The Waning

by Christina Bergling

  You stood in the doorframe alone. The room behind You was silent.

  I assumed I would have heard her dying; I assumed You used her and let her leave. With relief dripping over my brain, I was able to take note of the fierce aches in my body. My neck kinked violently after hours of my head dangling unsupported in the weight of my sleep. My low back tightened against the rigid seat and the spine still stacked crookedly on top of it. My hips had relented and fallen asleep sometime in the night.

  You were smiling openly, but with closed lips, when You leaned down to release my arms and legs. What is he trying to show me? What is this supposed to prove?

  Once the mild euphoria dissipated through my body, I felt my rage again. I was so fully and completely mad at You. Furious that You brought back the pain, disappointed that You tainted my one respite in aftercare, livid that You had set up me up to listen to You have sex all night.

  Did it get You off to know I could hear You? Was that how You were going to steal sexuality from me?

  Maybe You weren’t different. Maybe You were just the deviant I had feared You were.

  I did not know how I was feeling. My emotions were a tumultuous storm thrashing under my heart. I did not know why I cared, why I was so hurt by this new offense. They were just sounds. What were sounds in the scheme of this place? I could not have actually preferred Your attention focused on me instead.

  Did You just want to show me You were a man, with normal desires and a normal life outside these walls?

  I was too upset to rationalize Your motives and behaviors. I had to stretch my logic and analytical mind to its limits to wrap around Your world, and it was drowning in that sea under my chest.

  You were relaxed, unfocused, immune to the anger radiating from my tensed muscles and sideways glances. Maybe You were remembering her, basking in flashes of the night before the way I remembered doing every time with Lei.

  That was it. That was why I was a mess.

  Sex led to Lei in my primal wiring. Your sex summoned her back to my mind, resuscitated that excruciating longing for her.

  And if You did that deliberately, it was far more sadistic than any strike across my skin.

  You faced me toward the bucket then turned Your back to permit me partial privacy. When I was done, I crawled past You and into my cage. I never thought I would welcome the feeling of that meager blanket. I never imagined missing my confined quarters, but curling up tightly on my side, feeling those bars against my hip, made my body feel normal. It was almost starting to feel like home.

  I was happy for the darkness. I was glad to be left alone in my cell. You returned and deposited my plate of food, but I left it untouched beside my feet. I did not want to do anything but lie here exactly how I had fantasized while in that chair. I wanted to sleep until I forgot all the feelings seething inside me.

  And I did sleep. Most of the day. A heavy, feverish sleep that had me plunging in and out of deep pools of twisted dreams. I could not wrap the fingers of my perception around the scenes. I was only left floating among the fragments when I washed up in my cage before slipping under once more.

  Wrapping my fingers into Lei’s woven bracelets.

  The sound of a switch dragging along the bars of my cage.

  McAllister’s pants pluming wet and pungent against my face as I napped on the couch.

  The swatch of my bloody flesh spread out over an instrument tray.

  Swirling, writhing images flirting with my consciousness from the depths of my subconscious.

  I would wallow in them happily, rolling in the heavy blanket on my mind, over dealing with the reality that waited for me between the concrete walls.

  You released me to my bucket again, brought me another plate I chose not to eat. I knew the lesson was coming, but I decided not to care.

  This time, I was making a new choice. I was no longer resolving to submit, to fake obedience in order to sell You. Fuck that. Tonight, defiance was alive in my brain. Tonight, I had no long-term goal; I only wanted to indulge my rage and my disdain. Whatever the price might prove to be, I needed this small rebellion.

  Maybe You would just kill me. Maybe You would just finally end it. And maybe that would be for the best. I had spent enough nights sweetly courting Death, begging for him to just take me and make the pain stop.

  You came in to teach me. I did not look up when You crouched down to unlock the cage. I heard the whine of the cage door and rolled over to acknowledge You then turned my back to You and closed my eyes. You walked briskly to the wall of tools then returned and rapped on the cage bars with the switch. I ignored You.

