Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

Not just sometimes, always. I wonder, how did I deserve her? Those beautiful deep brown eyes suck me deep. Sliding down a slope of lust and love and self destruction. I go gladly.

  When I kiss her lips, I feel like a trespasser. Waiting for the shots to ring out behind me, striking me with bullet bliss in the back, I thrust my tongue inside her, and she capitulates.

  For the moment.

  The laughter in those brown eyes says she’s content with my descent. But laughter turns to curdled scream. Swallow and she’s gone.

  Naturally I’ve grown careful around her. Why would I want to go from kiss to kicks? She tells me to cook her dinner and I do. I follow her when she takes walks in the forest behind her house.

  “On all fours,” she says.

  “Naked.”

  It makes her happy.

  The first time she told me to strip off my suit and crawl, I made the mistake of giggling.

  The tip of her high heels caught me in the ear. I couldn’t hear on my right side for two days. But I took off the suit.

  Now I do what she says without question. She is still the only person who has ever made me happy. And, truth be told, maybe I like licking the dirt she plays in.

  Maybe I like it too much.

  Now I’m paying.

  “You’re a piece of wood,” she screamed at me this morning. I had kissed her before leaving for work. She promptly stuck out her jaw and smiled. I know that smile well. It says, “I’m gonna fuck with you. And if you resist, you’ll like it less.”

  “Lick my toes,” she commanded.

  That was easy. I started to get down on the floor to comply, but she shook her head.

  “Not here. I want to come to the office with you. When we get into the lobby, I want to you get down on your hands and knees and lick my feet. In front of your secretary and your boss.”

  I have been well-trained. I got to my feet and opened the door for her.

  By the time we got to my office, she’d turned dangerous. Apparently compliance was not what she was after.

  “You’re a wooden soldier,” she spit. “Where are your balls?”

  I think the moment that I crawled across the light gray carpet of my office, in front of the gaping mouth of Lorene, our receptionist, was the breaking point. As I ran my tongue in between the crevices of her feet, she kicked me in the nose, turned and walked out.

  I followed her. My heart was a bubble above a pin cushion. I had done everything she asked.

  Everything.

  How could anything be wrong?

  I think it’s really wrong now.

  I think I’m dying.

  Have you ever seen those steel combs that end in a spike of a handle?

  I’m staring at one now.

  It’s sticking out of me. And not because it’s stuck in my hair.

  She ignored me at first when I followed her from the office, but finally, she turned and kissed me. Hard and angry. Strands of her long spidery hair covered my eyes as she twisted me beneath her and we fell to the parking lot pavement.

  “I’m yours,” I gasped, out of breath from her sudden attack.

  “I know. But you must do one more thing for me. If you can do this…”

  “If you can do this…” had been her mantra since the day we met. I understood the motive behind Hercules’ labors. But I had prevailed so far. And she still slept with me every night. Not some other, better looking, better hung guy. It was enough for me.

  Oh, the steel comb? It’s between my legs. A salad fork is beside it.

  “Since you’ve been acting wooden lately, I’m going to teach you what wood is,” she pronounced suddenly.

  I didn’t like the sound of it.

  She led me behind the house, into the forest. I had never before had to strip and crawl through the pine needles and rough branches, which made me nervous. She carried a bag with her, and wouldn’t speak.

  “Here,” she said.

  We stood in a small clearing. Near the center was a dead oak trunk. It looked as if it had been struck by lightning. About 15 feet up, it had snapped off and fallen to the ground. The bare trunk pointed jaggedly at the sky still, but it had been years since the tree had sprouted a leaf of life.

  “Now you can strip,” she said. I unbuttoned my shirt, and dropped my slacks without thinking. She had long ago flogged away whatever fears I had about showing my nakedness. When I had piled all my clothes to the side of the tree, she slapped me, hard, on the ass. I grinned, secretly enjoying any kind of touch from her.

  “Against the tree,” she barked.

  And then she opened her bag and I became afraid.

