Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  “Okay, you can try.” Shandee grasped the arm firmly and held him so that his hand was in front of her mouth. He touched all the way around her lips, feeling the exact shape, and then, with very fine almost vibrating movements, he applied the lipstick. It was extremely red, a color called Terranova.

  “Good job,” said Shandee. “You’re good. And this color is great.” Her lips looked really luscious. “Thank you, Dave’s arm.”

  He made a little nod with his hand and then, lifting the pen, reminded her that he needed to have some of the fish-food mash and to be relieved of his chemical wastes. She took him to the toilet and popped open a little vent on his cap. A tiny trickle of gray water dripped out. Then she fed him some fish-food gruel, and he seemed quite revived. He asked her to place him on the windowsill, because he had a solar panel for energy. She did, and then she went to the party and danced and had a wonderful time, but she came home early because she felt she had a new friend that she had to take care of.

  When she got back her roommate Rianne was there. Rianne’s lips were very red – she’d been sampling the new lipsticks, probably – and she was holding on to Dave’s arm. The hand end was in her shirt, obviously doing something tender with one of her breasts. Rianne hurriedly drew him out. There was a pad of paper with lots of hasty writing scrawled on it next to where she was lounging on her bed.

  “So, you’ve discovered my arm,” Shandee said, with an edge.

  Rianne nodded. “He has a lovely touch.”

  “That he does,” Shandee agreed.

  Rianne said that she’d found out quite a bit about the arm and where it came from. “It belongs to someone named Dave,” she said.

  “I knew that,” Shandee snapped.

  “He went to a place called the House of Holes. There Dave had requested a larger thicker penis. Apparently you can do that. But at a price. The director, this woman named Lila, said to him: ‘Would you be willing to give your right arm for a larger penis?’ Dave said no at first, because his right arm was necessary for his work. But Lila said that it was only temporary – only till someone found the arm and took it back and stuck it on him. Dave said, ‘Oh, if it’s temporary, sure.’ So he underwent a voluntary amputation right near the elbow, and his arm had the self-contained life-support pack grafted on.”

  “You sure did find out a lot,” said Shandee.

  “I must say his touch is extremely sensitive,” Rianne went on. She threw herself back on the bed and laid the arm on her chest.

  Shandee watched the hand push aside the sides of Rianne’s shirt and find her breast again.

  “Hmm,” Shandee said. “I don’t know about this. I found him, not you.” She felt finger-snappings of jealousy.

  Rianne’s lips parted. “Oh my gosh, his fingers know what to do,” she said, flushing. The hand was gently rolling her nipple like a tender round pea. And then it surrounded her whole breast and shook it once. After that it turned and began crawling over her belly toward her pajama pants.

  “Are you just going to let that happen?” Shandee said, riveted.

  “Um, yes,” she said. “Could you dim the light?”

  Shandee turned off the overhead light and watched the arm undo the knot of Rianne’s pajama bottoms. It disappeared. Rianne went “Shooooo.”

  Shandee turned away. “He’s found it,” Rianne said, “and, boy, he’s got the touch of a master.” Then her voice changed and she said, “Oh my god, two fingers. Haw. Haw.” Shandee glanced at her. Rianne’s knees had fallen apart and her eyes were slitted closed. “He seems to want to make me come, oh god, oh shit.” Then: “Ham, ham, oo, oo, oo, oo, oo, oo, ham, ham, HAW!”

  She lay still and held up the arm. He made an O with his fingers, which glittered with her sex juices.

  “You want me to go with you?” Rianne said. “Okay, I’ll go. Bye, Shandee, I’m going!” With that, her face and body began to blur, and she swooshed into a long thin shape that went through the finger-O of Dave’s hand.

  She was gone. The hand lay on the bed. It began crawling toward Shandee. It reached her thigh.

  Shandee handed it a pen and folded back the yellow pad to give it a fresh page. “Where did my roommate go off to?” she asked.

  “The House of Holes,” the arm wrote. “Would you like to come, too?”

  “Maybe,” said Shandee. “How?”

  “If you let me touch you,” he wrote.

