Remittance Girl's Blog, page 14

Schism

[image error]I know what you see, when you look at me. A small, unremarkable middle-aged woman. Perhaps you think my lipstick is a little too red for my advanced years? Why doesn’t she, you think, wear something more appropriate? Perhaps you look a second time and are troubled by the arch of my dark eyebrow.  Perhaps it wears an unsuitable curve of arrogance or, worse, an obscene invitation? And what is that? Is that the sliver of a stocking top? The crook at the corner of the garish mouth? The slick, black click of a heel? The shadow of dark lace beneath my apposite blouse?

When he touches me, there, like that, with his voodoo concoction of casual ownership and arrogant defiance, how could I not be the most beautiful woman alive? That single gesture invalidates every other measure.

There are traces of my red lipstick, the lingering wetness of my mouth, still around the base of his cock. His fingers still bear the faint nutmeg scent of my cunt. My hips still have the fading red marks of where he grasped me. My labia are still swollen. My inner thighs still damp, sticky with the evidence of his desire.  There is no voice like his. No tongue so hypnotic, no language so ancient, or wise or raw. I will be gone long before you ever learn the grammar of it, if you ever do.

There, in your world of pleasure transactions, of sexual caricatures and autonomic genital reflex, you beaver away in your quest for the conquest of the easily conquered and the two-beer purchase of giggling pussy. And from what I can see, it’s never stopped challenging you.

Ours is another world, little boy. And, no matter how fast you grow up, you’ll never be big enough to step through its doors.

Sand Though Our Fingers: The Right of Writing

[image error]No other animal writes. It is, from a biological standpoint, a useless act.

Ask anyone who writes why they write and they will tell you: they write because they must. It’s a compulsion. Even when it feels difficult – impossible to do – the desire to do it is there, even if we often leave it unsatisfied. Many people who write anthropomorphize words as needing to escape, to get out. Not any particular set of words, not any particular story – although sometimes that, as well. But this mode of language that sits in the brain fermenting and requires expulsion from the body, onto the page.

Derrida, informed by thinkers before him, drew a big distinction between spoken and written language. Not only the very different way in which we construct communication when we write, but the act in itself.

Animals talk. To each other, to us. And I’m fairly convinced that some of them are story-tellers. Marousia convinced me that cats, for instance, are bards of battle. They bring home the poor dead thing they caught and re-enact, often in a non-linear fashion, the way they caught the thing. My cat, Seven, is infuriatingly vocal. He’ll sit beside me and meow for a span of 10 minutes. It took me a long time to understand that he wasn’t meowing for anything. He didn’t want food or water or affection or to be let out. He talks. He gets pissed off when I just echo him. He’s frustrated by the inter-species limitations. And it’s not just the lack of opposable thumbs. Chimps don’t write either.

But writing is not simply the communication of ideas, from one person to another. It is almost always an act of recollection, of a truth or a lie. Of fact or of a fiction. Spoken words are, unless you’re famous, ephemeral. They evaporate into the air. They are there and gone, but writing can be far more permanent.

We often speak before we think, but we almost never write before we think. The amount of mental investment in the construction of what will be written is hidden and mysterious. Some writers may be orderly in their mental construction of a story – they think about characters, about plot, about setting and conflict and all the structural underpinnings of story form, because they’ve been taught that stories have a structure. They have, to some extent, demystified the process. But if you’re a writer who cares about language, taking the story out and walking it around the page still has a mystery to it.

We get haunted by a phrase, we hone it, we interrogate it, we elaborate it. Unconsciously, all the wealth of its semiotic baggage weighs on our minds, pressing the juice from the fruit. Staining the words around it. The drips run in different directions, and our minds chase them down, furiously mapping the terrain around the runoff as it happens, shoring up the banks, trying to control the course. Failing. Succeeding. Both. And when one dribble dries up, we go back to the source and follow another. Or we glean something from the cracked river bed – enough to carry on.

And here’s the worst of all news: the more proficient a writer you become, the harder it becomes to blindly chase down the eruptions. The critic inside you gets spoilt and discerning. It demands that our map-drawing be better, our control of the flow be finer-tuned. Where once only a few words mattered, now it requires that every word be the right one. The gates to the groove don’t open as easily. We have our inspirations, but our critic shoots them down before we even begin. Too cliche, too unbelievable, too subjective, too, too, too. Whatever. Something bad.

Where once an idea would send us rushing to the keyboard erupt forth in glouts of naive exuberance, full of fire, authenticity and grammatical errors, now we demand that that idea prove itself to us before we even bother to press the power button.

But worst of all, we question the value of doing it at all. Writing doesn’t cure cancer, doesn’t feed a child, doesn’t rescue the victims of flooding. It seldom even makes money. What is the point? The world won’t miss my voice; it can do very well without this story. It will carry on just the same without it.

But, as humans, we don’t spend our every waking hour curing cancer, feeding the starving or saving people from disaster. We do a lot of ‘pointless’ things and don’t demand an accounting of the value of time expended in that way. Why writing?

I think it is because we know, instinctively, that writing is powerful. It lasts. It reflects who we are in a way that all those other wastes of time do not. I think the subconscious weight of that responsibility sets up a deep ambivalence to the act of writing.

We eat so much crap. We read, watch, speak, do so much crap.

So, I will ask you: are there too many intelligent voices in this world? Is clear insight so thick on the ground that we would not benefit from more? Have we so many truths and we cannot accommodate another?

No.

So, write. It is of grave importance that you do.

 

 

 

The Perfect Foreigner

We are all trapped.

Someone, somewhere – it doesn’t matter who, tarnished or bright as the sun – stands like a beacon in our memories for the time we got close.  Close to what? Just close. That’s all I know. Close. Very close.

You might remember it as endless nights of the best sex you ever had. or the only time you wore your own skin comfortably. Or it lingers like immanence, a sense of falling and falling and believing for that one time, that you would be caught.

I remember it like drowning, of being unable to take a breath and not caring.  The weight of him, the vastness of him, and his everywhereness. Like there was no part of the world that did not bear his fingerprint. All I saw, all I felt, all I knew waited for him to give it sense.

He is dead now, says the email from his wife.  She says she found my email address amongst his things and felt she should notify me of his suicide. I don’t reply. I can’t reply.

What is there to say? Sorry for your loss? I gave him back to you and you lost him? Twice? I offered him up, like Abraham, back to his source, and it could not contain him? I did what I thought was the right thing, but I was wrong? No. I left him the way I found him. Floating between worlds.  Angry that they weren’t bigger and bolder and on fire.

He taught me the beauty of a compromised existence. The saintliness of shadow. He taught me that hypocrisy was a Western concept and that walking the walk was how selfish people journeyed. He taught me, early on, how to leave him.

He had square hands, nimble hands, like colts ready to bolt. And skin that always smelled like the sea.  It was, he said, because his father had been a fisherman, will balls full of saltwater. That he would never be free of the stench of tuna blood.  And perhaps that was true. He was the colour of a sun dying on a calm sea.

I met him outside, on the windswept concrete of the Southbank. Smoking in the rain even though, in those days, he could have smoked in the lobby.  He said he was enjoying the cool, wet air. The BFI was running a Japanese film series. I never asked, but I assumed he was there being a good representative for the home team.

He was always a good foreigner. Always ready to be charmed and impressed and grateful for the threadbare hospitality of the English.  Always particular about his suits being just so. Neat and quiet and pressed to perfection. The same with his shoes. And his hair, clipped a half an inch from his skull.  Its contours catching the evenly distributed steel grey that never changed.

Kaito also taught me to endure a good, hard bite. Halfway between my neck and the curve of slope of my shoulder, where the muscle tightens under stress. He would sit behind me, arms around my waist, press his teeth into my skin and listen to me breathe out the pain. Like a kitten learns to endure its mother’s grip, he said.  Go limp. I have you and I will not let you go.