  She took out a hammer first. And then a knitting needle. And a steel comb. And fork. And steak knife. She took out bobby pins and a spiked hair curler.

  And she laughed.

  It wasn’t a good sound. I felt my penis get perversely, uncomfortably hard.

  She used the hair curler first.

  “Bend over,” she said.

  It burned like fire at first, then sent sparks of broken glass pain up my bowel. But I took it. I wanted to make her happy.

  “Back against the tree.”

  I was crying, but I held my tongue. She plugged the curling iron into an extension cord, and proceeded to tie my waist to the tree with it. If I moved a muscle the teeth of the curling iron shifted inside me, drawing new gashes of pain. I remained very still.

  “Wooden as a tree,” she growled, and then slapped my obstinately erect cock with derision.

  That’s when she got the hammer.

  “If wood is what you are, wood is what you’ll be,” she mumbled, and began to stretch the skin of my balls to touch the rough bark of the dead tree behind me. Before I could even try to move, she picked up the steel comb and pierced the skin she held taut, burying the point in the tree. With three strokes of the hammer she drove it solid, and then repeated the action on the other testicle with a fork.

  I screamed then. I started to thrash, to kick her away from me, but the motion only drew the pain faster.

  “Ah, some reaction,” she nodded. “Good. Let’s try for some more.”

  I’m looking at the comb sticking out from my testicles, and wondering if I can ever go home again.

  There’s blood on the ground at the base of the tree.

  An alarming amount.

  There’s a knife buried in my left shoulder, a knitting needle in my right. She pierced the cartilage of my ear with a bobby pin, and then hammered it to the tree. She missed once, hitting the ridge above my eye. I can still see out of the other one. I can see the nails that pin my hands to the tree trunk, one at each side. I can see the dried blood that smears my body, and the razor graffiti that she wrote on my chest.

  “Wood,” it says, by my left nipple.

  “Burns” it says, by my belly button. It’s a little smeared where the blood ran, but still legible.

  The sun set awhile ago, and the night has quieted. I watched the grass swaying in the breeze for a few hours, but now it’s still.

  The pain has dulled to background, and I’m almost floating above it all now. If she thought to make me more responsive to her little murders, I think the plan has backfired. I’m above the pain, above the blood, above the sadistic impulse in her that makes her burn and kick and spit on me.

  And still, she makes me happy.

  “Tonight,” she promised. “I’ll be back. I’ll bring some matches. We’ll have a bonfire, you and I. Dead wood burns best.”

  It looks like this time, I won’t fail her.

  One night at an Italian restaurant, I found myself trying to unobtrusively cut a pill in half with a dull bread knife for my wife, whose throat constricts on all but the smallest of pills. This seemed both absurd and yet, absolutely necessary (she had a splitting headache which threatened to ruin our getaway weekend trip). “It’s all psychological,” I’ve often said – not that this has any effect. Psychological constraints are just as constricting as a real-life straitjacket. Of course, the
re are a lot more things in life beside pills that turn out to be difficult to swallow…

  Swallowing the Pill

  n mid-sip Gerard coughed into his beer, sending a puff of froth over the edge. He turned his face away so the foam would drip from his chin to the floor, instead of wetting his lap.

  “Jeez man, you need some codeine. And an antibiotic. You sound terrible.”

  Gerard nodded mutely, willing the spasms to still in his tickling, wheezing throat. “Got some,” he gasped finally. Can’t swallow the damn antibiotic pills though. They’re effin’ horse pills.”

  Andy laughed and shook his head. “Whaddya mean you can’t swallow them?”

  Gerard knew that behind the question was an accusation, the same disbelieving put-down that he’d heard from pharmacists all his life. What are you, a baby or something? Be a man and take your medicine.

  “Believe me, I’ve tried, I just can’t get them down.”

  “It’s not a matter of can’t, Ger,” Andy clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s a matter of won’t. Your throat is big enough to accommodate the pill, but your mind says no. It’s all in your head, my friend. If you really wanted to, you could swallow those pills.”

