My Darling Dreadful Thing

by Johanna van Veen

I was his creature utterly and completely.

I truly think I wasn’t aware that I had a body before I met Agnes. I had felt things before, of course: hunger and cold and pain, all the small degradations of the body. Those were things to be ignored, and if they were too sharp to be ignored, they were to be borne.

With Agnes, my body no longer was an inconvenience to be brutalised into submission. It was as if she had woken me from a deep slumber with that lover’s kiss at the séance.