by Alison Tyler
“I’ll never forget that fucking chicken,” I said. “Or the chicken-inspired fucking.”
“You know it,” Calvin said. And smacked my ass one more time. When I cried out, he grinned. “That one was just for garnish.”
THE BONDAGE PIG
Kristina Lloyd
Ralph brought the pig home when I was out, whether by accident or design, I couldn’t say. I got back from the community garden, dumped a bag of veggies on the kitchen table and immediately sensed a presence, a dark anticipation lurking in the house. Dread is too strong a word for what I felt. It was more akin to the unease experienced before a thunderstorm, that time of waiting when you long for release but the imminent violence bothers you.
“What?” I asked.
Ralph was rinsing a pan of pearl barley in the sink. “What’s what?”
“Dunno. Something’s up.”
Ralph shrugged. “Nothing’s up. You okay?”
“Sure.”
Ralph put the pan on the hob, paid too much attention to the dial, then straightened. He smiled, thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, looking guilty. “I have to work tonight, sorry.”
“No worries. What is it?”
“A repair,” he said. “Looks a bit of a bastard. Not sure how I’m going to tackle it.”
“Repair of what?”
Ralph shrugged. “Just a, um, Victorian curiosity. Anyway, sorry, Sim. I need to…”
“Honestly, it’s fine. But try not to be too late coming to bed, eh? It’s been ages.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
Ralph’s always sorry.
I took a bath later that evening. I could hear Ralph clattering above me in his attic-workshop. I was aching and dirty from an afternoon’s gardening followed by two hours of squashing sodden newspaper into a press to make bricks for the fire. The gardening I enjoy, the brick-making’s a chore, but Ralph and I are committed to ethical, green living. The bathwater around me was gray, its surface filmy with soap, and the subaquatic shadow of my pubes was a lonely, ominous rock on a seabed of flesh, my nipples cresting in two coral peaks.
Bath time makes me dreamy. The room was smudged with mist, a great cloud lit from within by the diffuse glow of a shaving light. Outside, the sky was black and, on the windowsill, a large fern glittered with sequins of peeping moonlight, its green fronds veiled by the room’s haze. My body became mysterious and charmed, a powerful primeval thing in a land of carboniferous forests, swamps, stars and lumbering, long-necked monsters.
I listened to Ralph pacing to and fro as he does when there’s a problem to solve. I fancied it would be the repair troubling him rather than the real problem: us, grown dull and old too fast, doing the same thing week in, week out. I heard him sawing and hammering, pictured his lanky frame hunched over his workbench, straggly blond hair tucked behind his ears. I hung on to silences until my thoughts wandered off, a thump or a scrape returning me to the moment. I drained away water, topped up with hot. Steam curled lazily in the half light. I was hoping to emerge from the bath when Ralph had finished work, then lie down on the bed, pink and clean, and have him sully me with scents of sawdust, sweat and leather, his fingertips rough from labor. Unfortunately, he appeared to be in no rush to leave the attic.
I pinched my nose and sank my head underwater, wondering what the repair was. I wanted to stay submerged a long time, enveloped by fluid, not breathing. It was peaceful and warm. When I came up for air, I thought I heard a faint cry of pleasure from upstairs. I held still, listening. A few seconds later, I caught the noise again. Then again, louder this time and almost pained. Was he…? Yes, he was! Ralph was jerking off!
I was angry, embarrassed and humiliated: angry because he should be saving that for me; embarrassed because we had a lodger, Jack, who was probably home by now and could well be within earshot; and humiliated because if Jack heard, he would know Ralph no longer desired me and I’d rather those mortifying, domestic intimacies were kept private, thanks very much.
A series of long, guttural groans shivered through the house, each cry stretched thin with torment and incredulity. I remembered, with the anguish of loss, how it used to be when Ralph would grab me by the hair and bang me six ways till Sunday.
Despite my resentment, the noise from the attic, so strangely and horribly potent, snagged at my cunt. As Ralph’s cries rose to a pitch of near-bestial abandonment, I hooked my fingers inside myself, thrashing my clit in a frenzy of tiny splashes. I kept my moans as soft as I could. When I came, someone paused the universe. I shattered into a million little pieces and was blasted across time, at one with the dinosaurs and space travel and everything in between. Angels danced in my thighs, their revelry light, perfect and joyous.
