Power. Evil. Sadism. Alexis moaned on the bed behind me as Kerstin’s cries mounted in front.
I didn’t stop.
When I was done with Kerstin, her back a bloody mess of red weals and broken skin, she staggered over to a toolbox across the room and returned with a large set of wire cutters. On the bed, Alexis was writhing in excitement, her ruined hand missing between her legs. “Take it,” she gasped, over and over. “Please.”
When Kerstin put her cutters against the end of Alexis’ foot, I pulled her back. “You can’t,” I cried.
“It’s what she wants,” she answered. “And I won’t, you will. She wants this to be your mark. We talked about it earlier today.”
“No,” I said. “No fuckin’ way.”
“I’ll help you,” Kerstin promised, and pulled my hand to the softness of her breast, before clasping it to the handles of the cutters.
“Please,” Alexis begged me from the bed. “I need it.”
“We need you to do these things for us,” Kerstin said, looking into my eyes. I saw a desire there harder than stone and darker than war.
Together, we cut off Alexis’s last toe. I won’t detail the things we did with her after that, before Kerstin dressed the wound.
After that night, I didn’t feel nauseous about anything we did together anymore. It was all consensual, right? I pressed my fingers into their wounds and kissed them both, reveling in the shiver of their pain as much as they did themselves. The thoughts I once had kept buried about my old girlfriend’s scars were tethered no longer.
We had begun our descent into the circles of hell. They were far ahead of me, but quickly I shed all of my inhibitions and caught up. Maybe I surpassed.
A few weeks later, we pooled our money and bought a tiny house out in the middle of nowhere, but still just thirty or forty miles from Kerstin’s bar and my day job.
We built our own private dungeon in the little frame ranch’s basement, and that’s when things really got weird.
The night she cut off Alexis’s other leg, Kerstin was ready with morphine and stitches. I couldn’t do it, as depraved as I’d become. I literally cried when I saw the blood spray as the saw bit down and Alexis screamed so hard my ears still rang in the morning. We buried the leg in the yard, and for the next three weeks we fucked like a twisted trio of wounded rabbits, while Alexis screamed between us alternately in pain and pleasure. Eventually she healed. It was the celebration of our first anniversary together.
My fixation with her stumps only increased now that both of her legs were shorn, and I began to whip Kerstin not only on her back, but across her thighs and breasts as well, taking care not to hit her on flesh she couldn’t cover at work. But I quickly overprinted her lattice of scars. She abandoned her body to my growing sadism. She took to wearing layers of clothing when she left the house, as she was always bleeding and oozing from somewhere.
“Front or back,” I’d ask, as she handed me the cat o nine tails.
“Whatever you want,” she’d always say. Later, I would lick pink scars on the stumps of Alexis’s legs before cleaning Kerstin’s wetter wounds with my tongue. There were times that I thought I was in the heaven of hell. My daydreams were filled with scars and blood and writhing women who lived for both.
I killed Alexis on Christmas.
I didn’t mean to. We were taking her arm off with the saw, and I think we waited too long to bandage her up, after. But Alexis kept screaming in pain at the same time as insisting that I fuck her. The three of us were covered in her blood when Kerstin finished her orgasm with the butt of the saw as I came inside a bloody, screaming Alexis.
The next morning, stitched, bandaged and morphined…Alexis was blue. She did not wake. She had wanted to give me a special Christmas present and I’d elected this year to take it. It was the last gift she would give.
Kerstin and I wept and held her dead body for an hour before we finally left her in the slaughter ro
om.
“We’ll bury her in back,” she pronounced later that day.
“Are you serious?” I said.
“We can’t very well call an ambulance and report it as an accidental death, can we?”
Good point.
“I can get us a coffin, even,” Kerstin said, her voice paper thin. “I have connections, you know. And he’ll think it’s just another kink.”
That night, she pulled into the driveway in a rented SUV with its seats removed. A plain brown coffin in the back. I helped her bring it in the house, and together we laid Alexis out in it. A private wake.