  If I couldn’t escape You, maybe I could convince You to kill me. Fight sure hadn’t inspired homicide in You. Quite the opposite. Maybe indifference would push You far enough.

  You hit the switch against the bars again, harder. I could hear Your impatience in the increasing strength in the strikes. By this time, I could hear Your voice in Your actions and mannerisms, like I could read Your mind. You stood there, inflating from cold to rage, letting Your thoughts radiate over me. I lay unaffected. This would be my insubordination.

  Fuck compliance. Fuck surviving. It was time for rebellion.

  I knew when I could hear You release a breath and turn around, it was going to be bad.

  I knew when I heard the metal of the chain links clinking together, we were going to explore a new dimension of education.

  The cold links bit my skin as You wrapped the chain around my ankle. Then I felt the tension tighten; the links tore into me, pushed until they compressed my nerves and my blood flow, as You ripped me out of my cage by my ankle. My hip collided with and scraped over the frame of the cage door; the cement crashed against my body as I stuttered along it.

  I think I howled out in both surprise and pain.

  Nerves all over my body were firing through the panic. But my mind screamed fuck you just the same. I would not fight, and I would not wilt. I would be nothing.

  I did not cradle my aching points or curl up and cower. I lay on the gray floor like a corpse, staring blankly at the dusty floor, feeling my own breath bounce back into my face.

  You snatched me by the hair and dragged me up to my feet. I felt every follicle in Your grasp scream and pull, but I steeled my jaw and forced myself to not make a sound this time. No sound, no reaction. I kept my limbs limp and uncooperative despite the adrenaline throbbing through my system. My base self wanted to fight or wanted to submit; I had to consciously suppress myself into this outward seeming apathy.

  Rage was in the force of Your touch but not in Your pace. You kept to Your methodical and meticulous practices. You looped the chain eloquently around me. I felt the cold length coil around my arms then my torso then my legs in unfamiliar patterns. Finally, You brought it around my throat, a sensation that made my heart pause, before guiding it up around the mounted hook. The pressure was laced over and back and between until I was half suspended upright and terribly uncomfortable.

  My arms were lashed unnaturally behind me, wrapped against each other until I could feel the wretched stretch tearing across my pectorals, digging deep into the tendons across my shoulders. My chest felt splayed by the contortion.

  My legs were tangled awkwardly, keeping every joint engaged and every muscle struggling to support my knotted position. My feet quivered weakly, unable to sustain my weight, unable to release the pose. I could feel the acid building and pooling in my thighs; I could hear the chain grumbling as they quivered relentlessly.

  The binding kept my spine rigid. The slightest slouch brought the links deeper into my throat and restricted my breathing. I felt the tension mounting between each disk, the ache that crept into the surrounding muscles and curled around my ribs. My shoulders began to turn in on themselves, the rigidity spreading its throbbing fingers up into my neck and the base of my skull, which now seemed so impossibly heavy.

  There were too many points of pain for my brain to choose from, rolled onto my toes, half-squatting,
chain gently pressing against my throat, arms held useless behind me.

  Those first hours were sheer torture. My mind was simply a blur; I could scarcely distinguish a sensation and had lost all coherent ability to form thoughts. Words and sounds screamed through my head, but I could barely tell if there were in my brain or in the room around me. My muscles felt like they were ripping; my skeleton felt like it was fracturing. Every single nerve shrieked at full volume.

  Enough pressure and time finally brought the sensation of pins and needles to my extremities. Then they slowly began to vanish from my awareness. My nerves gradually surrendered, and I went numb. I do not believe the pain stopped; I only think my perception of it changed. After so long, after so much, out of survival, my brain elected to begin shutting it out, begin shutting down. My body was warped so uncomfortably that my mind could only hear its incessant pleas to make it fucking stop.

  You brought that fucking chair back into the room, a wooden foreigner in my country of cement and metal. You placed it directly in front of me and sat, staring me calmly dead in the face. Somehow, Your eyes on me made it all the more painful and uncomfortable. Something in the way You could just watch me suffer, the way it did not register on Your face at all. I could not bear to look into Your dead eyes, yet You had me so contorted that it was the only natural position for my gaze.