When the clutches subsided, my thighs grew heavy. I rested my head against the slope of the bath, panting and confused. The sick taint of shame stole over me as it used to when I was a teenager. Ralph’s weird cries echoed in my ears and I lay in the cringing regret of my post-orgasmic stupor.
I didn’t know why I felt so bad when it had just felt so good. I simply knew I couldn’t stay in that space any longer. I needed to distance myself from whatever had just happened. Quickly, I wrapped myself in a towel, bundled my hair in a turban and pulled the plug, leaving the scene of the crime with steam billowing around me like dry ice. Jack, our lodger, sat opposite the bathroom door, slumped, cool and rebellious. His knees were raised and open, his back to the wall, a cigarette in one hand, a saucer of ash on the floor.
I pulled up short, heat rising in my already-hot cheeks. Jack stood but it was more like he bloomed in fast motion, a surly, stubborn bud unfurling and swelling to become a glorious tropical flower whose nectar was poison. Tribal tattoos swirled on one big bicep and his short hair wasn’t merely red. It was a tantalizingly decadent russet reminiscent of ruthless Tudor kings, forest hunts and witchcraft. He smelled of beer and cigarettes.
I gripped my towel. “We don’t allow smoking in the house.”
Jack swaggered past me into the bathroom and tossed the butt into the toilet. A small hiss extinguished the cigarette. “I forgot,” he said flatly. He stood before the toilet, looking at me as he unzipped.
I wrapped my towel tighter, hurrying away.
I didn’t get chance to investigate the attic until Saturday morning when Ralph was holding his weekly whittling workshop at the community center in town. I hadn’t asked about the repair. Something told me not to. The closest I came to mentioning anything was when I complained Jack had been smoking in the house while Ralph had been busy upstairs. I tried to make the word “busy” sound as loaded as possible.
Ralph shrugged. “Ah, he’d probably been down at the pub, that’s all.”
“Well, aren’t you going to call him on it?” I said. “He’s more your friend than mine.”
“It’ll be a one-off, don’t fret.”
But I wasn’t convinced and I did fret. I was disappointed, too, that Ralph had sided with Jack. We didn’t even know him very well. He was a friend of a friend of Ralph’s, in need of somewhere to stay, so we’d offered him our spare room for a nominal rent. The deal was supposed to last a couple of weeks but he’d already been with us a month. Some people, you give them an inch and they take a mile. Sure, the extra money was useful, but we should have been charging more for a long-term let. However, we aim to be good and kind, and Jack was out of work. Mind you, he always managed to find beer money, didn’t he? But on the plus side, he slept late and, since Ralph and I have our morning routines, I was grateful for that.
And if I’m being honest, I rather liked how Jack’s presence disrupted the normality of me and Ralph. The mild threat, while often irritating, was secretly welcome.
It was a bright autumn day of low temperatures and crisp sunshine. I heaped the fireplace in the living room with dried newspaper bricks and pinecones while Ralph stirred porridge in the kitchen. I gazed into the leaping blood-orange flames, entranced. At the fire’s heart, the pinecones were charred, malevolent flow
ers. When Ralph left for his class, he pecked me on the forehead, and even though he’d recently showered, I caught a hint of the smell that had been hanging around him for days. It wasn’t his smell. This was feral and musky, on the edge of repellant. To my shame, I found its nastiness arousing.
Ralph hadn’t cleaned the pan he’d used for the porridge, nor had he returned the milk to the fridge. This was unusual. He’s a tidy man. Jack was in bed. This wasn’t unusual. He rarely emerged before noon on a weekend. I made for the attic, intrigued but also drawn by an inexplicable pull. It seemed to me discovering what was up there would satisfy my mind and a whole lot more.
Crazy, I know, but ever since Ralph had brought his Victorian curiosity home, I’d been twisted up with vast, unfathomable cravings. It was a yearning for nicotine, sugar, sex and heroin; for ecstasy, annihilation and for flinging myself off a cliff and embracing airy, exhilarating transcendence. It was all those things and none of them.
