I feel I am free but I know I am not—EM Cioran
I removed the ball gag because..who wants to sleep like that?..and I heard her crying quietly throughout the night. The lights always stay on in the crate. She would have to learn to sleep exposed—no blanket, no darkness, no security whatever.
She called my name but I did not go to her—dead girls must make it through the night on their own.
In the morning I went to the crate.
She lifted her head.
Her face was caked with salt and mascara.
"Mr. Temple. Or do you prefer to be called Mr. Simple?"
"I don't prefer that you call me anything. I prefer that you keep your mouth shut."
Then I took off my night sweatpants and climbed on top of the chair. I held myself in position with the ropes and pulleys hung from the ceiling, pressed my ass into her jaw to force it open, and took my morning shit in her mouth.
She shook her head but I got most of it in.
The moment my shit hit the back of her throat she threw up and—being reclined as she was—she began to choke on the combination of my shit and her own vomit and when I could hear she wasn't getting much air, I lifted myself off of the chair and hosed myself down with the spray nozzle.
Anna continued to reflex vomit as her own vomit hit her mouth until she was controlling her coughing to propel the vomit and shit out of her mouth, and she eventually cleared it out enough to breathe.
She didn't berate me then—would you?
She laid there quietly, breathing in and out with her mouth open as wide as possible so that the shit/vomit remnant on the side of her cheeks and between her teeth didn't start another cycle of puking.
I hosed her off from head to toe, spraying the nozzle directly into her mouth. I saw she left me a little cow pie between her legs and it was filling the cracks formed between her legs, her ass, and the chair. I sprayed her ass and vagina full force with the nozzle and I saw her wince but she said nothing. I kept the nozzle on her clit longer than I had to—which must have hurt—but she said nothing. Then I gave her mouth a final circular rinse and said:
"Close your eyes."
And I washed her face. Cleaned all the mascara off. Cleaned inside her ears, where some of my shit had got. Turned off the spray nozzle.
"Open your eyes."
She did.
"Now we're gonna read Shakespeare."
"What about some breakfast?"
"Now we're gonna read Shakespeare."
This time she did not respond.
I unlocked one of the drawers in my tool chest and pulled an old paper copy of Hamlet. I read her only the scenes with Ophelia, and when I came to this passage I read it twice:
O heavens, is 't possible a young maid's wits
Should be as mortal as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
I looked at Anna, as if daring her to say something—anything. Ask for breakfast. Ask me why I shit in your mouth. Ask me why I read this passage twice. But Anna said nothing, and that was exactly as I desired it to be.
I read that little portion once more to make sure it sank in for both of us.
After Hamlet, I left the crate, locked her in, came back in a few minutes with eggs and bacon.
"Is this going to be an ok breakfast for you today?"
Anna nods.
I feed her eggs over medium and crispy bacon and she swallows gratefully—grateful that what's going down her throat is not my morning shit. She is quiet all the way to the end of the meal.
"Are you still hungry?"
She shakes her head.
"You can speak if you want to."
"I'm fine."
"So you're not hungry?"
"No."
"If you want special things for meals, just tell me. I don't expect you to eat bacon and eggs every morning. But keep in mind Pain is a town of 300—the grocery store sucks. If you need special items I'll have to drive into Sioux Falls—which I do periodically—so if you need anything unusual don't expect me to be able to get it by the next day. I make trips into the city about once a week. That's if everything goes well. If you worry me, then I don't make any trips at all."
"How long are we gonna do this?"
"Remember the cats playing with the lizard?"
"Do you even have any cats?"
"They're metaphorical cats. They play with the lizard as long as they're having fun doing so. What's the moral of the story?"
"Be a fun lizard."
"That's one moral."
I swing around with the Glock in my hand, huge clip suspended from the gun, pointed at Anna's face.
"You can be an un-fun lizard and die right now. It's up to you. Do you like your life here—"
"Not exactly!"
"I wasn't finished. Do you like your life here more than you would like to die right now? That is the question."
I put the Glock in her mouth.
"Do you want to die right now?"
She shakes her head slightly.
I remove the Glock from her mouth.
"Life is a strange thing—wouldn't you agree with me Anna?"
"My life has become very strange lately."
"That's what I mean: your life. Your life is strange."
"It doesn't have to be."
"You mean if I didn't exist, then it wouldn't have taken this strange turn."
"Right."
"You'd be living your dream in Pain, Population 300, as a waitress at Betsy's Diner, serving me my breakfast and having never caught my eye—that would be weird. Tell me: would you wear your blue star nipple t-shirt when you worked?"
Anna rolls her eyes.
"Would you bring your insolent attitude with you every day you came to work?"
"I don't even know what insolent means, ok? I didn't get a sixteen hundred on my SATs."