“Take her one last time,” Kerstin begged me. “She would want you to.”
It didn’t take too much urging for me to lie with our Queen of Scars one last time. And another.
We kept her in the living room for three days before I could let her go.
Things changed after Alexis was gone. She was our center, the perversion we’d revolved around. Kerstin and I started pushing the envelope on each other then. She would threaten to cut me with the saw, its teeth just inches from my neck, before collapsing into a masturbatory fugue on the floor beside the bed.
I started bringing a razor to bed, and I dragged it across her skin deeper and deeper by the night. The flesh of her back and chest was black with scabs and swollen with infection. She oozed foul fluids when I pressed my body against hers. Her eyes took on a strangely haunted look as she continued to taunt me to hurt her more.
The morning I woke up tied to the headboard was the final nail. As my eyes fluttered open, and I realized what was going on, looking from one hand to the other and flexing my fingers, I heard the saw start up.
“I need a piece of you,” Kirstin said in a low, sex voice. She brought the blade up to my chest, and then down the length of my arm.
“No, Kerstin,” I begged. “Please don’t do this. I can’t live without my arm.”
“Whatever you want,” she whispered sweetly, and then the pain lanced through my little toe.
When I was done crying and she’d bandaged the wound, Kerstin kissed me. Deeply. With more passion than she’d had in weeks.
“So many things to cut.” She grinned, running a finger down my armpit and out to my palm. “But we’ll save the best for last,” she said, toying with the root of my cock with her other hand.
“I should be able to get weeks and weeks of use out of it before it’s time.”
That time was never going to come. Kerstin was used to dealing with masochists; people who wanted to be cut. She never tied ropes to hold people who didn’t want to be held. And I didn’t.
It only took a couple days before she tied one of my wrists just a little too loosely before she went to work. I was ready for her when she got home from work. I stayed in bed and feigned bondage. So well, in fact, that she stripped and straddled me before she knew anything was amiss. She bent to kiss me, and the shriveled remains of my severed toe trailed across my chest. She’d threaded it onto a thin chain to create a gruesome pendant.
“I love you,” she breathed. The warmth of her breasts slipped softly across my chest hair. On the surface, it probably looked or sounded romantic. But you could see in her eyes, that Kerstin was lost. Broken. Searching for something to fill in the hole Lex had left in her. In both of us.
I knew there was only one answer for her. She’d been getting closer and closer to it for years. And I was the one who would give it to her. It was something I had been getting closer and closer to for years too.
I flipped the ropes off my wrists and grabbed her around the waist, quickly changing our positions to pin her to the bed.
She was surprised at first, but she didn’t really struggle very hard when I twisted the ropes around her wrists.
I looked down at the ugly gashes across her breasts and the bruises on her ribs. At the yellowing stains left by the lashes on her upper arms. At the long ragged pink tracks of pain that crisscrossed her thighs.
“How…” she began to ask, as she tested the ropes. They held.
“You don’t tie a very good knot,” I explained. “But I do. Remember that night you asked me what I secretly fantasized about doing? My darkest dirty secret?”
She nodded. And I could see in her eyes a new spark of fear and…I think…the first flash of excitement in a long time.
“I don’t know if I could have admitted it to myself back then, not really,” I said. “But you’ve freed me.”
I walked over to the dresser and picked up the saw.
“I told you I once had a girlfriend who was covered in scars. But I didn’t tell you why we broke up.”
“Why?” Kerstin asked. Her voice was very small. She moved so easily from subjugator to slave.
“Because she died,” I answered, stepping closer to the bed with the saw. I revved it once, and I saw the muscles in her thighs clench. Her fingers touched the sheets and trembled.
“Her father worked at a lumberyard, and one day he’d gone to work and left his lunch on the counter. Becky—that was her name—drove it out to him, because her mom didn’t want him going hungry that day. She went into the plant and saw her dad working on the big saw down in the pit so she walked over. She couldn’t just call to him, because the place was too loud with machinery. Thing was…Becky didn’t walk very steady because of the car accident that gave her all those scars. And the day she went to give her dad his lunch…one of her legs decided to just…give out. It happened sometimes. She’d be walking along and she’d just…fall.
