On The Street Where You Live

She sat down on the floor, her lips forming a rosebud of disgust as she contemplated his groin.

'You really can't help yourself, can you?' she said. 'You're like an animal. A dog that needs to be fixed.'

Her tone was wonderstruck as if she'd finally arrived at a previously unconsidered yet obvious conclusion. He watched her stand up, heard the door open, and then her footsteps as she returned a moment later. She squatted down next to him again, her thumb upon the nipple of a yellow and black Stanley knife.

'I can fix you,' she said. 'Shush.'

His mouth opened but before he could speak, she had stopped it with the panties that she had retrieved from him earlier.

'These were a present.' She picked up the string of black beads and looped them around his cock, fishing him out before extending the knife's sloping blade and holding it over his pisshole. 'And now I can never wear them again. Don't move. You'll only make it worse.'

He thought that he would have struggled, thrashed about like they did in films, but instead, he was passive, weak as a fever sufferer. The blade was cold against his glans for an instant before she snatched it away.

'But you'd enjoy that, wouldn't you?'

Grasping the knife like a pen, she brought it to his face and held it poised over first one, then the other of his eyeballs. There was no sign of emotion in her face or any hint that she was deriving pleasure from what she was doing, only a serene determination, that of a vivisectionist preparing to slit open the thorax of a pinned down rat. He bit down on his gag, hyperventilating through his nose as the tip of the blade touched his eyelid.

'You're weak,' she said. 'You'll always be weak. I saw it in you from the start. A fantasist. A mama's boy.'

She pressed the blade to his cheek and pulled the panties from his mouth.

'Tell me about love,' she said.

'I don't know...'

'You said you loved me.'

Her tone had become harsh. As she said "loved", she applied pressure to the blade. His mouth opened to cry out as he felt a sting on his cheek, but only a gasp emerged. Jane leaned back, an painter contemplating an experimental brushstroke. She touched a finger to the dribble of blood she had divined and gilded one of his eyelids with it.

'Needs more.'

She moved the blade, selecting a corresponding position to the first nick on his other cheek and cut him again.

'They're like tears,' she said, 'Red tears...'

She held her breath while she painted his other eyelid. He looked at the blade, held daintily in her free hand, and felt his cock going into spasm when he imagined the damage it was capable of wreaking on his body. The minor wounds upon his face blossomed in his imagination, became gaping bisections of his flesh that resembled the characters, written in blood, of a profane and forgotten alphabet.

'Put your tongue out.'

He did as he was told.

'I could cut you,' she said, as if reading his thoughts. 'Your eyes, your mouth, your balls.' She put the blade on his tongue and traced a crooked line along its centre. 'You wouldn't make a peep. Because you're sick. Did you say something?'

She took the blade from his tongue.

'You,' he said. 'You made me sick.'

'Because it's my fault.' She nodded. 'I'm the reason you can't keep your hands of this...'

She grabbed his cock, then dropped it gingerly as her touch pushed him over the edge. It was a pathetic orgasm, both volume-wise and as a spectacle. He didn't so much come as meekly arrive, his weakly expelled jism pooling upon his stomach where the head of his cock was lying.

Jane shook her head.

'And that's what it's all about. That's all you have. Love.'

She laughed. A cramp ripped his foot apart but the pain only complemented the abjection that he felt; a sense that he had been pulverised and reassembled from piles of splinters and dust. His mortification was so total that it bordered on the erotic. He could see clearly but the reality he gazed on was so unbearable that it had him clamouring to return to his habitual state of delusion. A car approached outside and he shut his sticky eyes. This was it. He couldn't let the cops see him this way.

'Will you untie me, Miss?'

'What?'

'I think the cops are here.'

'I didn't call them.'

The car passed by, the sound of its engine fading away and dying.

'I thought about it but there's really no need to get them involved,' she said.

'Thanks, Miss.'

She took off her cardigan and leaned forward, looking at him blankly. Her blouse was stained to darkness under either of her armpits.

'Are you scared?' she said.

He nodded.

'I don't think you are. This is a kick for you, isn't it? The more extreme it gets, the better. Today's the first day in a long time I've had a few hours to myself. Rick is with his aunt. My sister. She said I needed a break. I was going to have a bath, smoke, read magazines. You ruined all that. You owe me.'

Her calmness was more menacing than her anger had been.

'It's a game.' she said. 'And whether I like it or not, I'm a part of it. Fair enough. I'll play. What do you say?'

