Thrust: A Novel

The older woman smiled. “Would you care to see a very interesting room?”

Lilly felt silly and seductive at the same time. She giggled. A snorting laugh came out. Ordinarily, that would have embarrassed her, but not when she’d been dipped in opium tea.

“Yes, I would love to. If it’s anything like your entry hall, I’m all in.” Lilly tried to get up from the couch, teetered a little, and snort-laughed again.

The woman opened the door to her bedroom. Or, not a bedroom, really, but something else: a room filled with intricately designed furniture and machines of some kind — the word contraptions came to mind. As Lilly stepped all the way into the room, her understanding grew. The furniture was all antique, and — a deeper truth — everything in the room was sexual in design. Lilly stopped in front of what looked like a vintage battery, with a wand attached.

“You’ve seen these before, I’m sure. A ‘muscle relaxer’ from the 1880s, marketed primarily to men. Until it emerged that doctors were using it on female patients to cure hysteria. In other words, the first vibrator.”

Lilly chuckled, but she was distracted by an object in the center of the room: a square padded table that sprouted a black rubber ball about the size of an apple near the center. Lilly put her hand on the ball. It felt cool and smooth to the touch.

“This thing was supposed to be for treating pelvic disorders in women. From a medical standpoint, it was… medieval. From another point of view, something else entirely. When women figured out their own home uses for a table like this, doctors warned that they should be supervised so as not to… overstimulate. The engine that vibrated the ball was steam-powered.”

Across the room, mounted on the far wall, was something that looked like a saddle.

“Obesity. Gout. And again, hysteria. But that’s not why women used them.” She smiled.

Ropes hung from the ceiling, silently coiled like beautiful thick snakes. On a small raised stage sat a crossbeam equipped with a set of leather wrist cuffs, and a second set of cuffs, for the ankles, spread far apart at the base. Lilly felt dizzy. Her mouth filled with spit.

“What’s this?” Lilly gestured toward an elaborate machine near the door.

“A spanking machine.” She released a low chuckle. “So you stood here, at one end, bent over this leather ledge, right? And when you turned the machine on, a great THWAP from behind!” The older woman demonstrated the action and they laughed at the force of the metal arm and paddle that shot up from the other end of the device.

On the wall, all manner of cock and cunt chastity cages, hanging like decorations.

But inside their shared laughter, their growing lust and intimacy, another object caught Lilly’s eye: a shallow wooden box the size of a body, with thin metal bars across the top of it, something between a coffin and an ornate cage. Inside it, at the bottom, a blood-red velvet cushion. The metal bars seemed to have openings at chest level, at crotch level, at mouth level. Lilly could not stop staring.

“Ahhhh, I see what’s caught your eye. That’s a holding pen,” the woman said.

“It looks like a coffin,” Lilly said. An array of devices — toys, wands, spurs — was arranged on the box like a crown. As Lilly stood near the box, she felt the flesh in her body ache: Her arms. Her legs. The cleft between her hips and legs. Something in her life ached. That feeling, again, of something both improbable and unsettlingly familiar.

“Would you like to try it?” the woman said, opening the lid.

Would she like to try stepping into her own dream? Into a space that has haunted her body as long as her body’s memory? Would she like to find out, at last, what happens next?

Her body suddenly broke into a heated sweat. Is it possible to reenter your own past, your own dreams and grief and loss and trauma, if someone else is there to guide you through every moment of your experience? Was it possible that she could reach her own deepest pain through pleasure?

“Do you think a person can… confront their own pain?” she asked.

“Yes,” the older woman said, gently opening the box. “Pleasure and pain are a great deal bigger than the story we’ve been told. Like their own epoch.”

Lilly shed her clothes quickly, her clitoris already erect, her desire uncovered — a desire not separate from guilt and fear and negation, but plunging straight into the mouth of it.

As the older woman closed the lid, she said, “Are you sure?”

Lilly nodded yes, but her steady eyes were the word for it.

“My name is Aurora. If you feel unsafe at any moment, say water.”

Lexicon