He taught me all about pain: its edge, its ache, and its pulsing voice that speaks into flesh. About how skin parted and knitted back together. He taught me to love fear, to lean into its curve, to let it dilate my pupils and make me breathless and wet.

He taught me the dignity of indignity, and the hundred and one inappropriate things with which I might be penetrated. Everything but his cock. That, he insisted, was for making children.

Once I whined about it, he tied me to the bed and asked me if I wanted a half-breed child. I said I didn’t want any child, so he fucked me with the case of his reading glasses.

“See?” he said, afterwards, perching the lenses smeared with my fluids on the tip of his nose.  “Stop asking for things you don’t really want.”

But I did want him. I thought it mattered. I thought perhaps he saved his cock for his wife, back in Japan. Maybe that was how he managed to make his way through the twilight between my world and his. Keeping to rules he’d never explain to me.

When Kaito got drunk, he would talk about never going back. About getting divorced and becoming English like Kazuo Ishiguro. As time went by, he did it more often, until I thought that all I needed to say was do it. Be with me.

That’s when I left and went so far I was sure he’d never find me. Because he’d taught me about duty. Because he’d taught me how to leave him.

Blow the House Down

[image error]He knows the hole. The gap, the lack, the wound that will not heal, the deafening howl that will not be stilled.  He knows the whole for its absence.  For its lie. The body’s ache, the cock’s strain. And all the counterfeit promises that can be whispered to it. This is it. This is the real thing. This is enough. She is enough. She will be everything. She will eclipse the stark noon of desire.

Each time he lets his body sucker him into the false hope of her fleshy house, he leaves wanting to burn it down.  Because he knew before he entered her. And, once again, he has done it anyway.

There is no Woman, only phantasms of comfort or ecstasy, innocence or abomination. Sometimes all at once. Too much and still not enough.

Hence the wrecking ball.

Lifeboats: The Myth of the Safety of Sameness

[image error]I just finished reading and commenting on The Good Men Project article Who Is In Your Rowboat? by Dale Thomas Vaughn. He’s reportedly vaunted as “a man of quality and one of the leaders of men of quality” by best-selling author and top feminist attorney Gloria Allred” which only reminds me why I have such a problem with most ‘feminists’ too.

Here’s the premise, a common meme: “Imagine you have a life rowboat with room for about 6 other guys – You need 6 guys who you can count on. Who is in your rowboat?”

I don’t have a problem with his basic premise, that it is important to identify the strong, brave, ethical, empathetic, wise people in your life and dispense with the flakes, bloodsuckers, users and unengaged. I agree with that, and the older I get, the more brutal I am with the scalpel.

But underlying his article is a strong, exclusionary and, to my mind, misleading message: if you’re a man, a REAL man, the 6 others in your life boat need to be men. Why just guys? What is wrong with a mixed gender rowboat? What about a rowboat with a trans person aboard? Why on earth would any intelligent person place their trust on people based on gender?

The myth of the ‘band of brothers’ is very old and powerful. It transcends culture, too. All Viking guys together! All vestal virgin sistas together! Boo-ya. I’d like to have a go at taking the knife of critique to this.

Historically speaking, it is men who destroy, betray, and undermine men, not women. Generally speaking, it wasn’t women who decided to go to war, drafted you or sent you there. Generally, women didn’t enslave you, or construct economic systems that have ensured your permanent poverty. On a personal basis, yes, your mother might have let you down. Your girlfriend might have cheated on you, but count the number of times you’ve been fucked over by your own gender and I will bet the opposite sex comes out looking pretty good.

It’s the same for women. It’s not, generally speaking, men who make you feel physically inadequate or exclude you from a sport’s team, or took you to some doctor in Cairo and let them slice off your clitoris. It’s other women.

I’m not saying that people don’t find support in the company of their own gender. Nor am I denying the reality of inter-gender nastiness. What I’m saying is that, in the grand scheme of things, the ones who fuck you over… they’re not any specific gender. They were just rotten people. Their gender is irrelevant.

One of the reasons I think these gender ‘gurus’ (male or female) focus so much on celebrating the ‘being with your own kind’ crap is because they haven’t gotten past the myth that sexual attraction makes people unreliable. We’re back to the idea that, if your dick is hard or your pussy’s wet, you no longer exercise good judgement.

The Greeks had no issue with this. In fact, one of the reasons for the celebration of homosexual love in Ancient Greece involved the fact that, if you went into battle with your lover, you were more likely to be heroic. You wouldn’t want your lover to see you in the grips of cowardice.

So, I’d like to unpack this: why on earth would I want to fuck anyone I considered unreliable, flaky, weak, stupid or unprincipled? And if I like this person enough to let them fuck me, why wouldn’t I trust them to have my back in a fight?

My lifeboat is has a mix of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and philosophies. There are people in my lifeboat I want to fuck and some I don’t. That doesn’t make it a weak lifeboat. It means I have the resource of a larger range of life-experiences, a wealth of wisdom, I have the counsel of people who see the world with different eyes, whose values have been forged in other furnaces, and some hankie pankie, too. It’s not a sisterhood, or a brotherhood. It’s the very best I can find.

 

 

 

 

 

Writing The Erotic Phenomenologically

You know how you’ll go for months, even years, without thinking about something and then you’ll stumble across it three times in a day? Yeah.

One of the biggest problems with being a writer is language. Yes, it happens to be the tool we work with, too, but never the less, there is an aspect to language that gets in the way, especially when it comes to the description of bodily and emotional experience. Language isn’t just a tool for communicating through from one person to another. It acts as an organizing framework, and more importantly as a tool of abstraction. This is particularly true when it comes to the erotic.

We use a lot of slang, acronyms and labels when it comes to sex. We do for other things too, for the sake of convenience and offering a quick reference to others. But I suspect part of our propensity for using it when it comes to sex is society’s ambivalent feelings about it. BDSM, CFNM, S&M, D/s, CP, bondage, anal, bukakke, F/F and M/M, bi, poly, trans, WS, ad nauseum. Yes, they are convenient classifiers and efficient communicators of erotic abstractions, but the last thing you want when sinking into an erotic story is abstraction. You want visceral, immersive detail. You don’t want a sequence of events either, diarized and organized like a song list. You want an approximation of the way being in an erotic state blurs sequence and time. Nor is analytical writing all that erotic (and this is MY big sin). There’s a difference between exploration and analysis. One discovers, the other attempts to rationalize and make meaning what has been discovered. And rationalization is the enemy of the embodied moment.

So, I’d like to introduce you, to those who are not familiar with it, to a method of examining and understanding the lived experience called phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. Essentially, it emerged as a refutation of Descartes proposal that everything could be known empirically, objectively. Hegel said… bullshit. Objectivity doesn’t acknowledge the rich data involved in the subjective experience. Through its development as a method of inquiry, phenomenology evolved a concept called ‘thick description’. It sought to acknowledge the legitimacy and the value of singular, subjective experiences, arguing that if you gather enough of them together, and compare them, you can come to another, richer and more nuanced understanding of truth.

Back at the language ranch, we have a problem. Bondage is getting tied up, right? Great, let’s talk cuffs and rope and knots. Let’s show pictures of people chained to a St. Andrew’s cross. For fetishist, this could be arousing, because they have already been to ‘bondage land’ and the objective language, and factual descriptions trigger memories of lived experience. But for anyone else… meh, boring.

Phenomenology developed into a methodological approach to describing intimate human experience without being reductive about it. One of the earliest uses of phenomenological methodology was to attempt to understand what was going on with people who had mystical and religious experiences. Before you scoff at it, think about it for a moment. Put whatever prejudices you have aside. Think about how counting the number of times a person prayed, or meditated, or how long they did it, and what position they did it in… how would that even begin to give you an idea of what their interior experience was like? Another early use of phenomenological methods involved studying nursing experience. Sure, you can count nurses, enumerate their ward rounds, use a list to record each procedure they performed and no matter how detailed you were in your records, what the hell does that tell you about what it feels like to be a nurse, to be a caregiver? Or to be nursed? How do you get to the meat, the ethos, the lived reality of what it is to care, physically, emotionally, for a sick person?