  “Touch where?” said Shandee.

  “Where it aches.”

  “It aches in my head,” she said. “Never enough sleep.”

  “Let me help,” the arm scrawled.

  She held it, and the hand surged through her hair, and when she steered it around to the back of her neck it massaged the stiffness away.

  His fingers were mobile and trembly now. She gave him back the pen. “Isn’t there another place that aches?” he wrote.

  “Yes,” she said, “there is.”

  He wrote: “TWAT?”

  “Mhm,” Shandee said. “But I really don’t think I can let you do that until I know you better. You need to be more than an arm to me.”

  “Take me to class tomorrow,” he wrote.

  The next morning she fed him some fish paste and drained his waste and wrapped the cloth around his life-support addendum and put him in her bag. In the middle of her nineteenth-century novel class she felt his fingers very gently brushing her calf. She reached down and held his hand and loved how it felt.

  When she got home that afternoon, she washed the hand carefully in the sink and then took him back to her room and dimmed the lights and put on Appleseed’s “When Are We Going (to Do It).” She said, “I’m ready for you to hold me now, any way you want.”

  His hand brushed over her lips – she was wearing Terranova again – and she opened her mouth and tasted his fingers, and he circled her tongue and tweaked it, and then as she steadied him he crawled down. She put her feet together and let her knees fall open. His hand found her stash and she looked down and saw his fingers half buried in her folds, and then she felt a warm filling feeling as first one, then two of Dave’s fingers slid inside.

  She held his arm and helped him angle his fingers in and then pull them out. Then she pulled him up to her clitty and he circled it. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. Just before she came, he stopped and held his hand up to her mouth.

  “What is it, baby?” she asked.

  His fingers made the O and then he pushed the O shape to her mouth. She put her tongue through it, and her mind and neck and body stretched until they were very long and flowed through his fingers, and then his fingers flowed with her. She was pulled in a whoosh of wispiness, and she landed and condensed. Before her was a sign in the grass: “Welcome to the House of Holes.”

  She looked down at her hands. They were still holding Dave’s arm.

  THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WHIP (PORN MIX)

  Fulani

  Fulani is the author of erotica, much of it with content of a fetish and bondage nature. His work is published by Xcite Books, Pink Flamingo, Renaissance Sizzler, 1001 Nights Press and Sweetmeats Press. His stories often seek to explore how fantasy and the subconscious link to our everyday lives.

  Even when lying coiled on the chair, it looks alive. The braided leather, thick by the Turk’s-head knot, gradually tapering, calls to mind the scales of a snake. The fall and cracker, the rattle of a rattlesnake, the sting of a scorpion. The leather glistens gently where it catches the light, a sheen that says it’s used, but not worn with use, a working animal. Yet when he holds it, moves his hands over its length, it is also a pet. If it had memory, speech, it would chuckle dryly, crackling, over stories of bodies it had stung, flesh it had pressed itself into until the welts came.

  When he cracks it, there is a moment of equipoise; a point at which it lies in the air, invisibly suspended, motionless, in repose. Then the tail licks out faster than the eye can follow, a blur of red/purple as the cracker accelerates across the room.

  The physic
s of it is something you already know. The energy delivered to the handle, its cross-section the thickness of a thumb, is passed progressively to the other end of the whip, tapering at the cracker to no more than a few strands of cotton. As the energy is concentrated, the end of the whip accelerates. The cracker meets, exceeds, the speed of sound. Hence the crack.

  Even so it sounds like a pistol shot, a promise of concentrated violence, searing pain.

  You are, as normal, spread-eagled, standing, wrists pulled up and outward on the frame, ankles placed wide apart so that your heels are not quite on the floor, and your weight is taken on the balls of your feet. You are, as normal, naked. Vulnerable, open, accessible to caresses, to suffering, to agony.