  Everything planned, down the smallest and most vivid detail.

  You sat in symmetry. Your feet were flat on the floor, legs in perfect angles above them. You put each hand on each knee. Your shoulders were rolled down and relaxed, making Your neck look all the longer. Your jaw cut another straight line into Your neck as Your placid face simply observed me. You rested unaffected as I twitched and writhed against the chain, as I whimpered and quietly let the tears roll down my face.

  Then amidst the turmoil, my mind found a single point of clarity, a momentary oasis in the storm of my anguish.

  I woke up in the hospital in a paralytic haze. The weight of the anesthesia crushed my awareness and muddled my senses. The lights seemed blindingly bright above me. I squinted against them and found it difficult to wrestle my eyes back open again. My mouth felt completely parched, tongue sticking to the roof and my cheeks. I tried to swallow, to solicit any saliva, yet my throat ached, as if the tube was still stretching against it.

  Lei’s hand found mine as I floundered in my consciousness. The sensation of her skin, the familiar shape of her fingers grounded me back in the moment, even as my mind continued to swim.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered near my ear. “It’s over. Just rest now. I’m right here.”

  I let my eyes fall shut again as a lazy smile played on my lips at her words. I tuned out the stimuli of the unfamiliar hospital room and allowed myself to scan my own body. As my evaluation moved down my torso, I felt nothing. A crushing feeling of emptiness registered under my abdomen, where my womb used to be. I had never considered the thing much before, aside from when it warped against me monthly, yet I found myself experiencing its void in a way I did not anticipate.

  I shifted my hips, breathed deep into my belly, tightened my muscles into a Kegel. Nothing. It all felt like a gaping, heavy nothing.

  I felt tears burning at the edges of my eyes when I opened them again. Lei had retracted her hand without my noticing. Instead, I was greeted by a foreign figure in hospital scrubs. A nurse, maybe an orderly. I knew nothing of hospital stratification.

  He leaned over his cart and very carefully sorted through medication, comparing what he lifted to his face with a chart held in his other hand. I noticed his hair first, dark, precisely combed to leave a rigid part down his scalp.

  Lei walked back into the room, a soda can cupped in her hand. She smiled and spoke softly to the man. He looked down as he replied into the clipboard.

  He finally seemed satisfied at the contents in the small paper cup and walked very deliberately toward me. His steps were unnaturally slow, and something about his mere presence seemed to beckon anxiety deep inside my chest, somewhere adjacent to my new emptiness. As he placed the cup in my hand, he met my eyes for just a second. They were dark, seemingly black, and startlingly cold.

  It was You.

  I could hear the chain clinking against itself and dragging against the floor. I could hear my own cries and whines and my own heartbeat throbbing in my ears and against every link of the chain and in every contorted joint and twisted skin. I could hear Your gentle breathing, creating rhythm against the furious chaos enveloping me. Seconds banged out eternities as I struggled just to breathe, to go anywhere but here.

  I could still feel that hospital bed at the edges of my brain. The first glimpse of You mocked me and how long it took to fish it out of the tangles in my head. The moment had been locked in there all along, hazed over and tucked away. You had seen me then. For some reason, You had selected me then.

  That was over three years ago.

  I did not want to think about it; maybe I had been blocking it out all this time. I tried to conjure any other memory. I scraped against my brain, raked my nails over the matter desperately trying to dig out one pleasant moment. Yet the soil was now barren. There was only You staring back at me. I cried out from my deepest gut at the last mourning of the former me.

  I felt something collapse in my heart, in my soul. I felt something deep within me break.

  This was the single moment when I became Yours, the one instance where I fully and completely crossed that line.

  Then the epiphany hit me. Harder than any realization in my life. More poignant than when I articulated I had no interest in lying with any man, when thought finally articulated what my soul always knew. I didn’t want to accept it; some fragment of me tried to resist it, yet it rose slowly and thickly in my brain just the same. I felt the honesty in it resonate through my bones like a tuning fork.

