It was very late, the boulevard was quiet, and if in a moment someone would emerge from the little convenience store (denonoshtno, its window said, day-and-night), if in a moment someone would emerge to investigate, I had time to get away, as I thought of it, walking one block and then another without passing a soul. I kept my head down, trying to be blank and unplaceable, trying to calm what I felt, which was pain and relief and shame and panic still, even though I thought I was clear, that I was far enough now to go on uncaught. But I couldn’t calm what I felt, something rose in me I couldn’t keep down, as I couldn’t keep walking at the pace I had set; with each step my foot was more tender and there was something else too, a nausea climbing to my throat, I was going to be sick. I turned quickly into the space between two buildings, an alleyway lined with trash bags and refuse, among which I bent over or crouched, unable to stand. But it wasn’t with bile or sickness that I heaved but with tears, which came unexpected and fluent and hot, consuming in a way I hadn’t known for a very long time, that maybe I had never known. I raised my hands, wanting to cover my face, though there was no one to see I was still ashamed of my tears, and I saw that my right hand was covered with blood. In the light from the street I could see where my wrist was torn, a small deep wound where it had caught on the glass. Stupid, I thought again, stupid, at the wound or my weeping, I’m not sure which. Why should I weep, I thought, at what, when I had brought it all upon myself, and I took one of my socks from my pocket and pressed it to the wound, wrapping it around my wrist and folding the cuff of my sleeve over it, not knowing what else to do.
It was a fit of weeping violent and brief, and as my breath steadied I felt a sense of resolution, that I had been lucky and must learn from that luck; I wouldn’t go back to such a place, I thought, this would be the end of it. But how many times had I felt that I could change, I had felt it through all the long months with R., months that I had spent, for all my happiness, in a state of perpetual hunger; and so at the same time I felt it I felt too that my resolution was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that my real life was here, and I thought this even as I struggled to climb from the new depth I had been shown. And even as I climbed or sought to climb I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time. There was no lowest place, I thought, I would strike ground only to feel it give way gaping beneath me, and I felt with a new fear how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek. For some moments I wrestled with these thoughts, and then I stood and turned back to the boulevard, composing as best I could my human face.
Scissors
by Kim Fu
As the curtains open, Dee sits on an empty stage in a small, cabaret-style theater. Black-painted walls, the smell of dust burning on the stage lights, ancient cigarette smoke baked into blue velvet drapery. The spotlight swings to Dee, a garish full moon. She sits in a plain wooden chair, her wrists bound to the armrests and her ankles to the chair legs with neatly torn strips of canvas. Her posture is slumped and casual, her knees open and her shoulders expansive and angled slightly backward, as though lounging in a hot tub. Her white T-shirt dress rides up over her thighs, the radiant heat on her bare arms and legs more like sunlight than moonlight.
The audience sits crowded around tightly packed, circular tables. Lit candles at the center of each one illuminate white tablecloths and sweating highball glasses, while the faces beyond remain largely in shadow. A table in the front row draws Dee’s attention: a group that remained rowdy after a hush fell over the rest of the room, the only people she can see clearly in the reflected footlights. Their drinks slosh out of their glasses as they make jokes and jostle for the best view, but one person at their table is quiet, sitting back in his chair, slightly outside the conversation. He toys nervously with the candleholder, testing the hot glass, the tiny flame rolling on its wick. His hands jerk away and draw back. He glows pink, already blushing behind a pair of square glasses.
El enters stage left, dressed in a fitted tuxedo with tails, the black bow tie locking in place her high-necked shirt collar. She crosses in front of Dee. She holds up a pair of scissors, ordinary but large, stainless steel from tip to handle, as one might keep in the kitchen to snip through tendons and butcher twine. The steel catches the spotlight like a wink. She waves them around and gestures toward the audience, a magician with an empty hat.
El usually wears dagger pumps with the suit, six inches of killer heel with her trouser legs jacked up short. Tonight, she’s barefoot. Dee stares. She’s thrown by the sight of El’s feet, their unexpected intimacy, her unpainted toenails like a row of pink pearls.
El grasps the bottom hem of Dee’s dress and begins to snip. She takes her time. An inch, a pause. Another inch. The sound is satisfying, the neat clip of the blades coming together, the fabric stretching and shearing. A straight slice up the center, in line with Dee’s navel. Dee feels the scissors close and stop at her solar plexus, and then El steps away. The fabric on either side of the split hangs to her sides like a flyaway nightgown, an inverted V of exposed skin between.