You throw away all your assumptions about what you think you know. You stop using words that abstract the topic. You don’t ask the person to tell you what they do; you ask them how it feels and what’s it like. Metaphors can play a huge part in the phenomenological investigative process because in order for people to construct metaphors, they are forced to think about detailed actuality, and whether one thing is ‘actually’ like something else. In picking and judging the metaphor to be apt, they have to think about it with precision and care.

Here, courtesy of a very nice introductory lecture on phenomenology, are the principles of its research approach:

Don’t test hypotheses – This means pretend you don’t know anything about this. Pretend you’re a complete virgin about this. Drop all your preconceptions, even if you have experience, don’t assume commonality. And don’t assume your reader knows anything.


Don’t use a theoretical model to determine the question. “PRIMACY OF THE LIFE-WORLD” means that our approach to understanding is “pre-theoretical.” (Yes, in a sense of course this is a contradiction because we are describing a theory. But the theory includes methods to minimize its impact on The nature of the data obtained.) There is a lot of jargon going on here, but basically don’t bring any political baggage with you. You’re a feminist, you’re queer positive, you’re a practitioner of Safe, Sane and Consensual BDSM – dump it. Be prepared to accept a subject reality where your own political values don’t have a place. Don’t judge, just accept, no matter how repulsive you may think it is. If you judge, you limit your ability to know. Period.  Be prepared for your writing to take you places you don’t feel comfortable and that don’t accord with your schema of the universe.
Try to come as close as you can to understanding the experiences being lived by the participants as they do. Understanding is not sanction. Your truth doesn’t need to accord with their truth. There is no right or wrong in this process. Just new understanding.


There is no claim that phenomenological results are predictive or replicable. Several studies that probe the same phenomenon may discover similar meanings, each described from a unique perspective. These perspectives may also lead to the discovery of new and different meanings. Every experience is true to the person who experiences it in that moment. It doesn’t need to make sense. It doesn’t need to share common ground with anyone else’s experience. It is exactly what it is. No more, no less.

This list describes a research process in which the phenomenological researcher is eliciting, asking for details, encouraging another party to give over subjective information, but this works surprisingly well for characters, and in fact, there is a branch of the discipline called Individual Phenomenology, which requires a lot of discipline, honesty and introspection but, in essence, is a phenomenological interrogation of the self.

How does this translate into writing the erotic phenomenologically?  It’s probably better if I give you an example.

I want to write about a blow job. The first thing I want to do is try to forget I’ve ever given one. I’m going to focus on how I feel in my body, on texture, on how my jaw feels opening wide enough to fit this cockhead, what my lips do as I take it in, the sensation of the skin of the shaft on my tongue, how am I breathing as I do it, when I close my mouth around it, what is the sensation, the fullness, the pressure, the smell, the taste of skin, of precum. Is he circumcized or not? How does that feel. Don’t compare. Just the one, singular experience of it. When I suck, what is it like, find a really true metaphor, something not even oral. Open your eyes, what do you see. Does he put his hand on your head, how does that feel, what emotions does it bring up? What does it sound like. Don’t give me the cliche porn meme. Give me a simile, a metaphor that really truly describes the sound. Does he move? How does that feel? What sensations or emotions does that evoke?  Can you hear your own breath? His? What does it mean to you in your body? How does it reverberate there?

Don’t tell me what you don’t or can’t know. Don’t tell me how he feels. Even if you have a cock and know what a blow job feels like, you only know what it feels like to you, not to him. Don’t make assumptions that I, as a reader, have ever given anyone a blow job. Tell me everything that you experience. Only that.

Writing phenomenologically tends to produce incredibly deep, very immediate erotica. Because in avoiding assumptions, you tend to touch on things that hit in a very real, raw and intimate place for the reader. You’re not relaying your or your character’s experience, you are unpacking it, unpeeling it, bringing it down to the level of visceral experience. This is the only blow job in the world. One singluar, experience of sucking a cock. For the time that you’re writing it, there is no other and I need you to record this singular event for posterity and whatever you leave out will be lost forever. And don’t be shy to get poetic. Some of the best phenomenological writing is incredibly poetic.

Be warned, it also ends up swelling your word-count astronomically. You can get totally lost in the process. And that’s when you know… you’re in the groove.

If you’d like to give it a try, good luck! And post a link in the comment area if you’d like to share your experiment.

 

 

 

 

Reflections on “On A Very Dry Afternoon in Early Summer”

[image error]Doing this PhD has taught me to be a lot more reflective about how I write, what my goals are in writing any given story, what theory might inform it, and how I might situate the story in relation to other creative writing in the genre, both in form, and in content.

Genre

Erotica is a genre that serves many agendas. From a genteel label for written porn, the sole purpose of which is to facilitate fantasy during masturbation or spice up a couple’s sex life, to a story – of any genre; mystery, romance, fantasy, sci-fi – that contains a number of explicit descriptions of sex written in such a way as to invite the reader’s sexual arousal in those portions of the text, to a literary effort to examine the human condition as a whole through the lens of erotic desire.

I have situated this particular story, and most of the stories I write, in the third camp. There isn’t  a lot of explicit sex in the story, and that sex might or might not be arousing to any given reader, but the characters are both trapped in their quests to understand how sex has altered their lives and formed their characters. The sex in the story is important, but it is not an end in itself. It is a way of knowing, of understanding things that were not known before.

I wrote this piece with an eye to the strange ambivalence exhibited by the ‘legitimate’ erotica publishing world when it comes to writing about rape, and rape fantasy, in the genre. There is excellent and recent research indicating that at least 40% of women have ‘rape fantasies’, and yet with few exceptions, almost no ‘respected’ erotica editor or publisher will accept material that addresses this. It is left to self-publishers and small e-presses of questionable repute to do so. Some try to handle the subject with intelligence and care; others flagrantly exploit the tabooness of the subject. I intentionally set out to reveal that hypocrisy; to write a piece that could not be said to be exploitative of the reality of rape, and yet still acknowledged that its fantasy counterpart held great erotic power.

Form

Although a short story, clocking about 6,600 words, I decided to take a rather more novelistic approach to this piece. Usually, I stick to a single POV in a short story, and although I’ve encountered shorts that pulled off multiple POVs well, usually I find them disorienting. I chose, in this story to take advantage of that very sense of disorientation for the reader. I wanted to interrupt what I perceive, under the veneer of political correctness, as rigidly gendered divisions on the subject of rape.  Consequently, the story is cut into mini-chapters and these are narrated by both the male and female characters.  Moreover, the narrative is non-linear. Finally, I shift tense to purposefully distinguish between reflection or projection vs embodied experience. Although my non-writer-readers might not consciously identify the tense or POV changes, I’m hoping that it will imbue the story with a sense of staggering, of unsettledness, of dislocation. This isn’t a safe subject. I wanted them to feel that, viscerally.

Theory

I won’t go into this in any depth here, because I don’t want to pull you into my murky miasma of Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, this story focuses on the impossibility of the desires of two people. The jouissance of the female character has two aspects: one overt and one implicit. Her desire to know that she’s a fighter as a way of constituting her sense of self-value is an impossible one. There is no reconstituting the past. She doesn’t get exactly what she wants, she gets the understanding that she is what she determines herself to be. The implicit jouissance is a desire to be asked forgiveness and to give it.You have to believe you have value as a person in order to believe you can grant forgiveness. She can never get this off the person who raped her. So her desire is only met symbolically through her lover and by the sequence of events she lives through in the story. The jouissance of the male character is also twofold. The first is the impossibility of knowing that one possesses eternal, unconditional love (it’s not that he can’t have it, it’s that his knowledge that he has it will always be unstable. This gets into the Lacanian concept of the castration complex and the induction into the Symbolic order. Blah, blah, blah… I’ll spare you.) and the problematic and reflexive spectre of forgiveness. It is not enough to have forgiveness given to you, you must believe you deserve it in order to accept it and have it mean anything.

