A Penny Saved

by Sèphera Girón

  She’ll pay. With her body...and soul!

  “Find a penny, pick it up, the rest of the day you have good luck!” “A penny saved is a penny earned...” But what if that penny is the price of your soul?

  Cora hoards pennies, and why not? Pennies have been obsolete in Canada for years so to find one is rare. Unfortunately, Cora’s obsession has conjured a demon who requires payment for the deals he can make for her. Cora rises up through the business world, as promised, but at what price? There’s a special place in hell for some people, and Cora’s spot has been reserved.

  A Penny Saved

  Sèphera Girón

  Dedication

  For penny hoarders everywhere...you know who you are!

  A Penny Saved

  Cora spotted the coin glittering from many feet away. The sun was hitting it so that the glare of the copper, actually not copper at all but whatever metal they used for pennies after 2000, caught her eye. The street was crowded and she knew if she bent down to pick it up, she might cause a domino of tripping pedestrians. It didn’t matter. Superstition made her fingers itch. A penny on the ground was a wish and she needed all the wishes she could get.

  The day was grey with impending winter crisp in the air. The tall stone skyscrapers created wind tunnels where debris swirled and whipped. And yet the penny glowed, the peekaboo sun touching it with teasing rays. A penny. So odd to find pennies these days. Pennies had been discontinued a few years ago in Toronto, so the old “find a penny, pick it up, all the day you have good luck” adage was growing rare. Not to mention that “a penny saved is a penny earned” and she wanted the universe to notice that she cared about every little penny. And maybe one day she would be rewarded.

  At last, she was in front of the coin and she scooped it up without missing a step. She closed her fingers around it in her pocket and made her wish.

  Next she was standing in a bright light. She raised her hand to her face, squinting around her. She looked down at her naked body, her slightly swollen tummy, her other hand crossing her large pale breasts while she raised one firm toned yet large leg slightly sideways against the other.

  “Who are you?” Cora asked. Her mouth was weirdly dry. The light brightened and she heard whispers from beyond. Low, guttural, echoing around her, just below her range of understanding. “What are you saying?”

  A voice boomed as if over a speaker system.

  “Kneel down.”

  She stood squinting at the light. “Pardon me?”

  “Kneel down. Now.”

  She kneeled, modestly keeping her breasts covered. The floor was cold on her knees. She looked down and saw hunks of stone lining the floor. Cobblestone. Where the hell was she? She kept her gaze lowered so as to avoid the brilliant glare of the light. She took a deep breath, smelling the air. Stale, sweaty, rotten, salty, musky, muddy and damp. She wouldn’t be surprised if there were horses nearby.

  “Look up.”

  She lifted her head stoically, keeping her eyes tightly shut against the light. As she raised one of her hands to shield her face, it was roughly grabbed by manly fingers and pushed behind her back. As both of her hands were strapped with leather restraints behind her back, a leather blindfold was pressed against her eyes.

  “What?” She barely got the word out as a ball gag was slapped into her mouth and buckled behind her head. She was urged to her feet, spittle foaming from her gag as her long red hair hung across her face, blocking her own nose from breathing until she shook her head again. Her hair was pulled into a clump and she was forced to move with a rough tug. She shuffled along, being pushed from behind. The smell of leather and sweat was stronger now. And something else. Sweet and musky. A perfume. A scent that she vaguely recognized framing memories and nostalgia—clove cigarettes and spilled red wine.

  The hands were firm and strong as she was pulled back to stop walking. Other hands, several hands, tied her wrists, her ankles, thick heavy cords of rope winding around her breasts, her legs, her arms, through the crack in her legs, pulled tight against her pussy, slipping up her ass, and pinching against her throat. She was strung up as a fly in a web. There was no talking, no music, nothing but thick, heavy smells—sweat, excitement, burning meat, stale air, her own musky odor emitting a combination of fear and pleasure.