“It picked a rotten time to give out this time though; she was on the stairwell just above where her dad was working. He had no idea she was even there—you couldn’t hear anything in that place but the sound of the cutting. He had no idea until she fell right there on the big log he was guiding through the saw, and that blade bit right down into the middle of her without slowing speed a hair. I used to wonder if he even knew who it was that he’d helped chop up before her head rolled down the sawdust trough to stare up at him from his feet.”
Kerstin’s eyes were bugging out now, fascinated and afraid at the same time. “Oh my God,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” I said. “Can you imagine sawing your own daughter in half? I was pretty broken up at first. But then I started having these dreams about it. Only, it wasn’t her dad at the saw when she fell. In my dreams, it was me. I masturbated a lot thinking about how she must have looked there on the floor, sawed in half…”
“Oh God,” Kerstin said, spreading her legs wider. She glistened with excitement, and I put my finger on the saw’s trigger again. She visibly responded to the sound, but this time, I didn’t relax my finger.
“I never wanted a dead girl the way you thought,” I said, moving the saw closer, finally admitting my darkest fantasy to myself. I don’t even know if she would have tried to close her legs if I hadn’t tied her ankles. In any event, I had, and she couldn’t. But I knew that she was twisted just for this. I was twisted just for her.
“Whatever you want,” I heard her whisper as the whining teeth of the saw moved steadily closer to her most vulnerable parts.
I think she orgasmed as the blade ate into that pink flesh. I know she was moaning the closer I brought it, and the first scream she let go sounded like the big O. After that…the screams sounded a lot less happy. Either way, they didn’t last very long.
Some of her ribs were hard to cut, but steel blades and electricity prevailed. In the end, I lay down there on the wet bed with her. In her. Between her. I kissed her blood-spattered lips and felt my own insanity rise fully, freed at last. Her eyes were vacant, but I knew she was happy wherever she was. Violated completely at last. Her lips were still warm. This time, she wouldn’t heal.
When I fell asleep that night, I didn’t dream at all.
Because all my dreams were real.
Grandma Wanda’s Belly Jelly
>
Even the slogan was inane:
It won’t stick to your heart or make your thighs swelly
But it’s sweet as the twinkle in the eyes of lil’ Nelly
It’s Grandma Wanda’s great Belly Jelly!
God was I sick of hearing that name.
You’d think old Grandma Wanda had a fifty-percent market share or something.
Not likely. The prune-complexioned granny produced this stuff in the basement of her little suburban house and only released a few hundred jars a year.
Oh, but those jars…
People paid a hundred bucks a pop for them. Before the resale scalpers came into the picture. Naturally it wasn’t long before the real jelly manufacturers wanted a piece of the action. We could have made her a millionaire overnight. Her face (well, actually, we would have gotten a sweeter-looking granny for the labels) would have smiled from the aisles of supermarkets from Greenwich Village to Key West.
But Grandma Wanda had turned up her mottled, discolored close pin of a nose and grunted. “Uhh-uhhh.”
There were plenty of closed-door meetings about Grandma Wanda. Bet on it. We were not the only bread spreaders who wanted the rights to the recipe. Marketing boys sketched kindly looking aproned matrons and syrupy slogans to present to the old bat in hopes of converting her.
Money didn’t talk. “Uhhh-uhh.”
Ad slicks met with crumpling. “Uhhh-uhhh.”
The old warhorse patriotic good-of-your-country speech raised an eyebrow but no salute. “Uhhh-uh.”
“We have to buy her out before Fucker’s,” our CEO shouted in his affectionate vernacular for our arch rivals in morning manna.
The offers were made.
The offers were countered.
The counters were topped.
Grandma Wanda spread a slick of translucent crimson jam across the contracts, folded them neatly and shoved them back in the breast pockets of our sales force.