Subject

In the interest of honesty and integrity, I need to make my association with this subject clear; like one in four women (one in three, according to the George Mason study), I have been raped. What I’d like to make clear is that a) it was not a violent rape and b) I have not suffered any debilitating long-term effects from it. I don’t know where this puts me on the continuum of women who’ve been raped. What I do know is that I’ve made some people, specifically certain anti-rape activists, very angry for saying so. I have perceived, rightly or wrongly, that there is an agenda in certain circles to not only condemn rape and insist on a zero tolerance of it (something I absolutely agree with) but also to paint it as the most heinous of all crimes (something I don’t agree with). Moreover, I feel that, as important as it is to acknowledge the undeniable suffering and damage that can be caused by the experience, the desire to have rape universally condemned as an atrocity can also lead to those who have experienced it feeling that they are victims for life. That this is something no woman should ever be able to overcome and thrive beyond it. You may have noticed that I do not use the word ‘victim’ and I avoid it purposefully.

Within our culture, the status of the victim is one of unempowerment. That’s not fair, and hopefully it will change, but at the moment, the perception of being a victim is to be someone who has had their agency taken away. And to remain a ‘victim’ is to renounce agency forever. I acknowledge that the aim of the anti-rape movement is to empower survivors of rape to demand justice, to seek legal retribution, to have their experiences acknowledged and condemned, but if that requires people who have been raped to remain in a perpetual state of victim-hood for the purpose of an agenda, I have a problem with that.

So, I wanted to examine the issue of rape from a number of angles.

First, this wasn’t an attempt to write the story of every person who has experienced rape, just one. I wanted to explore what is left behind in memory, what the lingering effects might be. In specific, I wanted to deal with the issue of not fighting and how the cliche of a woman who ‘gives in’ affects their sense of self. I purposely chose a lasting psychological effect that did not pertain to me (my lasting effect is a hair-trigger suspicion of men who are ‘too handsome’ by my estimation). Women who do not fight their rapists are often left with a sense of guilt, a sense of impotence, a worry that they did not love themselves enough to fight. This is made worse by not only legal standards (which tend to use strong resistance as proof of non-consent) but also by public perception and recent research. A large meta-study done by Kleck & Tark found that resisting rape is surprisingly effective in deterring its completion. I wanted also to challenge the perception that the long-term effects of rape are predominantly sexual. They can have sexual components, but they are often more life-encompassing.

I was also very interested in tackling the Dworkian proposition that all men are rapists. She actually never said that, but she implied it often. She did say “Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” I find this insulting both to the seducer and the seduced. The fact that most men have penises and could, if they desired, rape cannot be extrapolated into a statement that they are rapists, or even potential rapists. I’m pretty sure that many men do not have the volitional capacity to rape. Some do, and consciously decide to never rape. Some men, like some women, fantasize about it. It is very hard to get numbers on this for men. I’ve only found one relatively old study on this which puts the number at 36%. The subject has become so politicized today, I have my suspicions about anyone’s ability to get honest responses.

Underlying the story is an interest in the tension between the real, visceral act of rape and the metaphors we’ve made of it in almost every culture on earth. It is a signifier with many signifieds: of theft, of ownership, of territorial sovereignty, of ravishment, of lust, of powerlessness and of blamelessness to name just a few. Those metaphors, I believe, play an enormous part in why rape plays the role it does in our (self-generated) sexual fantasies. It may manifest itself in fantasy as the act of rape, but it has a multitude of meanings. Many of them very distant from its ugly, brutal reality.

I was interested in exploring the gap between fantasy and the act of rape, if it could ever be possible to do it with consent. From a strictly logical perspective, if there is consent, then it isn’t rape. But I wanted to examine two things that take humans past the boundaries of logical argumentation: the suspension of disbelief in roleplay and the reality of the lived experience in the moment. I had an interest in the progressive pattern of thinking that might allow a moral, ethical man to do this. I was interested in the abstraction and dehumanization process and how it would affect a man’s sense of himself to go there. I owe a debt of gratitude to a specific man who gave me insight into this, and it is an unfortunate reality that to name him and thank him publicly might have negative fallout for him. He knows who he is. I thank you.

I’d also like to thank others who have told me their stories: women who sought to reenact their own rape in an attempt to find some resolution or some answers to questions that have haunted them; couples who have indulged in this type of roleplay for erotic/cathartic reasons; and others.

Conclusion

The freedom of fiction is its capacity to be a site where anything can be explored. Where we get to play with ideas on the safety of the page. This was probably the most difficult story I’ve ever written, because I was aware of a personal need to explore the scenario while being, in my own estimation, a responsible writer.

I know there will be people who are offended by this piece. I know some people will feel the end  somehow justifies rape.

My response is that I feel I have satisfied my own ethical standards. The story comes with a clear ‘trigger warning’ at the top, I do not believe I’ve been irresponsible or exploitative of the subject, and I adamantly dispute that any piece of fiction could or would ‘justify’ anything, ever. My stories are fictions, they are not a guide for life, a how-to manual or a recommendation for how to cope with the after-effects of rape.

If you have been raped, you should seek competent psychological care. There are no answers for you in fiction. I’m sorry.

On A Very Dry Afternoon in Early Summer

Trigger Warning: This story explores the subject of consensual non-consent, memory, and rape. It is meant to be disturbing, but not exploitative. Please exercise your good sense. Do not read it if you feel this sort of subject matter would affect you adversely.

Contemplation

It was easy to want her, to picture himself pinning her with the weight of his body, feeling her struggle beneath him, spreading her unwilling thighs, forcing his cock into her, trespassing where she no longer wanted him and not caring that she didn’t. Delighting in the fact that he gave her no choice. That part was easy.

All it took was imagining her betrayal; the casual, quotidian butchery people did to each other all the time. No matter how open he’d made himself to her, or how much she’d shown herself to him, or how he’d forced himself to trust her, to risk letting her all the way in, all it took was a change of her heart. Someone she cared for more than she cared for him. She could do it.

This was the acid he poured onto his hesitation.

It was just as easy to imagine ways to hurt her.  Words and acts that would wound her, frighten her, make her feel like she was nothing. Make her regret even contemplating the act of destroying him.

She’d cry and she’d beg and she’d try to reason with him, but he could shut his ears to all that. After all, wasn’t this the same woman, the same voice that promised to love him forever? The one who swore she’d always belong to him? All the shit lovers told each other when they were coming and regretted once they’d showered?

All this was what he used as fuel for his intentions. As the clock ticked down to the zero hour, he revisited this part of himself  -  the cynic, the bitter, misused monster he kept in the closet.

The hard part was having any confidence that he could translate fantasy into fact.  In his fantasy, she was a shell. She looked the same, sounded the same, felt the same, but somehow it was all attenuated.  It would be different, he was sure, in the flesh.

Harder still was convincing himself that she would ever forgive him, no matter how many assurances she gave him. How could she know herself that well? How could anyone? If he was to be honest with himself and step into her shoes, he could not say with certainly that he could do the same.

But the hardest part of all was believing that he would deserve to be forgiven.

Inquisition

“What percentage of men fantasize about raping a woman?” I had asked.

“Men who rape, or just fantasize about it? There’s a big difference.”

“Men who just fantasize about it.”

He was silent as he thought. “I don’t have a clue. More than anyone’s comfortable admitting, I’d guess.”

“Wild guess?”

He looked up from his desk and shrugged. “I really don’t know.”

“Do you fantasize about it?”

“That’s not a fair question.”

I pulled out the chair in front of his desk and sat down. “Why? Because someone raped me?”

“Well, yes. That, and you’re asking in the specific. Do you really want to know the answer?”  He moved a neat pile of papers from one side of his desk to the other, uselessly, to do something. “Don’t set a trap for me.”