  A whip can caress. Did you know this? He flicks it out and the fall wraps twice around your outstretched forearm. It’s gentle, sweet almost. The other whip, the one with the nylon fall, wraps, but the nylon slides off your skin. This whip, having a leather fall, grips more easily. The wrap isn’t tight, the sensation is akin to the process of bondage – something circling a limb, cinching just enough to feel like a restraint, a slight pull back on the forearm, enough that you can feel your balance challenged and need to stretch your legs just that little bit wider apart, exhale and pull on the muscles of your stomach that little bit more, to return to equilibrium.

  The wraps move from right forearm to right upper arm, left forearm to left upper arm, right calf to right thigh, left calf to left thigh, a lazy pattern, dulling your senses yet making you focus on your own body and the massage-like repetition of a foot or so of leather being wound around it.

  When he moves to wrap your waist it bites just a little more, the greater speed required making you aware of the knot that joins the fall and the cracker as it makes contact with left or right hip.

  Around your breasts. This time the knot lands on the outside arc of your left or right breast and the breast itself is made to bounce gently. The skin is more sensitive here, erogenous; and the tautness of braided leather across your breasts – because such a wrap requires half the length of the whip – makes you catch your breath at each stroke. The repeated impacts are light, refined, almost affectionate, yet somehow dangerous. They contain the promise of something stronger.

  When he cracks the whip again, to your right, you feel only the wind of its passing yet the sharp retort makes you gasp involuntarily. It reminds you that the whip is a technology for tearing and mutilating flesh. For encouragement. For training. For ensuring compliance. For punishment. For what offence, even whether guilty or innocent, will not matter to the whip. Perhaps even the punishment of the innocent is a purer, cleaner, application of its capabilities.

  Are you innocent?

  And, imagining yourself as he sees you – nude, exposed, and with just enough freedom of movement to twist and dance on the end of the whip – it occurs to you that it has one further purpose.

  Entertainment.

  The whip can tease. He stands back, allowing the entire seven-foot length of the instrument to extend, and flicks it out. The cracker is comprised of fine cotton, about twenty double strands, twisted tightly together and held with a knot. Beyond the knot, the very tip of the beast comprises forty or so short lengths of cotton, unbraided. You can feel, on your shoulders and arse, the subtle thwack of those cotton lengths, the last quarter-inch or so of the whip. It is sensation, not pain, because although the force is there the strands are very light. It feels a little like threading, where a single strand is used to abrade the very top layer of skin. The sensation is so odd it makes you laugh out loud.

  There is only one place on your body that causes a different reaction. When the tip of the cracker finds the very centre of the shoulder blade, the scapula, there is a nerve, a pressure point, that is unexpectedly sensitive. With your arms outstretched and bearing half your weight, the sensation is magnified. It hurts, but it is not yet pain.

  And you know that the whip, while licking at you, is being held back, controlled, like a wild animal on a leash. It’s saying to itself: tender flesh, tempting flesh, clean unmarked flesh, let me write on you. Let me write a story in angry welts on this cool, blank flesh.

  What it really wants to do is bite.

  Is there a confusion here between the whip and its wielder? The wielder, the man standing behind you, out of your vision, who you know only as “he”, is like an orchestral conductor. He moves his wrist. The whip, given motivation, extends its own interpretation to the movement. It can, like the bow of a violin, glide gently – or attack. It can switch from andante and piano to staccato, forte, con forzo.

  But not yet. Nearly, but not yet. A stroke comes up between your legs, the fall lying precisely between the lips of your cunt, the tip nuzzling hard a few inches above your clitoris. This is new, unexpected. It is still gentle, yet has the promise now of sexual viciousness, exacting cruelty. Again, the knot of the cracker has sought out a pressure point, a chakra. There are nodes there that in shiatsu, in acupuncture, are held to relate to the kidney, the liver... and what in Chinese terminology is sweetly called the “conception vessel”.

  The blow makes you jump, makes your breath jump, reminds you of your helpless state. And it is undeniably sexual. The strike serves to remind you of your sex, in all its meanings.

  Again. Again. The repetition, the emphasis on your sex, your passivity, is mesmerising.

  Then the whip takes your arse in its jaws and tears at your flesh.

  This is not pain. Not at first. It is so much more than the word “pain” encompasses. The sensation is sharp, clear, overwhelming, almost transcendental. To call this “pain” would be like calling a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, perhaps the Study for the Head of Christ, a quick working sketch.

