Right to Life

Inside the long dark box where she stayed through most of the day she began to mark the time by marking temperatures. Mornings it was always cool. During the course of the afternoon the box would warm both from the basement temperature outside and her body inside and by mid-afternoon while they were still both at work she would be slick with sweat and reeking with her own thick musky smell and would stay that way until they got around to opening it. When they let her out they would leave the box open to air out. When she got in again the temperature would drop till morning and then begin to warm again.

Her daily cycle.

On the tenth day Stephen noticed the cat moving into the box while it lay open and she was on the X-frame. The cat had come to her some nights and some nights it had not. She heard him shouting at it despite the earplugs which were never very efficient anyway and then heard Kath say something to him in a loud voice and then she heard them talking. When they put her back in the box that night the cat was there. They'd allowed it to stay. She didn't know why. But she was grateful for the cat and she thought that perhaps that was the point. To make her grateful. Grateful to them.

But she was grateful only to the cat. To her soothing presence. To have somebody to talk to even if that somebody couldn't talk back. Grateful that the cat didn't mind sharing with her the thick sweltering air.

The cat seemed glad of her presence too. Brushing up against her ankles as she stood tied to the X-frame or walked either to there or to the chair so that a couple of times the cat almost tripped her. She didn't mind.

When he wasn't hurting her he was telling her stories or occasionally reading scripture. The readings were usually about children or husbands and wives, slaves and masters. He liked Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Genesis.

"Now Sairai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. And she had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar.

"So Sarai said to Abram, 'See now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please, go in to my maid; perhaps I shall obtain children by her.' And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai.

"Then Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband to be his wife…"

The stories were always about the Organization.

The house, he told her, was bugged. They monitored the phone. They had known she was here from the very beginning and got daily reports on her progress.

Organization members were everywhere. The local police precinct. The legislature. The White House.

He gave her a Daily News article to read about the slave trade which said that in the Mideast, Europe and even in the U.S. the growing interest in S &M had lately given rise to a brisk profitable business in female flesh, women kidnapped for sale or barter to the rich and powerful with no rights or recourse to law. To be dealt with as each owner saw fit. To be tracked down and punished should they dare and then actually manage to run away. He told her that it was his father who had introduced him to the Organization and that as a young man he'd earned enough money to put himself through college by tracking down runaways.

He told her about one escapee who managed to elude the Organization long enough to actually write and publish an article about her experience. It took months but eventually they found her a second time and returned her to her owner. They pulled her fingers off one by one and then pulled off her toes. They cut out her tongue and blinded her with a soldering gun and used a stiletto to destroy her eardrums. They enlisted an Organization doctor to cut off her arms and legs without benefit of anaesthesia and then to cauterize the wounds. Finally they hung her, still alive, by her long braided hair on a hook above her master's bed where she continued to live for three days. A trophy above him writhing in agony while he slept and read.

He showed her some of her father's mail, two circulars and a phone bill, told her that they'd been brought to him by their own mailman, who was part of the Organization too, for her to see. So she'd understand just how easy it was to get to him or any time they cared to.

He showed her a roster of her students' names and addresses.

On the eleventh day, a Sunday, he ordered her to suck his cock. It was the first time she'd refused him anything in several days. He tied her to the bolted-down chair, pulled off her blindfold and produced an over-and-under double-barrel shotgun. He ordered her to open her mouth and when she would not forced the shotgun into her mouth, the cold metal cutting her lips and grinding past her teeth. She had no way of knowing if it was loaded or not until he pulled the trigger.

Which he did.