'Miss?'

She grabbed his crotch.

'What do you say?'

'Thank you.'

'Thank you what?'

'Thank you, Miss.'

He opened his mouth to squeal as she pulled him to the floor by the balls but managed to stifle it, sensing that any noise from him would displease her. His hip-bone took the weight of his fall, filling the hollow of his pelvis with agony, but Jane was oblivious to his discomfort. Her feet were planted apart as she manipulated the bulk of him with skilful hands until he was on his knees, facing into the sofa, his cheek pressed against the cushion, still ripe with sweat and the smell of his shit, that his arse had recently vacated,

He half-moaned, half-whimpered. The pose she had arranged him in was agonizing. His arms were still tied, making his shoulders feel as if they were striving to come apart, the pain consuming his back to a point roughly halfway down at which the pain in his hip took over.

Jane reached underneath him and unbuttoned his jeans before pulling them and his underpants over his hips.

'Straighten your back. That's better.' Her mouth was close to his ear and he smelled her breath of trapped vinegar and iron. 'Stay like that. Shut up.'

The slimy heel of her palm covered his mouth.

'We should improvise,' she said. She stood up and he heard the rattle of brass. 'Good actors make use of the set...If you'd done this during the winter, these could have been red hot.'

He felt the coldness of metal teeth pinching shut upon his balls.

'We improvise,' she said, and pushed his face into the cushion to muffle his cries. 'We make use of what we have at hand. We maximize potential.'

The teeth relented only to come together again, harder than the first time. Through the pain, he recognized her classroom tone and the platitudes of her discipline. "Maximize potential..." She had used that phrase all the time and he had never fully understood what it meant or how a person went about it. Now he understood. It was something he was incapable of, unlike Jane. His sexual fantasies flashed through his head, revealed in their utter poverty when compared to the monstrous and vivid dreaming of his captor. He revisited his fantasy of her husband's homecoming, watched her approach her husband/lover having put the child to bed and realized that it was violence she had had in mind all along. To bind a man, to cut him, to use a coal tongs as a crude emasculator...The pain he felt was minor compared to the gorgeous anxiety with which he anticipated the torments she had not yet visited upon him. He saw himself racked, bound, his limbs twisted into impossible, inhuman configurations; a living work of art subjected to constant revision under the hands of its creator.

She released the claws of the tongs and dropped them to the floor. His abused scrotum squirmed as it attempted to return to its default position, every twitch of every nerve like the hacking of a thousand razorblades. But the blandness of the relief was insufferable. It was her attention he wanted -- the devotion of all her will and her strength to the correction of his flesh.

'You're not a man,' she said. 'You're scarcely a person. I don't know what you are. Tell me.'

She pulled up his t-shirt and ran her hands down the length of his exposed back before lashing at it with what he guessed was the string of beads.

'I'm nothing,' he said.

'You're a sewer.' She whipped him again, this time across the buttocks. 'A drain that needs rodding.'

She became still behind him. There was a cool presence between his thighs, then the touch of metal upon his asshole.

'You thought about doing this to me,' she said.

The poker's insertion was slow, insistent. He felt, with an increasing sense of disassociation, the fine detail of the metal's texture, the grit that coated its surface. The pain was less potent than a feeling of gradual dispossession. The deeper the penetration, the more physical autonomy he felt himself surrendering. Was this what dying was like? "Nothing," he had said. He hadn't understood what the word meant until that moment...

'Don't move,' said Jane. 'I don't want you to hurt yourself.'

She removed the poker from his arse with the same care she had shown when inserting it.

'I'd say sitting down might be a problem for a while,' she said. 'But you can always think of me. I know I'll be thinking of you every time I poke the fire from now on.'

'Again.'

'What?'

'Again, Miss. Please. Put it in again.'

'The game's over, Paul.' She cut the rope that bound his hands and feet. 'Get dressed. I want you out of here.'

He slumped to the floor and looked up at her. The room was full of sunlight that reduced her to a featureless and monolithic black silhouette. He rolled on to his side -- she had been right about sitting down -- struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was free to go. The world outside the room, the one he had stepped out of on entering Jane's house, now seemed horrifying in its blandness. How was he supposed to go back to that? The real world...it was a joke. In here, with Jane, was real. Everything else was vanity.

The tolling of the midday Angelus bell could be heard in the distance. He crawled over to her feet and embraced her ankles. After a moment, he felt her hand upon his head. It was a trifling degree of grace but it was enough.