I spent hours, more likely months, of my tween years trying to bend Zanzibar and Zarana and their merry band of Tom Savini Sex-Machine-costume-inspired action figures into human pretzels. After my father took me kite flying on Wells Beach one summer, I swiped the spool of string and repurposed it as fixing rope, manipulating tiny Joe bodies into contortionist tableaus. After weeks of careful, systematic stretching, I managed to turn Zanzibar’s head completely around until he was a fortune teller in Dante’s Inferno, forever doomed to look only behind himself and tickle his silver skull pendant with the tip of his hair. Unfortunately for Zarana, though, I became too impatient, and frustrated after weeks of trying to make her elbows entwine behind her back, she broke in two, her torso spilling a dried-out black rubber band and her splayed legs held together only by a tiny metal hook.
Twenty-five years later, I still have her legs. Sometimes I think about attaching an ornament hook to them and hanging them somewhere out of sight on the town’s Christmas tree, but that might give the police a clue to my identity, and it’s best not to be reckless after what I’ve done lately.
II. Rebekah
My name means “tied up” in Hebrew. I shit you not. When I was a kid, a bunch of us looked up our names in my mom’s old baby book shoved way in the back of the old, musty bookcase. Apparently, it had been a real party game in the late 1970s, deciding what to name your little bundle of post-Roe v. Wade joy. When we cracked open the spine, a few dog-eared pages pulled us right to our brood’s namesakes. My older brother, Matthew? His name means “Gift of God.” My sister Abigail? “Gives joy.” And my cousin Adam, his name translates into “Son of the red earth,” whatever the fuck that means. Rebekah? “Bound.” Restrained. Confined.
The irony kills me.
I didn’t set out to become a dominatrix. I mean, I know everyone in the sex trade says that, unless they’re lying and/or coked up so high they’d say just about anything to keep the camera rolling. When you’re sitting at that worn wooden desk in third grade, tracing the scratches and graffiti with your finger, all the while cursing the son of a bitch whose etchings cause your pencil to make holes in your papers because the surface below isn’t perfectly flat anymore, you don’t daydream about one day, maybe someday, wearing a latex cat suit and cracking a whip against some thirty-something-year-old district attorney whose suit jacket shoulder smells a little like sour milk and Fruity Pebbles. You don’t go shoe shopping with Mom the summer before you begin junior high and imagine the sales clerk licking the toe of your brown Candies t-strap loafer. You don’t fantasize about hog-tying your senior prom date and stuffing him in the trunk of his dad’s Dodge Aries while you stab your undercooked chicken cordon blue and listen to your best friend whine about her stiletto heels totally killing her feet.
I mean, maybe you do think about all of those things. But you don’t make it a career choice. When Mrs. Zahn, my high school guidance counselor, called me into her office in October of my senior year to have “the talk”—you know, since I hadn’t expressed any interest in applying to college, entering the military, or even pursuing a dead-end career as a Citgo convenience store attendant or IHOP waitress—I had nothing to offer her, not even a half-assed line of bullshit about wanting to become a kindergarten teacher or a famous fashion designer. I simply stared at her and waited out the five minutes of silence that hung between us until the bell rang for next period.
I loafed around community college for a few years, even honed a trade working for an engraver part-time to pay my rent. The place was called “Stanislau’s Personalized Gifts,” and Stan, the mild-mannered owner with the heavy Polish accent, was patient and taught me first how to engrave metal plates using a machine. After a few months, I was using the hand stencils and detailing calligraphy like an ancient stenographer on papyrus. I even tried my hand at stone etching a few times and seriously considered going into the tombstone design business. I still might. It’s an art, transcribing someone’s last identity onto a marble slab. I dabbled in wood carving a bit, too, and was even hired to create a set of “special edition” paddles for Pi Beta Phi’s Rush Week; the sorority liked my work so much that they let me keep one of them afterwards. I still personalize paddles for wedding shower gifts every now and then. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Anyway, one night after work, a bunch of us headed up to Sophia’s Bar for the usual obnoxious binge-drinking and beer goggling, and I met this guy and we really hit it off. His name was Chris, and he had this beautiful light brown skin, big, brown doe-eyes and a headful of soft, curly brown hair. When he laughed, his whole body shook, like the joy was ricocheting off of his insides like Pop Rocks. We sucked down Mind Erasers first through those tiny cocktail straws, then finally by pouring them down our throats without swallowing, sometimes ice cubes and all. We shared a cab back to my apartment, and while I didn’t make it a habit to bring strange men into my home, I knew my two roommates would be there within the hour; I figured I could survive his plan to knock me out and rob the place and still live to tell the tale if worse came to worse.