The door was ajar and that smell seeped out as I pushed, an ancient, earthy scent riding the regular aromatic wave of fresh wood and leather. My hands were shaking. Sunlight slanted in through two large, sloping windows, pale angles hanging like a ghostly representation of the attic’s pine beams. A dusty haze fuzzed the center of the workshop and I switched on a random selection of lights, sending shadows scuttling out of the corners.
Ralph’s work surfaces were strewn with chaos, while sawdust, leather, chunks of wood and mess littered the floor. The corrugated tube of a dust extractor snaked among the debris. Saws bared their teeth. Tools and knives dangling from hooks and poking from pots glinted with medieval menace. From a high beam, a wooden African mask gazed down with blank, black eye sockets.
But I was used to the mask’s face. It was always there. The face that troubled me was a new one, a dark, burnished face with beady glass eyes and a broad snout pierced by a ring. It belonged to a life-sized, stuffed leather pig, deeply upholstered like a Chesterfield sofa. “Grotesque” is the word that sprang to mind. I stared at the inert beast, my heart quickening. I couldn’t say if I was excited or afraid. I knew only that I was reacting strongly to the pig’s presence.
Leaving the attic door open so I could listen out for Jack or the phone, I drew hesitantly closer. The pig was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It stood on metal trotters, sunlight glossing its quilted bulk. The leather was a dark oxblood, its pouches and pits so taut the skin gleamed with the hard polish of wood. On the pig’s back was a brown wooden saddle, a fine crack running vertically down its center.
I might have guessed at the pig being a plaything from a nineteenth-century nursery if it hadn’t been for the huge, ruddy phallus protruding below its hindquarters. The penis wasn’t corkscrew-shaped as on a living, breathing pig, but realism obviously wasn’t the aim here. If I’d been looking for confirmation the Victorians were an odd bunch, it was jutting out in front of me, larger than life, and then some.
I glanced around the attic, wondering what Ralph made of this bizarre artifact. I recalled hearing him jerk off on the night he’d supposedly been working on the repair. Christ, our problems were bigger than I feared if my love rival was a leather pig, hung like a horse.
But no, this was something else. The attic possessed an unsettling atmosphere, a brooding eroticism hanging in the air, oppressive and enticing. Objectively speaking, the pig wasn’t attractive, I could see that. But somehow, it created an attraction, almost as if it had charisma. I know this sounds loopy, but I sensed an intangible danger lying in wait for me. In my head, one voice urged me to leave and get a breath of air, while another voice begged me to stay. The latter was not the voice of reason; it was fueled by lust, and even though I’ve been a committed atheist since the age of fifteen, I felt as if the devil himself had a hand in it. And I couldn’t turn away.
On one of Ralph’s workbenches, a number of carved miniature pigs, all with spread wings, were scattered about the surface. Flying pigs, I mused as I rolled one in my hand. It was unvarnished, still slightly rough in its execution and, at a guess, made from beech. Other pigs were well shaped and finely crafted, while some had been abandoned at an early stage. I set the pig down, feeling as if I no longer knew or understood Ralph. Is this, I wondered, how marriages disintegrate? You find flying pigs in your attic and can’t discuss it with your husband?
The attic was warm although it shouldn’t have been. I wondered if Jack had surfaced yet. I hoped when he did, he would add more bricks to the fire to keep the living room heated. I imagined he wouldn’t; too much of a layabout to care. He’ll start to care when it gets colder, I thought. I slung my cardigan over a chair, comfortable enough in one of Ralph’s old shirts and a pair of stripy leg warmers I’d knitted for myself two winters ago.
I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to sit astride the pig. I’d wanted to do so ever since I’d first entered the attic. And I might have done that, might have kept it nice and simple if, on approaching the pig, I hadn’t been struck by an overwhelming urge to handle its big, shiny phallus. I suddenly wanted to feel it in my fingers, hard, polished and lewd. My hunger to touch the pig was also, inexplicably, driven by a desire to give pleasure to a lover. I had to remind myself this was an unpleasant object whose heart was sawdust, whose cock was wood.
