In A Chamber of Ice.

In the dark you look like a robot as you move your arm from the elbow repeatedly in the exact same motion to bring the unfurling flogger down between my legs. It's old, we should get rid of it. I feel like I'm watching a stabbing-robot from one of those haunted, horror houses. Your silhouette moves so mechanically and consistently that it hypnotises me, you are saying words and I can hear the sounds, but I am not listening because I am not able to. Nor am I feeling pain but that doesn't have anything to do with your robotic frame; some days the pain is bigger and some days I am. Tonight you could impale me and the best you'd get from me would be a whimper.

"Here slave," you say throwing the flogger on my stomach, "Have a go at it."

I am so confused and I suddenly wish that I had been listening. I have no idea what you mean for me to do. Even as you speak now, I cannot make out your words and I wish I could tell you that. I wish I could explain that I am not trying to be disobedient, I've just fallen into the ground and soared away, but I don't tell you things. Well, I tell you many things but there is a time for that, and a time for this, and I don't tell you things when I'm also a thing. Sometimes I want to tell but there is something about holding my tongue that I find incredibly powerful with you. It's just that I always say what is on my mind, and I won't let anyone tell me what I cannot say or talk about. I won't tailor my tongue to any situation but I'll tailor my tongue to you, and I know you don't want to hear me explain why I wasn't listening, you only care that I wasn't. I like that you can draw such hard lines in the sand especially because I couldn't. I always have to know why before I can decide about what, and even then I come up with twelve different answers.

Not you. You move decisively towards my side and tell me you'll show me exactly what I need to do so that my dumb, little brain can grasp it. I hear those words and all the ones that follow as you show me what you want me to do and explain that since your hands will be occupied tending to my duties, I should occupy mine taking over yours. It drives me crazy that you are so calm as you do this. Why is there such calm and silence while you hurt me? Why won't you just punch me or kick me or throw me against something? How are you able to do this with so much dispassion that wind is howling louder than us and I can hear every rustle of the tree outside our bedroom window? I'm a child of violence, I still don't understand your clinical ways sometimes. Your fine ways. This reminds me of my friend Prithvi, the only man to ever call me babygirl and get away with it.

"You gotta stop fucking brutes, babygirl," he'd say in his extremely finite wisdom.

And I would just roll my eyes at him and remind him of the disasters he was dating.

"Get yourself a fine man who'll hurt you gently with love," he'd say, "And make sure he has an average-sized dick so you can take it in the butt a lot."

Prithvi," I'd tell him with love and only a little snark, "I have one hole over you and it can take pretty big stuff."

"Bitch," he'd say tossing the one purple lock of hair over his forehead to the side, "I am pretty sure this is body shaming. Besides, I have the superior hole and it knows not to fuck brutes unlike you."

He wasn't wrong, my holes really don't know better but he was right about non-violent sadists. They are better at pain but they are also better at making you crave violence like a babe seeking the warmth of a bosom. Yet you wont even touch me, and with my tongue tied in invisible bonds I cannot ask you to, so I just take your flogger and beat myself for you. Normally I hate beating myself, just seems like such a waste, but tonight I don't mind it. I don't mind beating myself and I don't mind repeating your words into the air. I can use my tongue if you want me to, even if it feels like my words are coming from some other mouth. I still repeat the words designed to demean me, to remind me that I am a bad slave. So terrible, in fact, that all you see in me now is a mop. I wonder what Prithvi would say about emotional-brutes because now I can show him an asshole blended into a gentle, kind man, and I don't know what to make of it, but maybe his wisdom could break it down for me.

My wisdom has left the room and it took my wits with it, all it left behind was a mindless, lifeless sack of bones chanting its own inadequacy while you rummage through the closet. My eyes are closed but they fly open the moment I smell the shoe-polish right beside my face.

"Please don't," I say immediately as if panic has jolted me to have a voice.

But you remind me with just as much dispassion that if I interrupt you again, you will do this every week for the next two months. I feel this is too harsh, but I don't say that, I think it as you brush the dirt off your boots onto my face and body. Polishing your shoes is second nature to me, I've done it almost as long as I've known you, and it's one of those things that watching you do it is akin to watching a child being denied food. It's as if you are making me beat you and I cannot bear it. You've only ever done this once before, and even that time it nearly destroyed. This time, I don't even think it's fair but you say harshness is always fair when one violates the fundamentals. This is our origin story, isn't it? Shoes and polish and service and hurt. It is unsettling to see it play out this was with roles reversed in complete silence.