I pulled up my knees, wrapped my arms around them, and rested my chin. “It’s not a trap. I swear.”

“Really want an answer? Think. Please, think fucking carefully.”

I did think -  a long time. Then I came around his desk, slid into his lap and leaned my head on his shoulder.  “I do want to know. Although your reluctance is pretty damn eloquent.”

“Then you’ve got your answer.”

I had my answer. And I felt him loosen his arms, as if waiting for me to get up and leave, but I didn’t.

“It’s what I keep the tightest leash on. I’d never do it. But I’ve fantasized about it,” he offered.

“Often?”

“Not often, but when I do, it’s hot.”

“Why’s it so hot?”

He jostled me as he shrugged again. “Because it’s so wrong.”

“Is she some abstract woman or someone you know?”

“Either. Both. Depends on my mood.”

I turned in his lap and eyed him. “Me?” He met my gaze but said nothing. “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear.”

He gave me a pained, irritated look and pulled me back against him, but it was gentle, tentative. “Why are you asking this?”

I thought about trying to explain and knew it would make no sense to him. It hardly made sense to me. “Please, just tell me.”

He stroked my hair off my forehead. Something I’d only ever seen parents do to children. “Yes.”

“Is it violent?”

“A little. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s not.”

“Do you kill me?”

“What the fuck?” He stiffened, pulled back and stared at me. “Jesus, no.”

“Sorry. I just…” I grinned, embarrassed. “I fantasize about all sorts of awful stuff. I assumed everyone does.”

Brows furrowed, he looked at me as if I were a disappointingly slow child. “You wouldn’t be nearly as much fun dead.”

It was an attempt to turn the conversation, to get me to say something silly back. I considered a quip about zombie sex, but resolved to stick my course.  “Do I fight?”

He did his best to keep a straight face, but the smile won. “Oh yeah. You fight. You fight hard.”

Recollection

People describe memory as one long, detailed film, but it’s nothing like that. Sometimes it’s a fairy tale you tell yourself just to knock the past into some kind of shape that will fit in a box so you can store it away. Sometimes, it’s as if you’re telling the story of someone else: an earlier version of you, almost unrecognizable now; a stranger with your face and your name, but alien and broken. Mostly, it’s just a series of tiny moving clips, with sound and colour and smell and feeling. With chunks missing in between, as if someone forgot to hit the record button.

We were sitting at the bottom of the garden at my house, on a very dry afternoon in early summer, just before school let out. I had bruises on my shins from field hockey and was ashamed of them. The faded purples and blues marked the skin of my shins, and was worried that he’d see them too and think them ugly.

He was so handsome, I kept telling myself to look ahead, look ahead over the terrace wall to the burned bristle of the slopes beyond, so he wouldn’t catch me staring.  I felt so lucky. Lucky that he’d noticed me. Lucky that he’d talked to me. Lucky that he’d held my hand and kissed me in the hallway at school. Lucky that he’d offered me a ride home on his bike.

We sat on the stone garden wall, looking down the hillside, drinking iced tea I’d made myself because my parents were out and I wanted to impress him, until he finished his and reached for my hand. None of the boys I’d known had been confident the way he was. On the way home, with the hot, dry, salty air streaming through my hair, he’d reached back and pulled my arm around his waist. And this gesture was just like that one. As if all the limbs in the world belonged to him.

Then we were kissing beside the pool on a pile of faded blue lounger cushions covered in dry eucalyptus leaves, breaking up and prickling under my shoulders and my thighs. He was on top of me, his hips pressing into mine, kneeing my legs apart and it hurt. Like his fingers digging into the nothing swell of my non-existent breast. That’s when he kept on kissing me, after I’d stopped. I could smell his spit on my mouth, and his ragged breaths.

He was hurting me, pressing the air out of me, bruising my bony hips with his, yanking the hem of my dress up my body.  I didn’t feel lucky anymore. And he had ceased to be handsome.

“No. Stop that. It hurts.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll like it.”

I was crying and trying to push him off, or squirm out from under him. Both at the same time.  He was laughing and pushing my legs open with his hand, his fingers in my crotch, nails scratching me as he tried to pull my panties out of the way.  The cotton stretched and burned my skin.

I remember sobbing, saying, “I thought you liked me,” and knowing then how pathetically immature it sounded, and that he had never liked me. He’d just pretended so he could hurt me, like this.

That -  the dreadful sense of my own stupidity,  the recognition of my inane hopefulness -  that’s what broke me. That’s when I stopped fighting.

I don’t remember how he got his cock inside me.  As if some all-powerful deity edited that bit out. All I remember is that I turned my head and looked at the long leaves, like curved, silvery daggers, floating on the surface of the pool’s blue water, and thinking this hurts. It shouldn’t hurt like this. I remember my fisted hands aching.  I remember he finished and pulled out of me and tugged my dress down over my hips.

Now all I want to know is that I could not be broken with such appalling ease. I want to know that I would find myself of greater worth.  I want to know I’d fight.

Proposition

Two weeks later, she brought it up at dinner. “Remember what we talked about a while ago? About rape?”

Christ, not this again. What was going on with her? He swallowed and put his fork down carefully. “Fantasy. Rape fantasy.”

“Yes.”

He leaned his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers, and propped his chin on them. In the years they’d been together, they’d had all sorts of conversations and all sorts of sex. She wasn’t inhibited or unadventurous. There were times when she wanted it rough and he’d been happy to oblige. Then she went through phases of almost unworldly tenderness. He’d always been fairly open about what turned him on, but he knew about her past. And, with that in mind, he’d stayed well away from anything that even hinted at non-consent. He had no idea how to handle her fixation on this particular subject, and it felt like a set up. Like she was looking for something to be upset about. “And you’ve decided I’m a psychopath?”

“You’re not a psychopath,” she said dismissively.

“How do you know?”

“Psychopaths don’t have ethics or empathy.”

“They’re pretty good at faking it, though.”

“So are a lot of politicians.  Are they all psychopaths?”

“Possibly,” he said, but he smiled and felt his shoulders unlock. “Look, the fantasies are fantasies. I’m not particularly proud of them, but you asked and I answered truthfully.  And you… well, you’ve got some personal history there, so I get that it’s a minefield for you. But everyone has fantasies they’d never act on and…”  He stopped, tasting his own defensiveness. “What a minute. Why are you bringing this up again?”

She prodded the fish on her plate with her fork, took a sip of wine and swallowed. “I need to know that I’d fight if I got raped again.”

“Are you expecting that to happen anytime soon?” An irrational anger tightened his chest.

“No. But it could. I just want to know. That’s all.”

“You would fight. Take my word for it.”

“I wish I could. But I can’t.  I didn’t. You know? I didn’t and, well, it’s bothered me for a long time. He could have done anything. He could have killed me and I would have just let it happen.”

He fought down the hair-trigger rage that flamed up whenever he was forced to confront the fact that some prick had done this to her.  He forced himself to speak calmly. “You were young. And frightened. And traumatized.”

She shook her head. “No. You don’t understand. Maybe you can’t. Maybe men just can’t.”

“Don’t…” he almost lost it.  This ‘men don’t understand shit’ made him livid. Women didn’t understand either. She had no idea how badly he wanted, if it were remotely possible, to track the cocksucking asswipe down and beat him to death with a blunt object. He took another deep breath, reached for the bottle of wine and refilled her glass. “Look, I’m certainly not going to understand if you don’t explain it.”

“Oh, and this is lubricant?” she said, taking another swig.

He inclined his head and shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

“Okay.”

“No, wait.” Standing up, he grabbed the wine, and held out his hand. “Come sit with me.”

Nestled up next to him on the sofa, he wrapped an arm around her small shoulders, and resolved to listen without losing his temper. “Now, explain it.”

“It’s not the rape. It’s not really about what he did to me anymore. It hasn’t been for a long, long time.”

“Then?”

“It’s about what I didn’t do. That’s what eats away at me. It does. You have no idea how it does. Every time I think I’m strong, that I won’t take shit, that I take the measure of myself, it comes back to haunt me. It’s robbing me of something important.”

