HUSK

When she was still alive, my mother loved to dispense life lessons. One of the few I still remember is this: ‘Good love is an amulet.’ I must have been about fifteen when she said it, while fixing her hair for a rare dinner out with dad. ‘When someone loves you well, let that feeling crystallise inside you. Keep it forever. It will protect you from bad love’. I didn’t understand what she meant by bad love, and I didn’t ask, because I wanted to seem disaffected. Understanding would not have kept me any safer.

The wedding ring I wear around my neck is the antithesis of my mother’s amulet. I keep fantasising about yanking the chain so hard it breaks, but I’m worried my head will come off with it.

🦷🦷🦷

click to listen to the soundtrack for this story as you read. Used with permission of the artist.

‘Count them down’, I say to the man lying on the shiny laminate floor of the dungeon, on his back like a red lacquer beetle. My left hand holds a promise, a bamboo cane raised high.

‘Yes, mistress.’ At the first strike, his whole face scrunches beneath the thick blindfold.

‘Twelve … eleven … ten.’

There are metal clips strapped tight into the folds of fat in his back, and he is straining to keep still, but it’s a poor attempt. Every strike of mine is followed by a clank of metal against the floor, a pained little yelp as the clips twist deeper in his skin. He is breathing through his nose.

‘Stay still now, or I’ll whack you over the blindfold and crush your eyes like soft egg whites.’ He stops writhing at once. Only his fingertips tremble discreetly.

‘Three … two ...’

I let my rhythm fall a little slack, listening to his inhalations as he thinks it’s coming, any second now, the last sweet lick of pain. His shoulders twitch slightly.

My mind wanders to domestic scenes, all the shit I should do before Sylvain gets home, breakfast dishes in the sink and the glowing hollow of the fridge. I wish I could make these men do something more useful instead of draining both our resources, but that would require merging parts of my life anathematic to one another.

‘Please, mistress’, the man gasps.

‘Do you want me to put you out of your misery, little swine?’

‘Yes, please, please’, he whines.

I give him what he wants, and two extra whacks for being annoying. That’s the end of our session. I help him up by his shoulders, extract the clips — slowly, slowly — and let him admire the angry bite marks in the mirror.

‘Have I been a good boy?’ he asks nonsensically.

‘No, of course you haven’t. You’re a fucking waste of space. You disgust me.’

I sit down on the leather bench and watch him scutter out of the door, throwing a long-suffering glance at me. He’s one of my favourite customers, although it’s not saying much.

🦷🦷🦷

When I get home, I find moths in the coffee maker. I pull the jar out, hoping they’ll stir and flutter away, but they lie silent in their coffin of stained glass.

Sylvain comes in, and the air grows thicker. He sits on the sofa, headphones on, frowning at his phone. I start doing the dishes, and he comes into the kitchen to microwave some leftovers. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t say anything, because I don’t want to face his lack of response. I look at him and wonder if he can feel my eyes on him. I don’t know what cursed him, but his transformation into stone is almost complete.

A couple of hours later, while I’m taking a shower, he walks in on me. ‘What’s happened to the coffee maker?’

‘I threw it away’, I say through the clouded glass door.

‘Why?’

‘There were dead moths in it.’

‘Why didn’t you just clean it?’

‘We never drink coffee anymore. That’s how it ended up moth-ridden in the first place.’

During the first months of our marriage, I brewed a large pot of coffee every morning, and we would finish every last drop of it before work. I remember sitting in his lap, kissing his neck between scalding sips while he read the newspaper. During the first six months he spent in exile from me, assigned to the furthest possible base, a lot of things changed.

Now, Sylvain slides the door open and looks at my body. I wish he would come closer, fully clothed, in the nude, doesn’t matter. I wish he would force himself on me. I want to know if the sight of me is making him hard. He fixes his eyes on my face and says: ‘Well, that’s fucking stupid.’

‘Why don’t you ever want to drink coffee with me anymore?’ I say in that kicked-dog voice which always makes him wince in disgust. Predictably, he turns around and leaves. I wish he’d at least slam the bathroom door, but he closes it very gently. I hear his footsteps echoing in the stairwell as I dry my hair.

There is nothing to do, so I go to bed and close the black-out curtains. At some point in the night, I stir — Sylvain’s weight is on top of me, inside me, his hands pressing down on my ribs.

‘You’re dangerous’, he says, dripping sweat over me.