  Gerard coughed again, a prolonged hacking that left his chest prickling with deep-burning fire. He shook his head again, sniffed wetly and then shrugged.

  “No, I’m serious here,” Andy pushed, refusing to let the subject drop. “I don’t believe your body is physically capable of floor vaulting from one end of this bar to the other – that’s just not in your genes. But swallowing a pill…”

  Gerard refused to argue anymore, and quenched the fire in his lungs with another draught of beer. Andy leaned closer, whispering so nobody else at the bar could hear.

  “You can do whatever you want. Don’t you realize that?”

  Gerard squinted sidelong at his friend. “Whaddya talking about?”

  “OK, take your boss. You’re always complaining that the bitch takes shit out on you. Well, give it back to her. And don’t say you can’t. OK, maybe you shouldn’t knock her out physically because you’d get fired – and that would hurt you. But there are ways to get even. Ways that only you will know about. Piss in her coffee cup. Hack into her documents directory and delete all the records she worked on the day before. Shit like that. You’ll feel better.”

  Gerard shook his head. Andy was drunk again.

  “Listen to me. Haven’t you ever wondered what you’re really capable of?”

  Again Gerard shook his head. He was really wishing he’d stayed home tonight. In his bed.

  “Man, you take everything lying down. You don’t try. Push the envelope a little. I mean, shit, when you found out about Jenine and her boss, what did you do?”

  Gerard slumped a little and mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said I forgave her.”

  “You forgave her. You didn’t scream at her, wail on her or give her anything that she deserved.”

  “No. I couldn’t hurt her, she’s my wife. I loved her. I still do.”

  “Ah, and there’s where you’re wrong, champ. You could’ve hurt her. She deserved some hurt for what she did to you. Hell, she might have even appreciated it. And you would have felt more like a man if you had.”

  Gerard looked away and Andy grabbed his shoulder.

  “The very least you could’ve done is had a little of your own on the side. You’ve told me about that admin girl at work. What’s her name, Trish? She comes on to you, so take her up on it.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Make you a deal. You think about this. Every time you say to yourself ‘I can’t do that’ this week, I want you to force yourself to do it anyway.”

  “Forget it,” Gerard whispered.

  “No, c’mon. You worried about going to hell? You don’t do church, so if there is one, you’re going there anyway.”

  Gerard sighed. “There’s no hell, I know that.”

  “Well then. Time for you to break some boundaries, my man. C’mon, promise – every day this week you’re going to do something that you say ‘I can’t’ about. By this time next week, I guarantee you, that pill will be going down your throat without a second thought.”

  “Yeah right,” Gerard laughed. “If I boff Trish I’ll be able to swallow a pill all of a sudden? Get real.”

  “It’s not about doing Trish or not doing Trish,” Andy hissed. “It’s about pushing yourself. It’s about getting beyond all those little walls you’ve put up that don’t do you or anyone else a bit of good. You can do whatever you want, man. For once quit staring at the ground and try to see what you’re really capable of. I guarantee you, the world will be a much different place for you.”

  Gerard slept badly and dreamed worse. His nightmares were peopled with choking pills and knives and beautiful women who grabbed him by his silk tie and dragged him beneath a sea of black water.

  Jenine was already in the shower when he staggered to the bathroom feeling worse than he had the day before. When was he going to shake this cold?

  “How ya feeling, honey?” came a silky voice from behind the curtain. Splashes of water slapped at the walls of the shower as she soaped her head and underarms.

  “Worse,” he croaked, and uncapped the horse pill bottle. Andy was right. He didn’t try hard enough. He filled the bathroom cup with cold water and stared at the long, daisy-yellow pill in his hand. Then, closing his eyes, he tilted his head back and brought a hand up to his mouth. His other hand brought up the cup and with a gulp of cool liquid, he sent the pill to the back of his throat.

  Where it lodged.