“So, what can I do?”

“I want to know that I’m not that person now,” she muttered.

“Wait a minute.” He moved and cupped her chin in his hand, forcing her to face him. “What are you asking me?”

He noticed then that she hadn’t been sleeping. There were faintly bruised half moons beneath her eyes.  Maybe she was about to cry.  She didn’t do it often, but when she did, it distracted him. Part of him felt her pain and the other part licked his lips.  She thought this was all about her, but it wasn’t. And, if he were honest, he knew what she wanted. It just scared the fuck out of him.

“Ah, you can’t say it can you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because if you say it, then that changes everything, doesn’t it? Then…” he pursed his lips and nodded. “If you ask me to, then it’s not rape.”

“Right.”

Her mistake, although he wasn’t going to tell her, was sophistry. Consent was more and less than words. She was trying to find logic to fit her needs.  This was a game of words, and she’d realize it soon enough. But it was a selfish game.

“Assuming what you are not asking was even possible, has it occurred to you that this might affect me?”

She had the grace to look like the floor had dropped out from under her. She pulled her chin from his grasp and leaned her forehead his shoulder.  “Oh.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” He gave her a while to think that one through.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Accepted.  But just to be crystal clear: what happens if I do? If I agree to go down this road with you, if I do what you won’t ask me to do, what will that make me? How real is real? Where’s the safe word? Where are your limits? Where the fuck are mine?” He could feel the anger, the unfairness of the situation gnaw at his innards. Breathing deep, he went on: “Because, honestly, I have no idea. What if I can’t stand what I find out about myself while you’re busy finding how empowered you are?”

She groaned against his shirt. “Jesus, okay. Forget it.”

What he couldn’t find a way to tell her was that she’d unwittingly stuck her finger into a huge, festering wound. Part of him did indeed want to know just how cruel he had the capacity to be, where he would draw the line and whether what he fantasized about would exile him, irredeemably, from his own sense of humanity.  But he’d lived with that puzzle for years. He’d settled into a bearable truce with his uglier urges. There were things you just didn’t bring into the light. And answers you could forgo. For all his darkness, one doubt burned. Not as containable as any of others.

“Here’s what worries me most: after you’ve found out what a courageous, fighting, spitting, biting little firebrand you are, after you put up a brave but ultimately useless defense, because – make no mistake – no matter how hard you fight me I will have you, how are we going to find our way back from that?”

For a long time, she didn’t answer him.  Finally, she pulled herself apart from him and sat forward, nodding as if she’d settled on something in her own mind. ” And those things, they’re all things you’d rather not know.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Initiation

Torn between fear and determination, her glances are furtive, hyper-vigilant. Her control slips. Her smile fails as the muscles draw it out in uneven little jerks. It’s a stuttered petition of a smile. A slightly manic, are-we-really-going-to-jump-off-this-cliff smile.

It’s so easy to see her mind’s gears churning, gripping, catching, and slipping. Her pulse is a moth trapped beneath the skin under her jaw, caged in taut tendon. But she’s here, despite her misgivings.  And jumping off this particular cliff was more her idea as his.

“It’s today, right?” she asks.

“Yes. Today.”

“Has it started yet?”

“Not yet.” He lies, watching the tension leave her posture.

In a way, it started the moment she began to talk about it.  The moment he understood exactly what she was asking.  He’s been chewing on time for days.

She wants it neat and clean. The uncertainty disorients her, refuses her a sense of order, a notion of what to expect and how to plan for it. This is a part of her she rarely shows: her equilibrium askew, her capacity to analyze and rationalize – so much a part of how she makes sense of the world – temporarily disabled.

They have agreed to suspend disbelief and enter into a fiction. They’ve given each other formal assurances of unconditional forgiveness. But he can’t, for all her promises, truly trust her. In a way, that’s part of the thrill – the not being sure. The risk of everything they have. If it blows up, it will blow up big.

“Then I’m going to sit down outside and do a bit of editing.”

“You do that. I’ve got some things to finish up here.”

With the tips of her fingers, she combs through the hair at his temple and kisses his forehead.  Her skin gives off the scent of the soap she uses. He allows the gesture – that familiar act of affection – to curdle into patronizing condescension. He takes umbrage and it tastes sharp and sweet.

Still, he forces himself to respond as he always does, with a playful slap on her ass.  Perhaps not quite as gentle as usual but, if she feels the sting of it, she doesn’t let on.

He swivels his study chair to watch her pace back down the shadowed hallway on bare feet.  Her shoulder blades tenting the white ribbed tank top, her dark grey jogging pants loose on her hips, her hair plaited into a careless braid.  It sways, a counterpoint.

“Whore.” He forms the word without speaking it.

He’s not going to give her the comfort of choosing the time or the place. Nor the dignity of what state she’s in when he takes her. He’s going to rob her of all of that and more.

Confession

The day promises to be hot, but the air still hold the cool tang of early, verdant shadows.  As hard as I try to concentrate on the document, the words squirm and slip like flatworms in silt. I make inane notations, cross them out, rewrite, recross them, and glance up at the house for the fifth time.

There are questions I haven’t had the courage to ask him for dread of the answers.  For fear he will read me too well and give me the answers he believes I want. There is a continuum of cruelty, from the petty to the murderous. I don’t know his limits. Or my own.

Everyone has ghosts. He has many. I only a few, but they are debilitating things. They gnaw at the stuff I think I’m made of. They despoil all the triumph of my dreams and poison my victories.

Fear fascinates me like a cobra fascinates its prey.  Once terror locked me, turned me into an absence. Like Lot’s Wife, into a pillar of salt.  And for years, each time I have glanced over the shoulder of memory, it did the same. Where had the animal inside me gone? The instinct to protect myself evaporated in a moment. My ability to think with clarity, to understand what was unfolding, to strategize, all gone. Even the most basic impulse to push, to bite, to kick, to fight, to curse deserted me.  I’d been a victim and, ever since, I’ve lived with the specter that I could be one again, in the blink of an eye.

I’ve spent my life seeking out fear before it found me.  Down dark alleys, in the bad parts of town, in cholera camps and street riots and the close, sweat-scented bedrooms of strangers. In the harness of a parachute and at the end of a bungee cord. Whatever it was, if it scared me, I fought down the urge to run, set my jaw and walked straight towards it.  Sometimes stupidly, sometimes with calculated appraisal of the risks, I walked into the arms of lovers who would press the edge of a blade to my cheek, who would tie me down and display their instruments of pain, and then use them on me.

Perhaps because of all that, I never again ran into a man who breached the boundaries I laid down. Never stumbled across anyone who did not screech to a dead halt at the utterance of the word no.

I glance up at the house again; the windows of his study are open. There’s music coming from them. Something I don’t recognize.

Although he has never crossed my lines, he pushed at them in as many ways as there were opportunities. He’s cajoled, persuaded and manipulated me right to the edge of them. Maybe on him I smelled the capacity to hear the word and not to heed it.  Maybe that’s why I chose him, and why I have stayed.

Examination

The sharp tug on my braid snaps my neck back. My hands, soapy from the water in the sink, grasp, scrabble and slip at the edge of the counter. The floor is damp in places and my bare feet slide on the tiles.

The forearm that bars my neck seems thicker than his. It cuts off my cry midstream and pulls me back against his body. The force of it almost lifts me off the ground. I try to prise his arm away but only end up scratching at the skin of my own neck. Had I been firmly on my feet, I could connect my heel to his shin, but I’ve got no balance, no leverage, and I hit nothing.  It feels just like before, even if it’s entirely different. I’m a doll. I’m dumb, helpless meat.

“Come on,” he says, moving his arm off my windpipe, until the air I don’t even realize I’ve been trying to gulp down enters my lungs. “Say it.”