I dropped to the floor alongside the pig, reaching below to fondle its phallus like some sick milkmaid. My fingers couldn’t encircle the pig’s girth, so I ran my hand, cupped like a C, up and down its length. The wood was as smooth as glass and marble! That irresistible tactility practically powered my caress. I stroked greedily, slipping along the swinish shaft, then molding my palm to its blunt, rounded end. My groin tingled as I imagined a thick, hard cock sliding inside me, and I remembered, with a tug of nostalgia, the wooden dildo Ralph had once carved for me. It was curved to hit my G-spot. We’d named it Nessie after the Loch Ness Monster. I didn’t know where it was anymore. I needed to rectify that.
An over enthusiastic caress on my part caused the pig’s stout member to creak and shift. For one terrible moment, I thought the beast was alive, its porcine arousal swelling in my hand. I tested again, eliciting another grunt from the wood. Then, terrifyingly, the shaft dipped a fraction as if it were coming loose in my hand.
Oh hell. I held my breath, fearing I might have broken the monster. How on earth would I explain that to Ralph? But no, not broken. This cock, I realized, was much more than a cock. I repeated the action, pulling the shaft backward. The entire pig shuddered and squeaked. With a groan, the wooden saddle split open down the center and began to rise and separate. I pulled harder on the phallus, now understanding it functioned as a lever. I leaned backward as the saddle separated further, a compartment emerging from the pig’s center, three tiers of drawers opening out beneath each saddle half, staggered like those of a cantilever sewing box.
I shuffled backward on my knees, gawping in astonishment. The drawers resembled wings. Ralph’s miniature flying-pig carvings immediately made sense. Or at least, I saw a connection between them and this. There was no sense anywhere in the attic. It was a madman’s playroom.
I couldn’t deny my excitement. My heart was thumping, my stomach fluttering. Our attic had the weirdest treasure. I was about to peer forward to inspect the contents of the drawers when I glimpsed a figure in the corner of my eye. I shrieked. I had company. My heart stalled. I felt woozy, hot.
Standing in the attic doorway was Jack, wearing nothing but a pair of faded, black jogging bottoms, ragged at the hem. He was propped against the doorjamb, arms folded, smirking. His biceps curved into the broad bulk of his shoulders, black tattoos licking at his contours. The hair on his creamily pale chest glinted red-gold in the mellow, autumn light and further down, a neat coppery line ran from his navel, down his flat belly, and disappeared into the waistband of his joggers.
I pressed my hand to my chest as if to keep my heart from leaping out. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough,” he replied smoothly.
&n
bsp; I blushed, saying nothing. There was no point.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” Jack strode into the room, hands in his baggy pockets. His outline smudged when he walked through a wedge of dusty sunlight. He looked mythic, otherworldly. Sensation pulsed in my groin, and I quickly grew tender and wet.
“You shouldn’t smoke in the house,” I said.
“I’m not smoking.”
“But sometimes you do. Ralph and I don’t smoke and we don’t want people smoking in our house either. You have to go outside. I can smell it from your room too. It’s not on, I don’t like it, this is our house, mine and Ralph’s. You can’t just—”
“Okay, okay. I’ve got the message.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“Same as you,” he said. He stood a few feet from me, looking down and smiling. His cock was lifting inside his joggers, pushing obscenely at the fabric. I wished I wasn’t on my knees, wished my cunt wasn’t tingling so insistently.
“No, this is my house,” I said, sounding bolder than I felt. “This is my husband’s workshop. I have every right to be here. You don’t. You’ve overstepped the mark, Jack. You’re arrogant and presumptuous. And nosy. You have no damn—”
“Quit with the attack!” He jerked his chin at me, eyes flinty with anger. “I saw you. I stood here and watched you work that shiny pig-dick. Saw how you loved it.” He took a step closer, deliberately intimidating. “And you know what? I did exactly the same thing when you and Ralph were sleeping. Yeah, that’s right. Crept up here one night and wound up making out with…with that.” He flipped a dismissive hand toward the pig. “Because I had no choice, see? I had no fucking choice.”
He gave me a long, hard stare as if, with the force of his eyes, he could make his words sink in.
I looked at the ground. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“And Ralph had no choice. None of us do.”