You wipe the excess polish off the brush onto my skin and remind me periodically to keep watching. I beg you but I know it's pointless, part of me is just doing it to get you to hit me, but I suppose you know that. Even if you don't, you seem determined not to strike me with you hand. You set one boot down on my face as you start working on the other. The water has been out the whole day because of some repairs they were doing and as a result my hair are oily, and my face is dirty, and the dirt from your shoes latches onto my skin and the smell of the polish into my hair. It only gets stronger as you put the other shoe down on my face too but my face is too small to support them both, you say it's a useless shelf as they fall of me onto the side.

Then you pick one up and strike me with the sole against my cheek. My hand moves, as if in reflex, to protect my face but stops ten inches short of your hand, for a long moment it just hangs in the air, and we both look at it. It's as if I have spoken out of turn, and a room full of people are wondering why the servant-girl is offering her voice on how to insure assets.

"Are you going to stop me?" You ask clearly, but softly.

I shake my head and move my hand away, and you go back to striking my face with your shoe. It hurts a lot more than your palm would, or even your fist, but it's not the same and I still want your hand. Somehow, it would be different if you were wearing the shoe, it feels like your body is missing from this encounter and my body is too involved. It feels like being naked in a room of people dressed for a snowstorm. I can feel the dirt on either side of my face as it burns into the sole of your shoe, but just as I can actually feel enough pain to replace the tears that will not come, you throw the shoe down on my nose and walk away. I truly believe you will break my nose someday, but I worry I may be hoping for it more than I let on, I shouldn't want you to break my bones, that would be so wrong.

"Get on your hands and knees," you tell me and I know it's not because you are going to fuck me.

I would do anything for that right now but you're so robotic sometimes I wonder if you could even feel that desire. Instead you put your shoes in front of my face and that seems more fitting in fantasy world, in reality I just want you inside me and I want your fingers inside my mouth while I beg you to use me. I dig my nails into our bed, half helplessly and half with the intent to communicate with you, to tell you how much I need you to hurt me with your hands and your cock.

"Yeah you can stop digging into the sheets," you say walking away to fetch yet another thing that you could use to touch me instead, "I'm not touching you, I don't fuck mops."

So I hug your shoes out of sheer desperation to feel something with the scent of you against my skin but all I can smell is polish. Polish that I didn't put on there, you remind me before you pull the shoes away from my grasp.

"They don't want you touching them either," you say as if you could speak for all the shoes and desperate whores in the room, "You'd be so lucky if I let you apologize to them."

This version of you. *God*. It really is our origin story, it's why you got me in so much trouble, denying me the basest things until I forget to question whether I even want what I am begging for. Refusing to fuck me and telling me to have some shame while you strip me of it yourself. You're a piece of work, and I only half-mean that as a compliment. Making me apologize to shoes. Where do you get off? Well, here, I suppose. Here, where I apologize to shoes and barely register that you are beating my back with what can only be a wooden stick. It feels like a feather and on the inside I am screaming for you to beat me harder. On the outside I don't move a muscle, because I can see you listening to my entire body for any sign that you can point out. Any desire I display is like a kid stealing candy right under the watchful eyes of a vicious parent, and all I want right now is a violent parent instead.

Not you. Not tonight. Tonight you are just cold and calculative. Even as you beat me harder it doesn't reach down deep enough inside me to make me really feel it. The pain lingers in the air, lost to this wooden device as it attempts to go from your fingers to my back. Tonight the catalyst consumes the pain and I am helpless, so I kiss your shoes even though I really want to bite them so they will bite me back. I know they are shoes but i don't know the line between humans and objects anymore. Even as I devolve helplessly before you, I can feel that you are not impressed. I am genuinely hurt, endless endurance is the entirety of my wiles and if that doesn't work then nothing does. I have no other tricks. Apparently I don't need any.

You order me up to my feet and the stiffness from my elbows abating feels like the only warmth on this cold, cold night, and the warm tricking between my legs to the floor as I try desperately to get you to touch me. This time with my eyes and the entire gamut of my nudity.  

"Put your clothes on before you wipe that filth off the floor," you say sneeringly, as you put your shoes by my pillow, "Do you know why must wipe the floor?"

"Because I'm a mop." I say it, so easily, in despair.

"Good," you say laughing as you turn away, "You are teachable, after all."

I'm glad you think so but I have no idea what I was supposed to have learnt. I already knew your insides are made of ice and I can't melt them unless you touch me.