  Lashes of leather, braided rope and wooden sticks struck her repeatedly, on her back, on her breasts, on her ass. The blows were harsh, quick, and she needed to gasp, to cry out, but her mouth was stuffed wide open with rubber. Rhythmically, the leather licked her flesh, and she swung on the ropes, dancing on her naked tippy toes scraping the cobblestones to keep her balance as she was whipped from all sides.

  Each blow brought a fresh welt, a fresh sting, a fresh awakening. Her nerves tingled, warm pain cascading into pleasure as her body surged with sensation. Awareness grew sharper, her senses keener. Pain lashed into pleasure, fear trembled into elation.

  The whipping stopped. She stood, listening, and though she knew there were people around her, she heard nothing but a faint thrumming of distant drums and faraway screams.

  There was a sharp pinch in her back. A pain. A release. A soothing, throbbing pinprick. Pinch after pinch lined her back. At first, she wondered if there were bees stinging her but she recognized the pain. Straight pins were being stuck into her, in three long lines down her back. She stood, dangled, flinching as each new needle pricked and pulled through her flesh. Blood dripped down her back, some pins creating longer streams than others. Pin after pin entered her back and then the unseen hands worked on her breasts. Cora shook her head as the pain from dozens of needles stung like minifires, like vampiric blackflies clinging for a last meal. When she felt that she could take no more, that she could scream so hard the ball gag would burst from her mouth, the pricking stopped.

  Her bindings were released and the blindfold loosened. She looked down at her breasts shimmering with an armor of hundreds of copper-coloured needles, blood dripping down in bright red rivers. As she stood with quivering legs, she plucked the leather restraints from her wrists and held them in her hand, staring at the floor. The cobblestones were gone. The smells were gone. The unseen hands were gone.

  Cora was now where she had always been. In her bedroom. The cold, dank little room in the rented basement apartment where she had lived for the past four years. A glow from the full moon was dim through the slats of the blinds in the window. She turned on the bedside lamp and looked again at her leather prizes.

  “How did this happen?” she asked into the air, as if the leather would reply. She closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for something in her to hear or sense an answer. There were no answers.

  She studied the strips of leather, the blindfold, in her hand. She pressed them to her face, breathing deeply of the leather that reminded her of the lash of the whip on her naked back. With that in mind, she turned around and caught a glimpse of her back in the dresser mirror. There, she saw the lash marks, some still weeping lightly with scarlet beads of blood. Their sting grew stronger the more she stared. Rows of tiny dots marked where the needles had pierced her.

  “Ooo.” She winced and headed for the bathroom. She had to pass through the living room first. She hated the setup of the apartment, a cobbled together ramshackle of a mess, but it was large for downtown Toronto, and the price wasn’t insane. Every time she had the urge to move, she checked the papers and saw she was better off where she was. In her price bracket, one didn’t have luxury. So she remained a cellar dweller with a bathroom on the other side of a very large room that was the living-dining-kitchen-home office room, and amazingly held it all without too much clutter, and then there was a narrow hallway. She had
to pass the thin makeshift wall that housed the heaving, huffing furnace unit with its sudden and frightening bursts of unpredictable cycles, and then a bathroom. It was worth the walk most of the time. The room was huge. The toilet was nearly lost with the two-person walk-in shower stall with the pendulum showerheads. A luxury she had yet to share with another over the past few years.

  There was also a decent washer and dryer, which saved her the hell that most cellar dwellers faced of hauling dirty clothes to the Laundromat.

  Cora stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. The whole bathroom was coated in mirrors. Sometimes it creeped her out, like now.

  She stared at her wounds in the mirror, aware of shadows shifting in the corners of the many squares. As if a smog was pressing to leak through the mirrors.

  Cora found the rubbing alcohol and cotton and dabbed as many of the marks as she could. Her arms ached from reaching impossible places and finally she stood with the bottle perched on her shoulder and slowly let the alcohol run from the mouth of the bottle down her back.