  His eyes popped open and he shook his head in panic and the remaining water gurgled from between his lips into the sink. Leaning over the basin he coughed violently, freeing the pill to shoot from his throat to lie on the silver ring at the bottom of the sink. Tears wet the corners of his eyes as Jenine peered out from the curtain, black hair white with the foam of shampoo.

  “OK?” she asked. He nodded quickly, not daring to talk. Replacing the cup in the holder by his toothbrush, he left the bathroom to her once again.

  As Andy had so often reminded him, Gerard was a bit of a doormat. In college, with his boyish face and weight-bench augmented biceps, he’d never lacked for dates. But he’d also never been the one to call the relationships off. He was dumped and dumped on. Things hadn’t really ever changed. Now at work, he carried the yoke of blame for every department misstep, and at home his wife had, at least temporarily, dumped him over for another man. Gerard accepted it all and called himself lucky.

  Well, sometimes.

  It was easier to just take it and not cause a scene. Not that he didn’t fume inside. He amused himself, placated himself, really, by imagining scenes where he took his petty revenges and emerged victorious from his complacency. But every fantasy held a bitter undercurrent of self-loathing. Because he could never act any of them out.

  Now, as he sat in front of Angela Harper’s well-polished mahogany desk, he thought again of Andy’s taunts of the night before. The spill of shrill rhetoric spun past his ears like white powder from the spout of a snow blower. It was Angela who had fucked up this time. It was her paperwork that was amiss. But as usual, she was playing pin the tail on Gerard with a tirade of self-righteous vinegar. Idly he stared at her coffee cup and grinned at Andy’s suggestion. No… he could go one better. He could serve the bitch coffee and cream, he could. And she’d suck it up and like it.

  “Yeah right,” his inner self laughed at him. “Like you could ever have the balls to do that. You can’t. You CAN’T.”

  But what if he could? What stopped him, really? Maybe it was the codeine, but he warmed at the thought. Hell, he got hard at the thought.

  A spat of coughing made him bring his own cup to his lips, all the while nodding and pretending to humbly accept Angela’s abuse. It was empty. And from somewhere, he found himself saying:

  “I’m sorry, Angela. I need a bath
room break. And some more coffee. Do you want me to get you some?”

  Her thin lips stopped in mid-sentence, both amazed that he would interrupt her and thirsty for some more hot coffee.

  “Yes,” she said, slowly. “But be quick about it. We need to straighten this thing out this morning.”

  His hand was cold as he gripped himself in the stall, but the vision of Angela’s lips sucking down what he intended to give her warmed him. He thought of his wife, taking the cock of another man down her throat (how could she…?) and then of Trish, kneeling right here in front of him, blouse undone to her navel…

  The black liquid swirled into the mug, its heat dissolving Gerard’s revenge like sugar. He topped it off with a splash of half and half and took the two cups back to Angela’s office, groin lax and warmly sending out signals of satiation, heart meanwhile pounding with a mix of disgust, fear and excitement. What was he doing?

  Oh, it felt good watching her drink his revenge down, licking her lips as if he tasted sweet as sugar. And maybe he did. He certainly felt a rush that was sweeter than any candy in his heart. For once Gerard Ambrose had the last laugh. Andy was right. Revenge, silent or not, brought a whole new view of the world. When the last of the coffee had disappeared between Angela’s pale, frosty lips, Gerard nearly split a gut.

  “I’d say suck my dick, but you kinda already have!” his inner child chuckled.

  And then, high on the moment, he did something else untoward.

  You can’t.

  I can do anything I want.

  You can’t.

  “You know Angela, if you’d filed the right paperwork for this with the home office, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said out loud, shocking himself nearly as much as her. “It’s not my problem. You figure it out.”

  And rising suddenly, he snatched his coffee cup in one hand and turned his back on her. He did not have to suffer this. His exit was marred by a spate of deep, croupy coughs, but behind him, Angela sat speechless, lips coated in the spunk of her coffee.