El leans in and kisses Dee on the mouth. Dee draws back, to the extent that she can, but El presses forward, the kiss soft and insistent. El has never kissed her onstage before. In the dressing room afterward, yes, during the frenzied, private fucking that used to end all of their show nights, El’s sweat-melted makeup smearing across Dee’s neck. She can’t stop thinking about El’s missing shoes. Her giantess persona shrunken to everyday height. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe a heel snapped backstage, moments before El’s entrance, but Dee likes everything just so. Her surrender is an act of choreography. She can’t do this if she’s picturing El at home in her apartment, an apartment like any other. El taking off her shoes in a foyer and rubbing her tired arches, her blistered soles. El eating a bagel standing up in her kitchen, her bare feet on the linoleum.
Someone at the rowdy front table starts booing, but good-naturedly, still laughing. Get on with it! Don’t tease us! Dee tries to focus on the audience, reorient herself in the moment. Her pupils have adjusted, and when she squints, she can see a couple at the very back, delineate their shapes from the darkness. Two women, their skin and pale hair lit red under the fire exit sign. They’re making out distractedly—lazy groping with their attention drifting back to the stage, always one eye on Dee.
El snips through the last few inches of Dee’s dress, now cut through from bottom to top. The edges curl outward, hanging over her bare torso like an unbuttoned jacket. When El tucks the flaps back and around her, the sleeves still comically intact, Dee can feel the energy in the room change. El steps back. She doesn’t touch Dee. Nothing touches her, which makes the nakedness stranger, more acute, more helpless.
El taps the scissors against Dee’s knee, as though absentmindedly toying with a pen, exaggerating the bounce. She rests the point against the side of Dee’s neck. The front table finally quiets.
El surveys Dee’s body for a long moment, as though deep in thought, a vein jumping in Dee’s throat. She lifts the scissors and presses the flat edge firmly against Dee’s left breast, parallel to her body. Not piercing or cutting her, just sinking in, as into a mattress. A presence, a hardness, the potential of menace. Drawing attention to how soft she is, how her flesh indents and depresses to the slightest pressure. Nearly flush with her chest, the blades open and shut without catching any skin between them, snipping through air between her collarbone and nipple, severing an imagined connection.
The closed blades slip across and between her breasts, down to her belly, without a scratch, pressing and skimming like the back of a fingernail. Down farther, to the plushest part of her thigh. The steel begins to warm.
Dee loves the way the audience flinches at El’s every movement. Their held breath. Gritting their teeth and
clenching on the inside, holding as still as they can, as though if they don’t move, if they don’t exhale, Dee won’t get cut. She knows it’s maddening to watch, a sharp edge near skin, on skin, the tension of it, the blood pulsing inside all of them, swelling up like balloons that want to be popped. It’s easier to be her, she thinks. She knows precisely where the scissors are, can feel the calm and control in El’s grip. She feels as though her skin lifts to meet the metal of its own accord, faint hairs and gooseflesh rising, a slow, magnetic draw.
The scissors are flat against her stomach again, pointing downward, dipping now and again into the waistband of her underwear, colder on the concealed skin. El rotates them slowly until they’re perpendicular to Dee’s body, still pointing to her center. The blades open, the beak of an eager bird. El snips through the side seams, the elastic at each leg opening, and the front half of Dee’s underwear falls forward like a drawbridge. Dee strains against her bindings to lift her butt as El pulls the silky scrap away.
The low stage puts her knees at eye level of the crowd. If they don’t raise or lower their gaze, it lands straight between her legs.
El uses the scissors to lift Dee’s chin. Their eyes meet, lock. Now El is running the scissors along Dee’s body without even looking down, blades all the way open in a narrow X, skimming in long sweeps as though curling ribbon. Her skin pinkens in strips from the friction and heat, though it remains unbroken. Her mind is still clear, restive, trusting, but her body clenches all the same, bearing down with her hips on the chair.
Still without looking, still on instinct, she touches the flat surface of the scissor blades—glancingly—to Dee’s vulva, against the outer lips, and someone in the audience moans, a sound of simultaneous dread and desire. The steel is wet. She brings the blades together, only an inch from Dee’s tenderest skin, the empty snip loud in the pin-drop silence. The same moan emerges from the dark.
El brings the scissors to Dee’s mouth, prompting her to kiss them, which she does. She slips the pointed tip between Dee’s lips, and Dee draws the closed blades deeper, up to the pin of the pivot point. The scissors feel dull against her palate and tongue, the depth of her mouth filled with metal. Dee is in control of this part, the sword-swallowing, bobbing her head and sliding her lips. She looks up at El, pleased with herself, expecting El’s eyes to be glassy with approval and desire, that wild-horse energy of hers, impatient for the next thing, for more.