‘Why?’ I say in a small voice. I think I am the least dangerous person in the world.

‘Because you’d let me do anything to you, wouldn’t you. I don’t trust you to ever tell me what you’re really thinking.’

I’m drowning in these words, more water to the depths already within me — there is simply not enough air to breathe and respond. Sylvain’s hands move to my throat, absolving me from any expectation of reply.

‘I think I am the least dangerous person in the world.’

‘I wish you’d talk to me’, he growls. ‘I really don’t know what your fucking problem is.’

His anger is a flower sewed shut, the stitch-seams glistening with old blood. For years, I have been trying to tear it open with my bare hands, expose the rotting core of it to the sun.

🦷🦷🦷

Before they enter the dungeon, my clients fill out a checklist of the things they want to do in session. Ticking boxes is the antithesis of real desire. It’s sad, but comforting too — who wants to confront what they truly want? The real function of these shopping lists for unattainable things is to protect my clients from their own hearts.

My blade carves wet streaks into the skin beneath Mr. W’s shoulder blades, and he screams despite knowing you get what you pay for, here, unearned insults and butter knives dipped in a bucket of ice. Zero death, zero rebirth. I keep thinking of those dead moths.

‘Aren’t you sick of living in this disgusting skin? I’m doing you a favour, peeling it off you’, I whisper. ‘What’s beneath is so much prettier. Will you show me all of it?’

Mr. W. Whines something unintelligible in response. ‘What?’ I say. ‘I asked you a fucking question.’

‘Yes, mistress.’

‘That’s better.’ I make an X-shaped slash on his lower back. He’s not crying out this time, just breathing hard. With the water beneath his shoulder blades absorbed into his sweaty skin, and the new puddle on his lower back starting to evaporate, he is becoming fully disillusioned.

‘I’m scared’, Mr. W. sniffles. I get up and walk circles around his bound body. ‘I’m scared’, he repeats, keeps repeating it until I step on his fingers and he screams. Nothing breaks. I’m so bored of fake fear.

‘It wasn’t in the—’ he says half an hour later, unbound and suited up.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I didn’t know you were going to hurt my fingers.’ He waves his wrist limply, as though his whole hand were broken. What a joke. ‘It wasn’t on the list.’

‘I’m sorry’, I say.

‘Please don’t do that again.’

‘Of course. I do apologise.’ It was a gift he did not deserve.

🦷🦷🦷

Sylvain doesn’t know about my job, and I’m not sure why I haven’t told him. It’s been three months since they sacked me, but he thinks I’m still teaching most afternoons. I spend hours upon hours imagining what could happen if I came clean: him bashing my face in and barricading me into the bedroom, or laughing at me and finding the whole thing unremarkably banal, or responding with weeks of hostile silence. I know the last scenario is the most likely, and it’s what I dread more than anything. I’m not scared of his anger. Without it I feel as good as dead.

The task of secret-keeping is an enjoyable one. I hold them close to my skin as though they were my amulet, my life suspended mid-air, crystallised into some dark and shimmering thing. I do not tell my husband, and he never asks. I wash my obscene work clothes in the launderette and keep them in the dungeon lockers. My colleagues know which topics not to broach. My clients never touch me. ‘How was school?’ Sylvain will ask me, when he’s feeling gentle, and I will sigh and shake my head and say ‘The students are too loud.’ Sylvain will shake his head right back and berate me: ‘You should discipline them better. Stop being a doormat.’

Stop being a doormat. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s said those words to me, twisting the knife. How many times I’ve begged him to walk over me, crush my bones, set me free. I can never reach him.

I know it’s not a scapegoat I need, but a scalpel, to cut all the horrible dead matter off my heart.

🦷🦷🦷

My newest client is hard to read. The first reason I should have refused to see him: he didn’t fill out the list, which breaks the very first rule on my booking site. The familiarity of his name seduced me. He used to be the top of his English class, eight years ago. That’s the second reason I should have cancelled his reservation. Instead, I am transfixed by the way he glances at me over the slope of his narrow shoulder. ‘Turn around’, I say, having ordered him to undress. ‘Sit down.’

‘I knew it was you, miss’, Thomas says, nervously tapping the arm of the leather chair. ‘I recognised your hands.’

‘What a disturbing thing to say.’

‘I’m sorry. I know there’s something wrong with me.’

‘Well, you have come to the right place to deal with that. What exactly is wrong with you?’