Say what? The words don’t register. What is it he wants me to say?  But I know. Of course, I know. Fingers dig into the hollows at my cheeks, squeezing until the pain brings tears to my eyes.  “Say it and let’s get to it.”

“No.” The word’s just a whisper but it doesn’t matter. There, I’ve said it.

“Again.”

“No!” I say louder, trying to shake my head loose of the awful pressure.

“Once more, just for the record.”

“No.”

He releases my jaw, only to plant a stinging slap on the side of my cheek. “That’s my girl.”

The slap isn’t hard, but it staggers me. I want to turn around and tell him that it wasn’t like this at all, that I need to explain how it was so he’ll understand.  But he’s lowers me back onto my feet and, before I have a chance, he’s got my hair again, right by the roots, and he’s dragging me through the kitchen and down the hall. I have to stumble-run to keep up, to stop him from pulling it out.

Pure fear. Bright, white, blinding, muscle priming fear. This is a familiar feeling. I know how to ride this.

Bracing for the pull and the pain, feet wide apart, hands flat to the wall, I stop. Even so, it takes him a pace or two to notice. He rears on me, and I can hardly recognize him. The anger I’m expecting to see isn’t there. Instead, it’s disdain – cold and hard and something else – perhaps contempt.

“You want it here?” he says, planting a palm on my chest and slamming me to the wall with a single hard shove. Taller than me by almost a foot, I crane my neck to look at him. He smirks. “Think I’m going to let you dictate anything to me? Think you can just turn me on and off with a switch? Who the fuck do you think I am?”

With careful deliberation, I edge my hands between our chests and shove hard with all my might, but the angle’s not good. I can’t put any muscle into it. He doesn’t budge an inch.

“Jesus Christ. That’s pathetic. That’s so fucking pathetic it’s almost endearing.”

“Fuck you,” I say, bringing up my knee between his legs. But he twists and it doesn’t connect with his balls. He just grunts as I hit his thigh.

“That… is not endearing. And now you’ve pissed me off.” His hand closes around my upper arm so tight I hiss. “Either you’re going to move or I’m going to move you. That much is up to you. The rest is not.”

But I’m not really listening now. I swing at his face with my one free hand. And miss.

“Fuck it,” he mutters, slapping my fist away. He stoops, grabs me around the waist with one arm, and hefts me onto his shoulder.

“Motherfucker.” It comes out as a wheeze, because I’m upside down and can’t breathe properly with his shoulder in my gut. I feel the blood draining into my face, the jolt of every step he takes. And, inanely, notice a worn patch on the back pocket of his jeans.

“Please, put me down,” I croak.

“Please put me down,” he echoes back in a falsetto.

Even as I try to kick my legs I know how cartoonish it looks. He’s got one arm around my thighs and the kicks do nothing.

“Really, I mean it. I can’t breathe. Put me the fuck down.”

“Really, I mean it. I really, really mean it!” He uses a ridiculous, high-pitched whine as sarcasm.

The fear has ebbed and anger has replaced it.  I can tell he’s got no destination in mind; he’s carrying me around like this because he knows I’ll hate it. Balling my fist, I take careful aim, and slam it down as hard as my position will allow, on his left kidney. There is no immediate reaction. Then he gasps and for a moment, I think he’s going to drop me.

“You fucking cunt.”

Incantation

As the pain lanced through him, he thought he might drop her.  But he breathed into the pain and felt it ebb. Fuck this shit. He needed to get her off his back and onto hers. Just as he felt her move on his shoulder to take another swing at him, he flipped her off him, and slammed her down on their bed.

He hadn’t intended to use the bedroom. Something in the back of his mind warned him to do it elsewhere, to leave that particular room untainted by this. Fuck it. She wanted to play? He’d play. He’d play just as hard and mean as she wanted. Harder, meaner. And then she’d know what it meant to see everything crash and burn.

The adrenalin streamed through his veins, cut through his muscles like blades, hum in his chest. He straddled her thighs and caught her flailing arms by the wrists. First one, then the other, and pulled them to her chest. She had little bones, little wrists. They fit so perfectly in one hand as he held them down between her breasts.

Her face had been red, but the colour was draining from it now. She was talking to him, swearing at him, bucking her hips beneath him, but all of that was just so much noise. He was looking at the tears at the corners of her eyes, just threatening to spill, the tight tendons on her slender neck, the swell and jiggle of her breasts as she took another breath to fire more invective at him.  He was looking at one perfect, rounded curve of her shoulder.  Then down at where her shirt had worked its way up one side of her torso. The exposed skin unmarked and bare, soft there, in the shallow valley between her hipbone and the swell of her belly. Through all the noise, the screeching and jostling and kicking and crying, that’s all he wanted. That place. To sink his teeth into it and never unlock his jaw again.

His skin. His, no matter what she said, no matter how she felt. His skin and he would push inside it and own it. He would teach her that it belonged to him; that her mouth and her eyes and her tears and her voice and her hands and her cunt and every fucking breath she took was his.

His cock throbbed.  His balls tightened.  As if all he had to do to own the whole fucking world was to push through the maddening, crooked, ugly veil of it, groin first. And there would be rest for his soul on the other side. But first, he had to get there.

“I hate it when you wear pants. Skirts are so much easier. You wear this shit just to piss me off.”

Resurrection

It would be so easy to give in, to go limp and pliant and get it over with. I look up at him, and wonder why I’m doing this? I love him. I want him more than any other man alive. How could I ever have imagined he could be a stranger to me? What is all this pretending going to prove? That he can wear a mask? That I can convince myself, for five minutes, that I don’t want to have sex with him?

When he hooks the fingers of his free hand into the waistband of my track pants, and starts tugging them down, I have to stop myself from raising my hips. Looking down his body to his crotch, I can see he’s hard. The bulge of his cock is straining at his jeans. I can’t help myself, I smile.

He stops trying to work my pants down and backhands me so hard that, for a moment, my vision goes dark. Then the phosphenes invade it and sparkles interrupt the lines of everything I can see. It’s not the pain I feel first, it’s the taste of metal in my mouth. Blood from where my teeth have cut into my cheek.

“Fuck.” It’s all I can get out, because my throat has closed up and I have to work to take a breath.

“Don’t you fucking look at me that way. Don’t you fucking dare.” His face is inches from mine and his hand’s around my throat. “Don’t you eye my junk and smirk, you whore.”

He’s let go of my wrists, but they’re trapped between us, and the hand that’s jerking my pants down my thighs is fighting the elastic, doggedly, taking my underwear with it.

“You’re just like every other loser whore who thinks there’s not a man on earth who can’t be led around by his dick,” he growls, “Don’t you? Don’t you?” The hand around my throat shakes it, slamming my head back into the mattress.

“I…”

“Shut the fuck up, you lying piece of shit. You manipulative little cunt.” His grip tightens until I feel the blood thudding against my eardrums. “That’s what you think and I know it. I’ve always known it.”

“No,” I rasp, worming my hands free, clutching at his arm. “That’s not true. Stop it.”

“Don’t even bother, bitch.” He spits the word and his saliva showers my face. “You know what I think?”

Full, flaming panic hits me. I can’t get a proper breath and I can’t think of how to get one. I just claw at his arm, at his wrist, trying to get some air.  And I can feel his other hand between us, working the buttons of his jeans.

“I think the simplest way to get some is just to wait until you black out. Then I don’t have to put up with any more of your poisonous bullshit. What do you think?”

My lungs are burning, my chest heaving and heaving to take in nothing, and just as my vision starts to darken at the edges and I’m positive I’m going to die, he lets go.

“Jesus Christ,” I splutter, wheezing and sobbing. “Jesus fucking Christ, stop it.”

“Aw, come on baby,” he says, tapping my face, then trapping my jaw. “Aren’t you going to show me any love at all? Kiss me like you mean it.”

He presses his mouth against mine. Wet against my closed lips.  He’s gotten his jeans off his hips and down his thighs because his skin is burning hot against mine, legs between mine, spreading them as far as the rucked down track pants will allow.