But El isn’t even looking at her. Her gaze is just behind Dee, into the sea of candles and stained tablecloths. Her hand around the scissors relaxes, goes slack. Is she bored? Dee lunges upward, indignant, her mouth widening to take in the base of the handles, the tip in the opening of her throat. Without turning her head, she tries to see what’s stealing El’s attention. The hecklers at the front table? El is smiling in their direction the way she does when someone challenges her, presents her with a bet or a dare.
El takes the spit-polished scissors and cuts a strip from Dee’s dress. She holds the scissors between her own teeth as she folds the strip in half, to thicken it, and wraps it around Dee’s head as a blindfold. Blackness closes around her. Dee tries to trust what she knows: El tying a tight, neat knot at the back of her head; El tucking the scissors ostentatiously into her hair bun, like decorative chopsticks. A thrilling dread alights in her gut.
“Are you ready?” El stage-whispers.
Dee is supposed to pause and then nod shyly, to appear hesitant but excited. She’s surprised to find herself actually hesitating. She told El from the beginning that she needed to write the details of her own submission, and El had understood. That Dee needed to be in control to give up control. That she would tap out over something as small as missing shoes, an unplanned kiss, an unnerving smile. That their lives had to be separate, their roles pure, their daytime selves left at the alley door of the theater. As though a hundred nights of sex and conversation and show adrenaline hadn’t revealed more than any other relationship she’d ever had.
El has never nicked her onstage, never misjudged a fraction of an inch and drawn blood. The scissors remind Dee of a jangling, dubiously constructed roller coaster at the state fair near where she grew up. The two-person car held her loosely as the metal sides bruised her ribs and her head whipped back and forth on her spine, once chipping her front tooth on the guard-rail. But she was never truly afraid. She lined up over and over, elated and alert.
The room is humid, hypnotized, heavy with want. In this moment, there’s no acute danger, no dips and turns rattling her teeth in her head, no steel edge digging into her naked skin, yet she feels a vertiginous tingling through her fingers and toes. Her carnival fear edged with something real: El, her El, bored with her. What a bored El might do.
El puts her hand on top of Dee’s, trapped palm-side up on the armrest, and squeezes lightly in a gesture Dee understands: It’s all me. It’s only me. It’s always me.
Dee nods.
“She says she’s ready!” El cries, turning toward the audience. “Those who want to play, line up in an orderly fashion. Stay close to the wall and wait until I gesture for you to come forward. Remember, hands only, and your turn is up when I make this signal. We won’t have time for everyone. I’ll be watching! Rule breakers will be escorted out!”
Dee reminds herself that nothing is happening, that the murmuring and shifting and patter is for show, people are just heading to and from the bar—this has all been explained to them in advance. Dee’s brain tells her one thing, that she’s a performer in a well-established show with rules of her own making, while her body knows only that it’s trapped, blinded and bound, the prickling sensation of being watched. Being seen without seeing. Even when she wasn’t blindfolded, she’d only been able to make out a handful of faces—the shy man at the front table and his raucous companions, the couple under the exit sign. She has no idea who’s out there. If they look hopeful, worshipful, like supplicants before a queen. If they’re laughing, having a fun night out, amused by the whole situation. If they’re sneering, impatient, eerily focused, blackout drunk. If they know her from some other time and place. A crowd is more lawless and unpredictable than any one person. A crowd is one of the most dangerous things she can think of.
Behind her blindfold, she pictures El’s face, broad-browed, impish, easy to love. Unbidden, Dee remembers an evening, not long ago, when she arrived at the theater and found El in a loose-knit sweater with one sleeve, a ragged skein of wool dangling from her other shoulder. Dee thought that she’d been attacked, but El only laughed in astonishment. She’d been idly tugging on a loose thread, scarcely aware of what she was doing until she’d unraveled the entire sleeve. “I get fidgety when I’m bored,” she said.
It’s all me. It’s only me. It’s always me.
The first touch is a jolt. The tip of a fingernail grazing the back of her neck. She hadn’t realized that anyone was behind her. The nail is pointed and sharp, the same intimation of threat as the scissors. She pictures a woman with brightly colored acrylics, stiletto tips. Large, teased hair, a bandage sheath dress. The fingers spread and comb upward through Dee’s hair, palming the back of her head like a basketball, manicured claws flexing open and closed. Dee leans into it. She likes having her scalp scratched this way. El knows that.
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