Kink

by Kink- Stories (retail) (epub)

  The hand withdraws, immediately replaced by the sensation of touch on her sternum, slight enough to be chilling, ghostlike. An almost unpleasantly light touch, trickling downward, circling one nipple with a hesitancy that makes her tense. If there were wet paint on these fingers, they’d hardly leave a stain, the contact is so glancing. It seems clumsy, hungry, a little afraid, like a virginal teenage boy. The man with the glasses at the front table comes to mind. (Had El noticed him, too? Is this her imitation of him?) The hand is joined by another, cupping her breasts from the front, and she imagines him standing in front of her, his glasses fogged with sweat, his shirt collar rumpled, his mouth falling slightly open, awed by the sight and feel of her. “That’s enough,” El says. Leaning back, throwing her voice in that way she does. She hears someone reluctantly stepping away before tweaking Dee’s nipple in a spiteful goodbye.

  Just as suddenly, someone grabs Dee by the neck, thumb and forefinger holding Dee’s chin from below, the flat of their palm against Dee’s throat. The movement is swift and sure, and Dee gasps. A little louder than necessary. The hand seems too large to be El’s, the middle finger reaching almost to the back of her neck, the base of the wrist resting on her chest. Too slender and too smooth to be El’s, missing her lifetime of calluses. Dee’s mind draws a pianist’s hand, wide-palmed with long fingers, masterful in its manipulation, octave to octave.

  The musician gives her throat a friendly squeeze, the way you’d squeeze someone’s upper arm in congratulations or comfort—except it’s a flash of constriction, a skipped breath. El would never risk letting someone else touch Dee this way. Would she? A firmer squeeze. Dee gasps without meaning to.

  It’s all me. It’s only me. It’s always me.

  Her throat is released. Two hands settle on her thighs from the front. Someone is kneeling in front of her, close enough that Dee can feel their breath hot between her legs. They turn their head back and forth, blowing a stream of air from the inside of Dee’s knee, up the inside of her thigh, across her pussy, down her other thigh, and back again. This, Dee thinks, seems like it violates the hands-only rule, in spirit if not word. The kneeler giggles, voice high and girlish. El’s natural laugh is a big, spirited bark.

  Strong hands massage the muscles at the base of her neck, unmistakably El’s. Dee tells herself that El—somehow—stood from where she’d been kneeling and moved behind the chair without making a sound, without disturbing Dee’s kinesthetic sense of where she was in the room. She tells herself it’s El she feels looming over her, that the clatter of footsteps and the scent of unfamiliar sweat and cologne is farther away than it seems. She tells herself it’s just El pretending to be other people, tricking the audience into thinking she’s tricking Dee, as they’ve agreed.

  She tells herself El would never turn her over to a roomful of strangers. Not even if Dee wanted her to. Not even if Dee begged her to. If Dee welcomed them, offered herself up like a feast. If she felt drunk on their attention, power-mad, giddy at having reduced a packed theater to single-minded animals.

  Hands slide over Dee’s shoulders, across her belly. Hands squeeze her breasts, climb up her thighs, rest on her hip, slap her cheek, tap the tip of her nose, tug lightly at her pubic hair. Hands palm her ass, cup her mound from behind. Fingers strum and abandon her clit. Fingers pop in and out of her mouth. Quick, darting motions, from all directions, never lingering, like she’s swimming with a school of fish, at the lightless bottom of the sea. An overwhelming, disorienting, untraceable amount of touch.

  It’s just El, of course. Of course. El walking in circles around her, El and her ventriloquism, her disguises, her multiplying, quicksilver hands, able to reach every part of Dee at once. El, who knows her, who can give and take and break her. Or not. Dee will never know, not really, what happens to her as she swims in darkness—she will always have to take El’s word for it. Dozens of times on this stage, she believes it was only El, only El’s hands that she’s ridden and bitten and bucked against, but she can’t know.

  And it’s the not-knowing that makes her core sing.