Almost immediately after stumbling through my front door, we began making out like newlyweds on honeymoon. I pulled him into my bedroom, the second door off the hall of our railroad flat, and he held his hands against the sides of my face and said, “Tell me what to do.”
I laughed and tried to untie my sneaker without falling over. “Um…help me get my stupid shoes off,” I joked.
Chris leaped to my feet and began to furiously untie my muddy Keds, and when my socks were finally exposed, he quickly peeled them off and bowed down like a devout Muslim facing Mecca to kiss the tops of my feet. “Tell me to clean them with my tongue. I’m a very bad boy. I need to be punished,” he wailed suddenly, not looking up at me at all.
I was confused. The evening had taken a really weird turn. This kind of kink dialogue was usually reserved for steady relationships that had cooled or cheesy late-night cable movies. “Uh…yeah, okay. Go ahead. Lick my feet. Consider yourself warned, though: I’ve been on them all day. They have that not-so-fresh-feeling,” I said, suddenly wondering how I could manage a graceful exit to grab a glass of ice water: my mouth was fetid and dry with post-alcohol tackiness.
Chris wrapped his meaty hands around my ankles and bent his head back, finally meeting my eyes. “I want you to slap me,” he said, his face completely serious.
I laughed. “You came home with the wrong gal, buddy. I’m a pacifist. I don’t even kill spiders—I scoop them up in Dixie cups and escort them outside.”
He smiled but didn’t move his hands from my lower legs. I shifted my weight a bit, more to assess how easily I could wiggle away to get that glass of water than out of nervousness. When he felt my movement, his grip tightened. “I’m not letting go until you slap me across the face,” he said. “Hard.”
I tried to move my feet again, and when I was unsuccessful, I glanced quickly around the room, running the situation quickly through the rational filters in my brain. He was drunk and wobbly. He was on his knees and would need an extra second or two to push himself up into a running position if I needed to get away fast. Defense weaponry was scarce, but I spied the barrel of my curling iron peeking out from a pile of discarded laundry on the floor near the hamper, and in a pinch, I still had my roommate Sharon’s duck-handled umbrella stuffed underneath my bed where I shoved most of my acquisitions. I tried to think of what to say next, but only one-liners from man-hating Lifetime movies came to mind. “Get your hands off of me,” I said with as much menace as I could gather. “Right. Now.”
A hard second passed. Chris didn’t blink. “No.”
I paused. Now I was angry. Who the fuck did this guy think he was, bullying me into slapping him?
I pulled my arm back and smacked the side of Chris’s face as hard as I could—so hard, the sting on my palm made me wave it around immediately to shake off the pain. He winced a bit, then returned his head to its original position. “Again,” he said softly.
This time, I slapped him with my right hand and followed with my left, a one-two strike. I didn’t wait for him to react. I continued alternately slapping and punching his face until he let go of my ankles, and then, instead of using my newfound freedom to run out of my bedroom, I began to kick him in the stomach. He did nothing to defend himself, even repositioning himself on his back on my nearby futon mattress so that more of his body was exposed. My assault continued for a good five minutes, until blood began to run from his nose and my toes and wrists started to ache. I sank to the floor in exhaustion, panting and wiping the sweat that had begun to form on my forehead.
We were quiet for a long while, and then Chris got to his feet, grabbed a tissue from the box on my nightstand to wipe his face, and walked over to me. I was still crouched in the same place on the floor. He touched my shoulder gently. “You’re one sexy fucking pacifist,” he said. Then he opened my bedroom door and left.
