Howard looked at the faces around him. Many of the men and a few of the women showed the same look of sick repulsion that he felt. But so many of the women had a feral look of joy – something that you would expect to see on a hyena as it tore into the corpse of a freshly-killed gazelle.
The worst, though, was the lust on the faces of a few of the men. Howard could understand the erotic power of a woman was submitting to a man, offering to give him any satisfaction that he desired. He could even appreciate that that submission could be obtained with the threat or reality of pain. But for a man to love the torture itself, to revel at the sight and sound of suffering, to wish to see the pain increased beyond human endurance without the possibility of any subsequent sexual act? That he could not fathom.
He wondered how many sociopaths walked past him on the street and in the office every day – men and women who were incapable of sharing in the suffering of another human being, but only knew pain if they felt it directly on their own flesh.
“That’s seven.”
He watched Marcie’s face as she delivered her eighth stroke with all the might that she could muster and wondered if she was one of those sociopaths.
As the beaten woman wept in agony, he studied his wife’s face hoping to see some flicker of humanity, however slight and brief, soften her features.
He saw only a grin so fierce that it was barely distinguishable from a snarl.
“Eight.”
Her ninth blow was delivered with as much vigor as any of the previous eight.
Catherine’s back should have been torn to shreds by the nine times nine individual lashes that it had endured.
Howard expected to see red blood cast across the audience and white bone showing where the flesh had been flayed away.
There was none.
The bruising would be terrible, but the woman’s delicate skin was intact. Not a drop of blood could be seen seeping from any break in that ravaged, burgundy fleshscape.
As he listened to the tortured woman beg for mercy, her soft, rapid words barely coherent, he envied the sociopaths in the room who felt nothing, shared none of her pain.
“Nine. Last stroke,” Jeff announced.
“Please,” Catherine whimpered in a tear-soaked voice.
A miracle.
Marcie flicked the lash casually against Catherine’s back in a dismissive gesture that barely brushed the tails against her skin. “There’s your mercy,” she said. “That’s more mercy than you showed any of us.” She dropped the scourge to the floor.
“Thank-you,” Catherine sobbed, softly.
“You won’t be throwing yourself on your back to service our husbands for a while,” Marcie sneered. “They don’t make a mattress soft enough.”
Catherine had neither will nor strength to answer; she slumped weakly against the bars of her former cage and let her hands dangle in their shackles.
Her job successfully completed, Marcie turned away from her handiwork, scanning the room for her husband.
Howard felt huge relief, not only because the torture was over, but because his dear, dear wife had shown a measure of humanity in the end. He could love her for that gesture.
“Ten,” Jeff announced.
The crowd applauded spontaneously. For Marcie? For Catherine? In thanks for the entertainment? Who could know why? It simply seemed appropriate to applaud at the end of the show.
During the applause, the two men, Jack and Bill if that were their real names, unlocked Catherine’s wrists from their shackles and led her toward the exit door. They had to hold her up by her arms and guide her steps after her ordeal.
She sobbed piteously. Her face was slick with tears.
She wasn’t taking any curtain calls after this performance.
Everyone began gathering their things and streaming out of the house as soon as the artist had left the room. The party was over.
Howard was subdued as he escorted Marcie back to the car.
“I voted to flog her,” Marcie said.
Howard shrugged. As soon as Marcie’s name had been drawn from the container, everyone at the party had known how she had voted.
“How did you vote?” she asked.
He fingered the badge that was in his pocket. “I couldn’t decide. I abstained.”
Howard suspected that he was the only person at the party who had not put his badge into one of the slots.
“Coward,” Marcie said and poked him playfully in the arm. “I knew that you wouldn’t vote to fuck her so I expected you to vote to free her.”
Howard wished that he had. It wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome but it would have meant something to him.
After the Ordeal:
“What happened?” Jeff asked as Catherine took the seat across the table from him.
“The committee passed me,” she said with a grin. “With distinction. The external examiner said that it was the most fascinating glimpse into the human soul that he had ever seen. I think that he was particularly impressed with the montage of people’s faces as they voted on my fate and then witnessed my flogging. It’s a pity that the audience couldn’t have had a chance to see themselves voting. It was the most illuminating sequence of all. Such a combination of lust and anger followed by some genuine remorse.”