  Maybe people lined up in a theater, out the door and down the block, for the privilege of touching Dee, and it’s these faceless figures who are grasping at her now, entering her with their hands, jostling for their turn. Maybe this time, El will lose control of the crowd, and they’ll rush the stage, overwhelm her, a force as tremendous as Dee is powerless, strapped naked to a chair, her skin thrumming, death-defying adrenaline electrifying her veins.

  Or.

  Or El will whisper to Dee in her true, private voice, remove the blindfold, and reveal just the two of them onstage. She’ll undo Dee’s restraints, help her out of the chair, hold her upright on wobbling legs. She’ll take Dee’s hand, in her warm, familiar grasp, and raise their arms together, Dee still naked and bruised and soaked and spent, the audience beaming in the seats they never left, wild with applause.

  The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror

  by Carmen Maria Machado

  I would never forget the night I saw Maxa decompose before me. I was a young woman, barely budded, but I’d been able to make my way to Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol by telling my mother I needed to go to church.

  My mother was a devout woman, a seamstress, and when I walked out the door she kissed me and said she was pleased I was seeking God’s wisdom. When she pulled away, I saw there was a black spot of blood where she’d brushed a pricked finger against the sleeve of my coat.

  The entire way to the theater, a crow had fluttered around me. It flew from rooftop to rooftop, occasionally dropping down the cobblestone to fix me in its gaze before ascending again. Its eye looked like an onyx, and an oily prism blazed over its black feathers. My mother, had she seen it, would have told me the devil was leading me. But she was not there, and she did not see that the bird could just as easily been following me, as if I were the devil. I kept walking, and it kept leading, or following, until I turned a corner and it ascended to a rooftop and disappeared.

  The theater was built at the end of a narrow alley, limned with white, sand-colored buildings pocked with shuttered windows and wrought-iron terraces. For a brief moment, the chatter of pedestrians fell away, and the Grand-Guignol glowed in the dusk. The cobblestones beneath my feet were the same I’d been walking on, but suddenly their unevenness made me aware of every rotation of my hip, every inversion of my foot. I felt like the theater took two steps away from me for every step I took toward it, stretching the space before me to an ever-doubling length.

  The crow dove at me from a rooftop, shrieking like a djinn. I ran toward the threshold. The light pouring from the open door throbbed like a bruised thumb.

  * * *

  I had not, precisely, told my mother a lie. The theater had once been a church, though that night the room was hot with spectators instead of congregants, and just as cramped and feverish. The stage was claustrophobic, like a too-hot whisper from an intoxicated stranger. The cherubs that lined the ceiling had a demonic air, an askew quality, and seemed glazed in our collective oils. The smell of bodies was heightened—women’s menstruation and the swampy folds of men. We all breathed in sync and through our mouths. I sat toward the front of the room, pressed between a man who kept glancing at me in confusion and desire, and a couple who gripped each other’s bodies like they were about to be borne away by a flood.

  When Maxa came onto the stage, it was as if a window had been opened to allow a breeze, and a gale had entered instead. I felt the room bend around her. She was not beautiful in a traditional sense, but her dark eyes beheld all of us as if we were slightly familiar to her. Her mouth was painted the red of clotted blood.

  The play concerned a wife who hatched a scheme to murder her husband so that she might live with her lover. Maxa played the strutting spouse with such assurance I forgot I sat shoulder to shoulder with my fellow Parisians; instead, I felt as if I were the play’s maid, who appeared at the edge of the stage from time to time so
that she might overhear the strategic dialogue, staged to divert suspicion. The plan was so nefarious, so meticulously plotted, I was certain I could reproduce it if I cared to. She turned to the audience from time to time, addressing us with scorn, sounding a little disappointed in our prudishness, our lack of imagination. We did not care. We arced toward her voice like petals to the sun.