We never saw each other again, but I slept better that night than I had in years.
III. Jesse
I want to go on record and say that I have never viewed prostitutes as lesser human beings. I don’t subscribe to that conservative crap, and I have never treated a patient differently because he or she was poor or white trash. I have little patience for stupid people, that’s true, but poor doesn’t always translate into dumb. And I know prostitution doesn’t necessarily mean poverty either. You always hear about those bored suburban housewives who get their rocks off selling it while their corporate husbands are at work, and I am here to attest that it is not, in fact, an urban myth.
In the beginning, I only ordered custom call girls—the kind where you call a service, tell the operator what you want—height, hair color, hold the anchovies—and within an hour, she’s on your doorstep, hotter and fresher than a Domino’s pizza. Thank you, American Express. One of the women, a petite but curvy gal named Mary Jane with a strawberry blonde Jennifer Aniston haircut and a meticulous manicure, stayed in bed with me for a bit after my deeds were done. Truth be told—I fell asleep immediately after, having worked a double the night before, and I had neglected to untie her wrists from her ankles before inspecting the insides of my eyelids. She had no choice but to watch her tiny, pedicured feet transform from dark pink to slightly purple after her attempt to unravel my intricate braiding had only managed to cinch the restraints tighter. A half hour into my snoring, she lost all feeling in her toes and nudged me awake.
I apologized profusely and gave her an extra tip for her trouble, and that’s when she confided in me. “I’ll have to stick to pants for a little while,” she laughed, rubbing the marks the rope had burned into her lower legs. “My husband wouldn’t understand.”
And that’s when she did it. Sore from having been held in one position for too long, Mary rolled her shoulders back and reached her arms above her head to stretch. She plaited her hands together, bent her elbows, and cupped the top of her head like a finger yarmulke. Without thinking, I jumped behind her, grabbed each of her elbows, and pulled them back hard, trying to make them touch. I recall wanting to mimic the Monarch butterfly I had seen resting on a flower in my garden earlier that week. Wings outspread, wings folded.
Her arm sockets cracked with a loud popping sound, and Mary screamed: a high-pitched, primal screech of both surprise and pain. I had not only dislocated both of her shoulders, but I had ruptured one of her coracobrachialis, the muscle running just under the top of the bicep where it attaches to the shoulder. Still holding her elbows together, I shifted my arms slightly from side to side and felt the new freedom with which her no-longer-tightly-tethered extremities could move. Mary buckled, made a terrible wail, and fainted, falling forward and back onto my bed, face-first.
In that moment, I saw my two choices as plain as day. I could carry Mary to my car and drive her to the hospital. I could pay for her medical treatment and maybe even throw her a few bucks in hush money. I was certain the service would never accept an order from me again, but that was to be expected.
I pondered that option for about two seconds, then chose the other one. I grabbed the rope from the floor and tied Mary’s elbows tightly together, weaving the rope in and out along her forearms until I could tie the ends together at her wrists. I gently turned her face so that she could still breathe—I’m not a monster, for God’s sake—and stood back to admire my work. From the side, her silhouette resembled that of a great white shark, her teepeed elbows the tip of an ominous fin. I grabbed my phone and took photo after photo from every angle: I had to commemorate this image—my Zarana had finally been achieved, and I hadn’t broken this one, at least not irreparably. My excitement almost reaching a climax, I climbed onto the bed and straddled her thighs, preparing to achieve what would surely be the greatest orgasm of my life, when Mary came to and began to moan. She opened her eyes and immediately began to cry, not because I was preparing to violate her but because she was in so much physical pain.
I lost my erection. I could not perform if I knew she was in pain. I was a rigger, but apparently, I wasn’t a sadist. Fuck. What a way to find out.
I climbed off of the bed and quickly began to untie her.
Before helping her into the wheelchair at the hospital I put five hundred dollars in her back pocket.
Her husband wouldn’t have understood.