  “Ahhh…” she screamed. “Shit!”

  She rode the waves of pain each tiny hole brought her, wondering who had played with her.

  She was no stranger to erotic dreams nor even erotic romps of an extreme nature now and again, yet through all her decades of nocturnal romps, she had never woken up with marks.

  How does one pull a dream into reality?

  Cora crawled into bed and stared at the clock. It was four. Afternoon or morning, she wasn’t sure. Sighing she stood up, and went over to the casement window. She lifted a shutter, bright light blinding her.

  Afternoon.

  She returned to her bed and took her TV remote from the night table. After idly clicking through the channels, she settled on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. The idiocy of Gilligan always got on her nerves but Tina Louise was hot.

  She closed her eyes and immediately the smell of leather filled her senses once more. Her ears rang with laugh tracks but her mind was back in the dungeon.

  Cora’s body trembled as she walked down a cold stone tunnel lit by fiery torches mounted in the walls. The TV noise grew distant as she approached a closed wooden door.

  She paused.

  She stared at the solid brass handle, a firm latch that would make noise when she pressed on it. If she opened the door, she was committed to whatever lay on the other side. Demon or dream, her curiosity bade her to press down.

  The door groaned open into a room brightly lit by dozens of candles. The ceilings were high, gleaming wooden slats framing murals of ethereal creatures and demons. Stories of temptation lined the roof and slid down the walls. Dozens of hand-carved mahogany chairs with overstuffed velvet were arranged in little groups around the room. Small lion-footed tables. A large long table with larger claws carved into the wood. A stage with a podium.

  She walked farther into the room, a musky scent of incense growing more overpowering, the candles flickering quickly. Her heart pounded, there were so many shadows. It would be so easy to be surprised. But she walked towards the stage. Beside the stage there was an altar. It was a beautifully carved wooden and stone monstrosity laden with ferocious faces and sharp claws. It held piles of rotten fruit, coins, jewels and papers. Candles burned brightly along the altar overseen by a voodoo doll, a Mary statue and a Buddha.

  Shadows flickered in the corners. A growing sense of unease swelled in her belly.

  “Hello?” she called. “I’m here.”

  Her voice echoed eerily around the room, ricocheting from corner to corner until it spiraled up out of the roof. She wiped sweat from her forehead, an ever-growing heat filling the room, as if an unseen fire were creeping closer with every breath she took.

  There was a foul smell of rotten fruit, curdled milk, perhaps rotten flesh itself. A thick musty wind blew up as a winged creature with a long tail swooped into the room. It landed on the floor near her and stood, morphing into a tall, muscular, copper-coloured gleaming long-haired man before she could fully register what was happening.

  He stared at her with brilliant red eyes, the black of his pupils slatted like a goat’s.

  “You called?”

  “Who are you?” she asked, heart slamming in her chest as he looked down at her. His wings tucked behind his back, he paced, naked and gleaming in the hot steaming room.

  “I am the one you’ve wanted, the one you’ve craved. You wanted to know more, see more, and here I am.”

  “No.”

  The demon laughed. He had long black hair that hung just past his shoulders, his red eyes sparkling with dark secrets.

  “What kind of a life do you want to lead? Fame, fortune, love, lust, money, power, new world order?”

  “All of the above.” She laughed.

  “Hungry, are we?”

  “Who isn’t? Why shouldn’t I be in charge? Why should I live in a shitty apartment with a shitty job? I want more. I want it all.”

  “And all it should be. It will be.”

  Cora burst awake, in her bed once more. Her body was slick with sweat. Her leather trophies were gone from the nightstand. She looked over at the TV. Gilligan was still trapped on the island.

  She sighed.

  “—by Monday, do you understand?” Hazel’s ice-green eyes flashed as her red claw-tipped hands slammed a stack of file folders onto Cora’s desk. Cora blinked, staring at the teetering stacks of papers already surrounding her, the computer screen blinking with unread emails, and the loud burbling of voices and phones around her.