"Insolent means that no matter what you had done, you would have caught my eye. Our paths would have crossed, and you would have ended up here. You didn't do anything wrong."
"Except be myself."
"Right."
"That's my crime."
"That's your crime. Yes. That's all you did, and this morning a perfect stranger shit in your mouth."
Anna is silent.
"Do you have anything to say about that?"
She says nothing.
"You don't have anything to say about that?"
"We're not.."
"What is it?"
"We're not perfect strangers. You took me to the..William's Canyon—"
"Wagner's Canyon."
"Wagner's Canyon. You took me to Wagner's Canyon and we talked like normal people. You let me shoot your gun—the first time I ever shot a gun."
"I hope it'll be one of our many firsts together."
"You took me there to get some space into my head, right? Before you brought me to the crate."
"That's right. Do you remember it?"
"It's fading."
"And it'll only fade more and more and more."
"Are you ever gonna let me out of this crate?"
"No."
"What if I promise not to tell?"
"That's what everyone says, Anna."
"But I really wouldn't."
"You wouldn't for about three days. Then you'd feel safe again, and powerful, and you'd want me to suffer. How does your vagina feel?"
"It hurts."
"Do you want me to put some cream in it?"
"You burn me, now you're gonna heal me? Why not just burn me again?"
"Think of it from my point of view. Cat playing with a lizard. It's a lot more fun for me to hurt you, then heal you, then hurt you again once you're healed."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"So you'll be able to think about it for a long time before it happens. In a few days I'll tell you how I'm going to kill you, and you'll have weeks to think about it..and the days will fall away, and each day there will be fewer and fewer left..and each day the thought will be with you, and each day it will be a different shape..and it will start small, as a remote possibility, even though you know it's real..until the day that it happens, it'll be big like one of those floats in the Macy's Day Parade. Like Mickey Mouse, but so big he'll scare the shit out of a 24 year old. I'll probably kill you on a little bit of LSD, just enough so you're laughing when you die—not even taking seriously that you're about to die—and you'll make a fool of yourself."
"Are you serious?"
"Do I look like I'm joking?"
"You're gonna kill me on LSD so I make a fool of myself when I die?"
"Yeah, something like that."
"You are fucked up."
"Anna. Tell me something I don't know."
I unlock one of the small drawers of my tool chest, pull out a fresh hypodermic needle and a jar of crystals. I'm sitting slightly behind Anna so she can't see me heating the crystals. I fill the syringe and slide forward on my stool gripping her arm in my left hand and hitting her right in the vein with my other.
I drop the plunger.
Her eyes roll back in her head.
I roll up between her legs and lick her clitoris.
You can see her hands trying to escape their clamps, to touch herself, to get me away, something.
"What..the fuck..is that?"
"Crystal meth."
A tear falls from her eye.
"Is that a tear of sadness because you were just forced to do a drug you told yourself you would never do?"
"No," she says so quietly I can barely hear.
I look up from working the young girl's clit.
"What's that tear, then?"
"It's pleasure that you are doing that to me."
"Being how horrible I was to you earlier."
She nods, and tears are coming out of both eyes.
I tongue her clit and kiss it, licking her like a dog.
Her hands try again to escape their clamps.
"What do you want to do with those?"
"God, how much of that did you hit me with??"
"What do you want to do with your hands?"
"I want.."
"You can tell me."
"I want to touch my nipples."
She says it like a girl who feels very guilty.
"Does it surprise you that you can enjoy this experience after I shit in your mouth this morning, and given that in a few weeks I'm going to kill you?"
"Just touch my nipples."
"You want me to touch them."
"Fucking touch them."
"Your clit is really engorged."
Her hips are moving from side to side in the chair.
I lick her clit again.
Her nips are rock hard.
"You want me to touch your nipples?"
"Yes," she whispers.
"Say please."
"Please. Fuck. What the fuck."
"It's confusing, isn't it?"
Anna nods.
"You're wondering how I'm going to do it, aren't you—how I'm going to kill you."
Her chin wobbles and her forehead scrunches together.
"It's ok, Anna Miller, there are worse places you could be."
"Like where?"
"Like a third world country. Or naked on an iceberg. I don't know."
I put my whole mouth on her vulva.
She winces on the steel.
"Do you know who I am to you?"
I lick her clit.
"Who?"
"Who do you worship?"
I go to work on her clit with my mouth like she was my own wife.
"Who do you worship?"
I suck her fat clit almost out of her tiny white body.
"Who?"
"God," she whispers.
"Who am I?"
"God."
Then I touch her nipples, swirling them and pinching them and climbing up on her to suck them and bite them and paint them with my tongue.
Her hands flex in the clamps.
"You want your clit?"
She nods, she meth overwhelming her delicate system.
I lick my finger and hold it over her precious gem.
"Touch it?"
She nods uncontrollably.
"Then call me by my name," I say.
And she does.