IV. Rebekah
Have you heard of Fetlife? It’s a social media site on the border of the Dark Web for individuals with sexual fetishes. If it whips, chains, bullies, cowers, pees, peeps, poops, licks, diapers, or switch-hits, you’ll find it there. There are even in-person “club meetings” and game nights. Profiles are free, but you do have to run through a verification process. Nothing is too freakish, nothing is too vanilla. When I first joined, more as free advertising than to expand my social calendar, I saw my old Philosophy professor’s picture in a profile. If I had registered sooner, I might have scored an A in that class after all.
Now that I have a regular rotation of clientele, I’m not as desperate to glean new business, but I do still check my Fet mailbox every now and then. That’s how I met Jesse.
One of my best friends, Johnny, is an out gay man. He’s extremely handsome and as fabulous as they come, but he tells me that his biggest problem in the sex department is finding a compatible partner. He’s a self-described top, and for whatever reason, he finds himself attracted to men who, as he finds out later, are also tops. Two tops don’t jive: it’s like trying to attach two screws together. You need a nut, or everything falls apart. Although we operate in separate sexual toolboxes, albeit neighboring ones at that, Jesse and I are both tops. We could never connect as sexual partners. We did, however, thrive as friends once we learned to interact as a team.
Jesse had misunderstood my ad and booked a “meet and greet” over breakfast at a greasy diner near my apartment. I always required this public meeting for new clients: why waste my time with wishy-washers or endanger myself with potential kidnappers, rapists, or serial murderers? Not that I could tell if someone had the potential to kill someone by the way they dipped their toast into their eggs: I mean, I certainly didn’t recognize it in Jesse.
When I walked into O’Brien’s Corner at seven in the morning on a Tuesday, I knew right away which man was him, even though he didn’t look at all as I had imagined. He was tall, but not too tall, and very thin, but muscular in the upper-arm region. His hair was wavy and a little too long on top, so it swooped over his eyebrows like a ballet dancer. The strangest part of about him was his face—I knew he was in his mid-thirties, but his face was that of a thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy, complete with Cillian Murphy lips and freckles. I suspected he had made a concerted effort not to color the streaks of grey in his hair so that he wouldn’t be carded on a regular basis. Without them, he hardly looked old enough to drive a car.
I stood by the booth and offered my hand. “Morning,” I said. “J?”
He clasped my hand in his. “Good morning yourself, R.” His hand was smooth
and cool, like a doctor’s, and it too was sprinkled with tiny freckles.
I slid into the seat across from him. “What are we eating?”
He laughed, and his wet blue eyes danced with amusement. “A gal with an immediate appetite is always appreciated.” He brought his water glass to his lips and drank a healthy swallow, his lips grinning and his eyes still focused intently on me. I liked him immediately, which is good, because twisted friends are hard to find. They’re even harder to keep.
V. Jesse
My Mary Jane experience was one from which I learned a number of things.
1. Don’t do anything hurtful, damaging, or that might otherwise require a trip to the emergency room with someone to whom my credit card is tied
2. Don’t meet prostitutes in my own home or drive them anywhere in my own car, especially those with whom I wish to push the boundaries of flexibility
3. Don’t push those boundaries of flexibility with prostitutes without doping them up with pain-killers first
4. A hospital visit costs a fuckload of money without insurance
But most importantly,
5. I liked dislocating Mary’s shoulders. I liked seeing her arms pinned back in an unnatural posture more than I had enjoyed anything in my life thus far.
It took a while to master my new technique. I rented cheap but clean motel rooms on the other side of the city, then picked up a pro or two in a seedy bar not far away. I couldn’t risk transporting a girl in my own vehicle again, so walking to my room was a must. I swiped a few Fentanyl patches and a handful of the lozenges from the pharmacy at my work when I knew Stacy, whose two-pack-a-day smoke habit couldn’t keep her from slipping out of the back door every half hour or so, was careless enough to let the door swing open just long enough for me to stick a card in to block the auto lock feature while she escaped to shove another oral cancer welcome mat in front of her mouth. I cut the patches into quarters and sealed the pieces in a Ziploc baggie, then packed them alongside my ropes into an overnight duffel bag.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4 Page 9