  In the final act, the wife lured her husband to her bedroom, where a large traveling trunk rested open on a tarpaulin. This was the plan: to murder him and pack him into the trunk, which she would take with her on a long journey. But before she was able to execute her plan, her husband seized the pistol and shot her dead. Her wrapped her in her own tarpaulin and placed her into her own trunk. It was heaved high in the air by an attendant and placed at the edge of the stage. The fiend murmured to himself—“She thought of everything”—and then cackled as he walked offstage. Then, a tremendous bang, as the front of the trunk fell open to reveal her body, twisted in a grotesque knot. The audience let out a collective breath. A woman wept silently in the row before me, and her companion turned to console her.

  I waited for the curtain to close on her death, but as I watched, her body began to teem with a living curtain of maggots. Someone screamed—it was me, it was me—as her flesh blackened and greened and sank in around her bones like fallen cake. I felt like a girl-child trapped in a nightmare. Some tiny corner of me knew that the effect was done with something real—lights or clay—but could not convince any other part of me that this was anything but the end.

  When the performance was over, I sat there picking at my skirt as the audience stood and shrieked and murmured confidences and eventually departed. I did not wish to return home just yet, when the nightmare of the performance lingered so close in my mind, and I felt warm and drowsy. No one came to move me, and I fell asleep there in my seat.

  A slam, wreathed in whispering, woke me. The theater was dark as a tomb, aside from a candle burning in my periphery. I reached for my throat, as though I expected it to be wet or gone or bitten, but only felt my own rapid pulse. I turned toward the whispering and saw one of the confessional booths had been closed, and from within there was a gasping sound, like a woman being strangled. I stood and walked to the screen, pressed my face close. Inside, the dark-haired woman was bent over, a man rutting behind her. Her face turned to the side and she saw me, but instead of screaming, she pressed a white finger to the pillow of her mouth.

  I turned and fled.

  When I returned that night, my mother asked me what the sermon had been about. I went to her and admired her embroidery. “The sinful Flesh and the living Word,” I said. She kissed me on the cheek. Her finger was still bleeding.

  * * *

  When my mother died of her wasting illness a few months later, I left our home—thrown out by the landlord, who’d asked for my body in lieu of rent—and found myself in front of the Grand-Guignol once more. I had some money on my person—enough for a few nights at an inn, a few hot meals—but still I turned some over for a ticket when I saw Maxa on the poster from the street. When I entered the theater, I saw once again the fleur-de-lis wallpaper surrounding me like so many seeds, like I was at the center of a large and pungent fruit—something unfathomably exotic.

  That night, Maxa gouged out her right eye with a knitting needle. I don’t remember why; besides, all explanations and plot contrivances were weak beneath the weight of the violence. She dipped her head forward and her hand twitched with new weight. I thought it would be white and smooth as an egg, but when she pulled her hand away it looked like a stillborn chick; a round mass of wet and gristle. I realized after she let it fall to the stage that I’d been holding my breath, and the influx of air was sweet as summer rainfall.

  At the end of the performance, I lingered near the stage, which was covered in gore. A young woman came out with a bucket and began to slop brown water along the wood. She looked up and saw me but said nothing. Feeling bold, I hitched my skirts and climbed up, stepping over a menacing streak of red. I could feel her eyes on me as I walked past her.

  Backstage, Maxa was sitting on her chair, looking ravished. Her curls were already half-undone, as if she’d been out on the water. A book was open in the dip of her skirts, and she was glancing at it with her good eye as she unpinned her hair. “Sabine!” she shouted. In front of her loomed a mirror the color of rust. In its reflection, I looked wide-eyed, feral, faint as a spirit.

  “Sabine, do you—” she said, and then flicked her gaze toward me. “May I help you?”

  Behind me, I heard footsteps, and the young woman, Sabine, appeared. She stepped around me and got very close to Maxa’s face. Her fingernail scraped along Maxa’s temple like a cat begging to be fed, and as the black peeled away, Maxa’s eyelid emerged beneath it.

  “I’m looking for work, for room and board,” I said.

  “Running away to the Grand-Guignol?” she said, her lips twitching slightly upward. “This is not a place for children to escape to. Won’t your mother be looking for you?” The effect seized the hairs on her brow, and she hissed a little. Sabine rolled her eyes, kept picking.

  “I’m not a child,” I said. “And my mother is dead.”