I wonder if he’s playing a different game, trying to humiliate me by exposing some pathological desire for schoolboys. If that’s the case, it says a lot about him and very little about me. I have never even considered—

‘I used to always fantasise about you, miss’, he says, staring at his bare feet. ‘In class. And after.’

‘You were a teenager. It’s not abnormal to feel that way. But that was years ago. Surely you have moved on to other fantasies?’

‘Of course’, Thomas says, a defensive note slipping into his voice. ‘I’ve had girlfriends my age. I’ve tried a lot of things. But I can’t deny it. Sometimes, I still think about you.’

‘When you think about me, what am I doing to you?’

‘You’re punishing me’. He locks eyes with me, becoming less demure by the second.

‘How? What have you done to deserve it?’

‘You’ve caught me stealing your underwear.’

‘Where? At school?’

Thomas nods. ‘I found a pair of panties in your pencil drawer.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know you were such a disgusting boy, rummaging around my private possessions.’

‘The panties were black and all bunched up, so I didn’t notice until I unfolded and smelled them. But when I did, I realised they weren’t clean. I went crazy for your scent.’ He looks at me with a challenge in his eyes. ‘What would you have done if you’d caught me doing that, all the way back then?’

‘Nothing at all’, I say. If my response disappoints him, he doesn’t show it. ‘I would’ve bought a new pair of panties. You were just a dumb teenager.’

‘And now?’

‘I know you haven’t just come here to confess. What kind of a punishment do you think you deserve?’

Thomas opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t matter—I know exactly what to do.

He doesn’t make a sound when I blindfold him and strap his limbs to the chair. It’s only when I squeeze his head into the mask that he starts to whine a little, straining against the leather. The sincerity of his fear thrills me like nothing else. For him to come here, a blank page of a notebook to let me rewrite my own past and his, is an indulgence neither of us have earned. The latex clings to his mouth so prettily.

‘I’m so bored of fake fear.’

‘Why would you think you deserve to breathe in my scent like that? Why would you think you deserve to breathe at all? Perverts like you are a waste of space.’

‘Miss’, he whispers through the mask. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

‘I don’t want to be here with your body’, I say. ‘You can breathe through it. Slowly, slowly.’ I place my hand on his stomach, reassuring. ‘Slowly’, I repeat, but his breathing only becomes more shallow. ‘Come on’, I say. ‘You can do it.’ I look at my wristwatch. After just two minutes under the hood, he is starting to hyperventilate. It’s pathetic.

‘I see you are too weak to take your punishment.’

‘I’m sorry, miss.’

‘Don’t worry, there are other ways I can make you pay for it. I will release you in thirty seconds.’

My eyes flick between the small hand of my watch and Thomas’ Adam’s apple, straining as he tries to swallow air. Without warning, his arms go limp, and I rush to yank the hood off his head. His mouth is slack, his eyelids closed without tension. I press my index finger against his neck and find no rush of blood under the skin. He won’t inhale any of the air I breathe through his dead lips.

At first, a rush of anger overtakes me. This must be some kind of a cruel joke, arranged as a childish revenge for my earlier indifference. Death possessed him so easily, I wonder if he was fully alive to begin with.

I sit on the floor and stare at his face, bathed in the garish red of the dungeon, expecting him to wake and reveal the trick up his sleeve. He looks oddly unchanged by death. I feel a strange kinship between us: both of our lives may have been suspended long before they ended, like moths under glass. I kiss his eyelids and leave him strapped in the chair, an ornament of fearless desire.

🦷🦷🦷

When I get home, it’s already dark. Sylvain is sitting on the sofa, watching TV on mute. ’You’re late’, he says when I enter the living room. His eyes widen when he looks up at me. ‘What’s happened to you?’

I walk to him, grab the back of his head and pull him upwards into a rough kiss.

‘I broke something’, I say, letting go of his head.

‘What do you mean?’

I can only smile at him. My whole body is shaking, but I feel good, so sharp and light, a solar flare. I push my husband into the bedroom and fuck him like I’ve never fucked him before, until a loud knock interrupts me.

‘Ssh, my love, I’ll get it’, I say, draping myself in a gauze-thin dressing gown. I close the bedroom door behind me.

‘Ms. Wylie?’ a woman in uniform says.

‘Yes’, I say, beaming at her. ‘I was expecting you.’ The night air crackles around me like a chrysalis, unstatic, moving me toward something unseen at last.

🦋☕️