I can’t let him do this. I squirm sideways, trying to roll, but he’s got almost one hundred pounds on me.  And all I can think is, I can’t let him fuck me like this.  I’m not that person he thinks he’s going to fuck. I can’t let him into me with that vision of me in his head.

Parting my lips, as if I’m going to kiss him back, I catch his bottom lip between my teeth, and I bite down, hard. He jerks back his head, and I feel his lip tear before it slips free.

“Fuck. You bitch.”

His hand is between us, trying to guide his cock into me.  He misses and jabs himself into the crook of my leg. But now I hardly care. I’m screaming in his face and tearing at his hair, clawing at his shoulder. I can taste his blood in my mouth and I just want more.

I’m fighting and yelling and it doesn’t stop until I feel him finally angle his hips and try to thrust into me.

It’s as if all my memory’s edits are gone. In that moment, I remember exactly what it felt like all those years ago. Those first two or three sharp, impossible thrusts when I was sure he was going to rip my cunt to shreds and then, as if my body decides to save me from my own best intentions, it floods itself, opens and he penetrates me.

It hurts, just like it did then, and, just like then, I turn my head to the side and stare at the chest of drawers below the window, then up, out at the sky beyond. The cartoon puffy clouds comic against the bluest of skies.  And I cry.

Recognition

He felt it, when she gave in. It was like a blind being drawn down.  It leached the adrenalin from his body, and shattered every insane bit of triumph he’d felt the second before. She’d turned her face aside. She was staring into nothing.

He cupped her face and pulled it towards him.  “You fought.”

Face slick with tears, she stared at him. He moved inside her and pressed his lips to her cheek, feeling the salt sting the cut on his lip. It left a bloody smear on her skin.  “You fought damn hard.”

“Did I?” she said vacantly.

“Yeah. Yeah, you did.”

Part of him wanted to stop. To pull out of her and wrap her in his arms because she’d found out what she needed to know, and it was over. But part of him couldn’t bear the thought of not being inside her. The hot, tight liquidity of her.  All the bitterness and contempt was gone, but not the blind hunger to feel her wrapped around his cock.

“Did you mean it?”

“What?” he panted, sliding his arms under her; one across her back and the other at the base of her spine, feeling her hips shift as he hilted himself.

“That I’m manipulative and a whore, all those things. As if you didn’t even know who I was.”

He wasn’t fucking her hard, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was so close to coming he could hardly think in words. “I know who you are, love.”

“Promise?” She slid her arms around his waist, over his lower back, palms flattened over the top of his ass cheeks.

He felt her arch her hips in that way that made it just so much sweeter, so much easier to fill her, and felt her inner muscles close around him. Lowering his head, burying it in the crook of her neck, he promised. And came.

Redemption

After, he pulls the covers up over us, and lies on his side with me pulled tight against him. I sob and he lets me. Silent the whole time, as if he thinks it’s something I need to purge, and perhaps he’s right.

“Want me to leave you alone for a while?” he offers.

“No. Please. No,” I say, twining my arms through his and anchoring them around me.  He expels a breath so long and deep I think he’s been holding it forever.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think I am.”

“Will you look at me?”

“Yes, of course,” I say, and roll in his arms to face him. The truth is I’m scared to see any hint of the contempt and disgust I saw in his face earlier, but I meet his eyes, because I’m me, and I have to know. “Are you okay?”

He blinks and then frowns. “I’m not sure.”

“Why?”

“Do you forgive me?”

“Yes.” But perhaps I say it too fast, because he’s still searching my face, still trying to find something – I’m not sure what – in my eyes.  And it’s that searching that makes me think that, at least most of the time, he doesn’t really think those awful things he accused me of. “I forgive you. Do you forgive me?”

“For what?”

“For all this. And for your lip. It looks nasty.”

He runs the tip of his tongue across in and chuckles. “I’ve had worse. Kiss me.”

“Ow, are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

So I do. Despite all the crying, and the screaming and the fear, it’s that kiss that tells me that everything is going to be okay.

Different, perhaps, but okay.

From Ice to Tears

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Photo by Doug Wheller

This afternoon in early May, with its corpse-grey sky and its implacable heat, the city creaked to a halt. The fan above her low, broad bed, stuttered once, twice, and then unraveled itself with a sigh, like a coiled ribbon unwilling to be constrained by duty any longer. There will be no rain until June, and no electricity until sunset.

Against the blinding white of the sheet, her pale skin is a shade of milky coffee in the aqueous light. Her pores prick in anticipation of a slow descent into airless hell. Reaching into the glass by her bed, she fishes out an ice cube, and drops it with care into the cup of her navel.  Already its angled edges have eroded in the limpid water, and now it weeps into that hollow place.

She forgets the droplets of sweat that have formed at her hairline.  Pleasantly cool at first, the ice becomes cold, and then as the heat of her skin melts it, begins to hurt.  There in the centre of her, it begins to ache, to burn, and beneath her skin, a fissure of nerves she was sure disappeared after her umbilical cord was cut, reassert themselves. A lattice of bright, icy pain spreads over her ribcage, down to her hips, over the curve of her waist.  As she breathes, the melt water spills over, following the tendrils of pain. Around her, and she is sure it found a way inside her too, under her skin.

When one is gone, she fishes out another cube, and this time there is no pleasant coolness like there was at the start, only another bite and slow burst of minor agony.

The fan above her doesn’t move.  Perhaps it will never move again. Perhaps she will never really breathe again. Perhaps she will lie here naked and rot in the heat, waiting.

She has done this many times, in the swelter and silence of dead afternoons. It always makes her cry. Not out of hopelessness, but in the knowledge that she has learned how to wait so well on the tines of time.

The Withdrawal

[image error]Fingers, tongue, words, needles, teeth, cock, nails, fists, lips, blades, ideas, images. It’s not the way he penetrates her that disturbs her; it’s the way he withdraws.  Because she knows he yearns to leave with the Polaroid of someone ruined and discarded firmly clutched in his fisted hand. That, she will not allow.

When he leaves, she bathes.

She lies back in the warm water. She smokes. She flings one leg over the edge of the bathtub and examines the pattern of his bite, the abrasions on her knees. She contracts the muscles of her cunt and feels the sting, the emptiness, the formless ache of congress that always leaves in its wake the echoes of the fuck.  The rosy marks of his fingers on her upper arms and hips. The angry contraction of her nipples in the water’s heat.

Sweat beads on her face and runs into the rawness of her lips. The places on her skin, like stretches of dried riverbed or barren ground, where his cum has dried and crackled, are reconstituted in the water to viscous again. Cuts unclot. Bruises bloom. She licks her lips to soothe the salt’s sting and tastes his saliva again. She revisits her small, peculiar triumphs.

Back in the presence of his caustic hunger, wound tight on the creaking pin of civility. The awful tension of that string doesn’t make her reconsider; it’s what draws her. To where he is a man always on the edge of being an animal, that bright and tender place of constant calculation of where the line might be drawn or broken.

There, what has made him doesn’t matter. Nor what conspires in her to call her to that place. She has tasted the sour premonitions of all the things he might render her long, long before she arrived at his doorstep.  Past the post of good judgment, like any good traveler, she becomes a fatalist.

In that no man’s land, he casts her in whatever role gets him hard: as deceiver, as whore, as pitiful victim of his dishonorable machinations, weak-willed, soft-hearted, half-witted fuckdoll or  lovelorn dupe. In that place, she is whatever hinges his jaw, sharpens his teeth, draws out his claws.

For her, he is all the abysses she fears to look into, the monsters she cannot face. Every insult, every humiliation, every loss of agency she believed she could not bear. All the pain she thinks she cannot tolerate.

She can and she does. She endures because it is all she needs to know about herself: that she endures, that she can walk through his fire with her eyes on his, and not lose sight of the fact that they are who and what they are, in spite of what they do to each other.

He may not leave savouring the spectre of her regret.  That is the one fantasy she refuses him.