“I’ll have to see it some time.”
“I’ll show it to you.”
He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re not going to erase any of those videos like you promised, are you?”
“It’s art. And it cost me a lot. But I’ll never show the recordings to anyone so it will be the same as if they were erased.”
“If they’re never observed then they don’t exist?”
“Something like that. The originals need to be archived. The artist has a duty to preserve her art. You’d be amazed by the amount of new media artwork that is lost to changes in technology every year. Almost all the art that was done with emerging technologies in the eighties will never be seen again.”
“Whatever. We need to celebrate your success. You’ve earned your Masters in Fine Art. That deserves champagne.” Jeff waved to a passing waiter.
Catherine laughed brightly. “You think that everything deserves champagne.”
“I think that you and I deserve champagne whenever we want.”
“I think that I deserve it for taking that flogging. God. If I’d known how bad that was going to hurt, I never would have done it. I’m no masochist. The only reason that I put it there was that I thought that the audience would shy away from anything so cruel. I expected most of them vote to let me go. The flogging option was supposed to be a dramatic gesture not a torture that would be administered on my poor back.”
“Surely you didn’t think that anyone would just let you walk away after you’d embarrassed them in front of their friends.”
“I guess I was naïve. I didn’t think that they’d feel that humiliated. I was just showing them what everyone had already seen when they looked at each other. It was supposed to be honest, not cruel.”
“I was afraid that that woman was going to strip all the flesh off you. She really laid into you.”
“She really did, didn’t she?” Catherine looked rueful. “You can thank Morris for protecting me from disfigurement. He’s known in the local S and M community as an expert with whips. The flogger was soft and light with broad round lashes that wouldn’t cut easily. The nine tails distributed the force so that no single lash hit too hard. Morris warned me that all those tails would decrease the damage but increase the pain. More important, though, he showed that woman how to use the flogger to hurt as much as possible but not cut. If she’d flicked the tips against me, she would have broken the skin but, by laying the lash flat across my whole back, she distributed the force. Morris had her practice on a punching bag until she got it right. He told her that it would hurt more that way. He was telling the truth about that. It was as agonizing as it looked. I thought I was going to die from the pain alone. He also told h
er that he would stop the flogging at the first sign of blood. That gave her a big incentive to do it the way he said.”
“The crowd would have felt cheated if he’d stopped the flogging after you’d only taken a couple of lashes.”
“No. Morris would have taken the flogger away and administered the remaining strokes himself. That would have been a mercy. When I researched this piece, I went to a club with Morris and watched him work. He can make it look like he’s beating someone half to death but be inflicting a lot less pain than that woman was doing. By her third stroke, I was praying that she would break the skin so that Morris would take over. You saw my back. It was a mass of bruises for weeks afterwards. I had to learn to sleep on my stomach.”
“I guess you would have preferred to be fucked by one of the men than to be flogged.”
“That I’d rather get loved than beaten? Surely that doesn’t surprise you.”
“Not a bit,” he grinned. “I know how much you like fucking with men.”
“I like fucking with you,” she said as she reached across the table to stroke his face.
He patted her hand. “We’ve got one other bit of business that I want to get out of the way this weekend.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to help me find a painting for my living room.” He grinned. “I’ve come to appreciate your taste in art.”
THE END
Afterword
These are works of fiction. Readers have often asked if I have experienced scenes like these in real life and I have to disappoint them by telling them that I have not. There is a caution in this. Nothing that I have described here has been tested in practice. The activities in these stories may not be as safe in reality as they are in my fantasies. If you’re going to play, then play safe, sane, and, above all, consensual.
I enjoy hearing how readers react to my writing. If you wish to comment, favorably or not, I can be reached at: [email protected].
If you wish to use my writing for commercial purposes, please write to me rather than waiting for my lawyer to contact you. I guarantee that you will find my terms more favorable than my lawyer’s.
Ashley Zacharias, 2011
Punish Me, Please Me Page 29