  I had no control; I never did. My choices were nothing more than a creature comfort, nothing real about them.

  This was Your world, and I was Yours.

  You saw the change in me. My body went limp; my sounds were silenced. You were more inside my head than I was able to read Your will. You were inside my very flesh, knew me better than I ever hoped to know myself. You stood slowly with a phantom of a smile at the edges of Your mouth. You removed the intruding chair and returned to me, slowly uncoiling me from the chain.

  Blood flushed through my system unrestricted, pounded through my temples, flooded my brain. I felt myself wobble, nearly drunk on it, intoxicated at the relief. That solace lined the vivid pain as pins and needles assaulted my nerves, as my body remembered the parts it had been striving to ignore through the ordeal. I tingled from my hair to my toenails.

  It was finally over. I had survived this test. All the screaming in my flesh stopped, and the world was suddenly very quiet. I closed my eyes to absorb the recession of my pain.

  With the chain removed, You supported my body, guiding me down to a position I could sustain on my own, collapsed into a pile on the concrete with my head rolling around like a newborn. My eyes were still lazily closed when I heard the latex snap. You were removing Your gloves.

  Then You touched me. No implement or tool, no glove between us. Your skin came into contact with mine. The feeling of Your warm, smooth hand on my neck was electric. It shocked my nerves the way no touch had before. Not even her sweet touch. She used to make me cum until the edge of the world started to blur. This was different. It had been so long since I felt the heat of flesh. My skin had forgotten what anything but cold and wet and metal felt like. To have that one sensation of humanity against my nerves snapped me out of my swirling inner torment and brought me a clarity of purpose. A gentle touch from You, Your smallest affection was all I craved, became all I sought to obtain.

  With Your warm hand on my neck, You moved me to sit in front of You. You knelt behind me. I did not know what to expect, but after enduring such a torturous stress position for so long, I didn’t much give a shit. I let my eyes
stay closed as I simply waited.

  You brushed my hair. Such a surprisingly affectionate gesture that I flinched. I didn’t even know where the brush came from, if it had been hiding in my cell all along. You lay bristles to my scalp. I remained frozen, mouth agape, arms suspended in disbelief as You put one hand to my shoulder to indicate I should stay and pulled the brush down through the strands. Each stroke hypnotized me. With each pass, my muscles released, and I melted into a puddle in front of You.

  18

  Once I yielded, once I both truly became Yours and accepted it, it became a different imprisonment. I simply stopped. Stopped fighting. Stopped trying. Stopped missing. Stopped wanting. Stopped feeling. Stopped thinking. Stopped plotting. Stopped dreaming.

  I stopped, and the world stopped turning. Life stopped existing outside of my room. I surrendered to You and let You resuscitate me into this new existence. I didn’t have to try; I only had to follow.

  Everything gradually just eroded within me. Not unlike the body that contained it. As my body wasted and sagged, my memories wilted, faded, reduced to only disjointed fragments. My thoughts devolved and became more simplistic and primal.

  I used to miss them all—Lei, McAllister, my dead mother, even Julie—when my ego still infected me. I used to lie on my side in my cage and stare into the dark. I let memory swell over me until I was in our bed. As I pressed my hand against the cold bars, I felt the soft warmth of her bare shoulder. I saw the corner of her mouth fall open as she snored softly. Her bangs stuck to her forehead. I would reach up and brush them aside, as I always did while she was sleeping. It used to be thoughts of her that kept me alive, dreams of seeing her again, feeling her body line up in perfect symmetry with mine as she clung to me for the first time.

  I tried to cleave to her, fight the dying of the light inside me. I shouldn’t be able to forget her; I shouldn’t be able to forsake that life. Yet survival made such a compelling argument. Sacrifice it all to keep having anything. I learned to forget her. The light drained out of my memories, and only the shadow of us lying together remained, dead and unmoving.