  She blinked her eyes hard, the one that had been encased in blood blinking a little more slowly than the other. Then she turned toward me, her whole body leaning from its chair as if she were drunk. Did she recognize me, from that night many months ago? It was unclear. Her eyes were bright, as if with fever. I felt that if all the lights went out, they would glitter like will-o’-wisps and lead me into the darkness.

  “Very well, Bess,” she said.

  “My name is not Bess,” I said. “It’s—”

  “It is now.” She hiked up her dress and pulled a flask from her garter.

  Something—disappointment, maybe—flicked through the muscles of Sabine’s face, but then it went flat, cold. “Don’t you have to ask Camille before—”

  “I’ll deal with him,” said Maxa. She lit a cigarette, stood. “If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be in the alley.” She tipped her head back and sucked at the flask as if it were a teat, and then stood and drifted into the shadows.

  Sabine handed me the mop.

  * * *

  Even when the Grand-Guignol was empty, it was never empty. Fat mice waddled casually along the baseboards, searching for what had rolled out of view. We chased bats out of the theater daily, an explosion of fur and leather. Crows—maybe even my crow—were taken to sauntering in casually, searching for food or baubles left behind by terrified audience members.

  Camille did not seem to understand why Maxa had hired me—though how could he, as I hardly understood it myself—but since I slept in her dressing room in the theater and Maxa fed me, he did not object. His round glasses did not stay on his nose very well; I offered to bend the wire, but he pushed them up nervously and turned away.

  Maxa’s vanity was cluttered with what she needed and more: bulbed bottles of scent with sleek lines, a small scissors, mascaras and powders the color of chalk, lipstick and a metal tracer, kohl for her eyes, a hot curler, rouge, a fat brush tipped in pink dust, pencils, old scripts, a pair of bone-colored dice. It seemed like a place where spells were cast, that by scooping up a resident mouse and opening its throat into her wineglass, she might be able to curse whomever she pleased. But there was no need for animal blood; powdered carmine—which Sabine told me was created by boiling insects—arrived in small sacks and I spent my waking hours mixing and reheating the concoction like a vampiress.

  At night, before sleep, I stared at the ceiling and thought about my mother—the gap of her, the tenacity of her voice. Every so often someone would come by to the theater’s doors, rattling them with a drunken ferocity, and then their footsteps would recede. I understood better than most. I was outside those doors once, but I never would be again. I could have been out on the streets, hungry and terrified. Here, the questions that seemed to follow me my entire life did not seem relevant
. I was invisible in a way that soothed me. My identity, my inclinations, my desires—it was all open for discussion.

  Before my mother’s death, when I performed the duty of pious daughter with rigor, there was a neighbor woman who often watched me from her window. My mother seemed to think of her as a useful eye—keeping watch on our door when she went to the market—but the woman never seemed to be watching with anything besides curiosity and disgust. Once, when I played jacks on the stoop, she came out and stood at the bottom of the steps with a basket slung on her hip.

  “Where is your father, child?” she’d ask.

  “He is—no longer here,” I said, for that was what my mother had said when dead could not reach her lips.

  She snorted as though she’d suspected as much.

  “And who does your mother think she’s fooling?”

  I caught my ball and looked up at her face, hard with suspicion and even anger. I didn’t know how to answer.

  “We all know who she laid with,” she said. “Look at you.” Then she shook her head and walked down the street.

  * * *

  A week into my tenure, I woke to find Maxa sprawled over her vanity, moaning into her arms. I stood, alarmed, and when she did not respond I rushed out to the theater, where Sabine was scraping candle wax off the floor.

  “Maxa is ill,” I gasped, bent over from my pulsing heart.

  Sabine stood with no tension, slowly wiping the blade on her skirt as she followed me backstage. She knelt down and looked at Maxa, who had fallen asleep.

  “Wine or opium, Maxa?” she said loudly. Maxa moaned a little. “Both?” Sabine said. Maxa slid from the dressing table and crawled into my cot. She was asleep before she finished her ascent, and her body went soft bent over the wooden frame.