  It has several components.

  First, the energy transmitted by the whip must go somewhere. It flings you forwards in your bonds. The shockwave travels up your body and you bounce against the cuffs holding wrists and ankles, every muscle jerking taut. You’d yell if you could, but a sudden spasm grips around your lungs, making noise impossible. And, truth be told, you feel that sudden spasm deep in your belly also.

  Second, there are the thoughts in your head. The whip has an animus. It has, of course, its own identity, but it is being wielded by him. He hit me. He hit me hard. He hit me with malice. He enjoys my helplessness, my suffering, it amuses him. This level of violence and cruelty, directed and controlled, is a rare thing. It is outrageous – more so than if he’d slapped your face in a fit of temper, an argument.

  Third is the fact, that all this energy was forced through a piece of skin perhaps a quarter of an inch wide and eighteen inches in length, across the buttocks. Four and a half square inches. An amount of flesh considerably smaller than the palm of your hand. The outer layer of skin, the epidermis, is only a couple of millimetres – let us say one-sixteenth of an inch – thick. The stroke must have bitten in, pushing deeper, perhaps half an inch. Now the line taken by the lash threads out, nerve endings squealing and cells reacting to the sudden shock. A tracery of poker-hot flame runs across your arse, as if a thin stream of molten lead had been streaked across it, marking the line of what will shortly become a raised abrasion and a band of bruised muscle. You can feel every single hard diamond-shaped mark from the braid of the leather.

  And fourth... fourth is the realisation that this was the first stroke. How many more will there be? How many do you think you can take? How much need will this stoke between your outstretched thighs?

  There’s no hurry. Anticipation is a hungry, tension-making pleasure. And there is a great deal more of this particular human canvas to paint the colour of weals and welts.

  PARK ANTICS

  Danielle Schloss

  Danielle Schloss loves being with friends, baking cakes, and hiking in various places, including exotic tropical forests, volcanic islands and mountain pastures. A fan of cows, for their deep dark eyes and placidity, she avoids pastures with calves, as cows lose all placidity and charge tresp
assers, sometimes causing injury. She is currently working on an anthology of her short fiction, as well as her first novel about sex, intrigue and sudden death in the corporate world.

  Jorge, a young Spanish jogger, paced himself to the song. “Lady P, Lady P, Lady P, Lady P...” he hummed in his mind, listening to McCartney’s song on his iPod. He had learnt that it was in fact “Let it be” since his English had improved, but he rather preferred his own version with a mysterious Lady P, so still mouthed it as he had when he had first heard the song, some years ago. The park was dark and he enjoyed the solitary act every evening. It was a ritual of his, a cleansing of his soul after a hard day’s trading in the financial markets. All things considered, he was happy to have a job in a cushy office with high pay in a country that was stable politically and had a low unemployment rate. His salary supported not only him, but also his parents back in Spain and his sister who was still studying. He had every reason to be pleased. He had for the first time met his new neighbour, a strikingly beautiful Russian girl, Ivanka, who had just moved into the flat opposite his own.

  They had begun by nodding at each other across the balcony. Then they had bumped into each other in the lift. Ivanka had greeted him in heavily accented English, assuming that the lingua franca of the modern world would serve its purpose. They had progressed far enough to have a few Sunday brunches at the local tea room. He was of course hoping that it might evolve further, and his fantasies about her often helped him to sleep at night, by providing solitary release in the depths of his large but empty double bed. He had moved from Spain to follow a girlfriend, who had recompensed by dumping him one month into his new job. Perhaps, after all, it had been a good thing. The future looked hopeful.

  As he ran he reviewed his day, then planned out the morrow. His deals had been successful for the past few weeks and as the year drew to a close he could expect a hefty bonus. He would give half to his parents, but he would keep half to spend on some luxury for himself. Perhaps a weekend in a five-star hotel in Gstaad with his neighbour. He would offer her champagne and caviar, and they would spend the weekend drinking and fucking. It seemed like a pretty good plan.