  No, she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything.

  Cora pulled open the top file and set to work inputting the numbers into the database. Her fingers and eyes had a smooth connection that allowed her brain to freefall. She wanted to go back to that room with the unusual-looking man. Was it real? Was he real?

  She didn’t remember anything between the creature and sitting here at her desk. She looked down at herself and found she was appropriately dressed. She had been working, functioning. Somehow. Had it been her?

  Cora clicked the keys on the keyboard, staring into the large monitor, where several opened windows begged her attention. Another email popped up. She ignored it as she clicked open a new account file for the newly assigned task.

  She was on tightrope, high above the world, wet, shivering, terrified. High above the tallest apartment. Higher than the daredevils on the outdoor EdgeWalk at the CN Tower. She was into the clouds and beyond, so she knew it was a dream. It had to be a dream.

  The tightrope was comprised of shiny pennies, somehow hooked together creating a tenuous path. She was naked, barefoot, freezing cold in the pelting wind, struggling to cling to the rope with slippery, trembling toes.

  Below her was a blur of people like a runny oil painting. All watching and waiting, mouths giant black circles, growing wider with every step she took. She carefully planted toe-heel, toe-heel, clamping the metal rope tight with her toes. The rope swung in the breeze. A gentle sway at first, the rain cold pinpricks, the rope growing wetter. She walked farther, toe-heel, toe-heel. The rope swung hard to the left, and she flailed her arms, her feet slipping then finding purchase on the rope once more. The rope swung widely, farther with each lap, rain pummelling her, the wind chilling her to the bone until she finally fell.

  She tumbled through the air, watching the smudge of the world growing clearer as she hurtled towards it.

  She spun herself, letting fate decide if she would smash to pieces on her face or on her back. The sky raced past and then there was darkness.

  She blinked rapidly, her fingers still on the keys of her computer. She saw that she had completed the report; all she needed to do was print it up.

  The pages whirred through her nearby printer, and she watched what she could of her coworkers through the opening from her cubicle. She had a view of s
everal other cubicles and the hallway where people went to the kitchen and water cooler. She saw that Henry Thomas was walking along the hallway, perhaps getting a coffee. She grabbed her mug and straightened herself up as she left the flimsy partitions of her cubicle. Around her, voices buzzed and chattered, talking up clients, conducting research, discussing childcare issues with the nanny.

  Henry Thomas was her office crush. Life was always more fun when she had a flirtation. In all her years, none of her flirtations had ever panned out. She was always that office pal, “one of the guys”, just someone who was always there. So as the years bled on, and she’d play her office flirt games with whatever nice-looking man might be on staff she began to aim higher. And higher and higher.

  Her last office flirtation had been with a vice president. She had found him attractive in his suit-wearing-briefcase-holding conformist manner. To her surprise, he flirted back. He even took her to a musical and another time for dinner. However, nothing ever came of it and he married someone else she hadn’t even known was in the picture.

  So she never actually put her heart into her office flirtations. Hearts got broken. But work was forever. Flirtations were games with no expectations and no emotions. She could dance and make the drudgery of work go by and when she got home, her world was her kingdom.

  She pushed the lunch room door open as Henry was pouring coffee into his mug. Vera, from telemarketing, and Connie, from media, were also puttering in the small kitchen, making snacks and talking.

  Cora stood by the coffee pot, watching Henry intensely as he placed the coffee pot back into the holder.

  “Why do you do this?” Cora asked him.

  “Do what?” he asked as he put two small spoons of sugar into his mug. He added a splash of cream. He stirred and she noticed how long and slender his fingers were. They had a delicate movement that intrigued her. She broke her attention from his hands and stared up into his eyes.

  “You’re the executive business manager, practically president, of this whole corporation. Why do you come in and get this not-so-great coffee with us lowly peons when you can go downstairs and have a triple latté hooha?” Cora filled her own mug with coffee as she spoke.