Pain Pools on the Poles; we are wedged in the middle.

Leopold Masoch’s Daughter.

      Each smack sent a clamorous melody through the deaf woman’s ears. The vibrations travelled through her skin like warrior plants slashing away towards the sun. Sun. The sun that was the lemon-shaped opaque crystal buried in the flesh of her chest. She was hit repeatedly, yet each ounce of pain slithered closer to her core crystal and to ecstasy. Ecstasy, it laid in the boundary land between pain and sensation, where life was experienced with a sort of quasi- awe, dis-attached from human emotions. The shards of feeling tingled sensuously from her cheek up. Spreading, like watery paint, the pain bounded off of her visual preceptors, and suddenly every thing she had ever failed to see leapt out at her. Taking a step back, she shook her head; no, there was no way she was letting this experience squirm from out of her grasp. The woman nearly leapt forward, causing the other one to widen their eyes in exhilaration. She motioned for them to strike her again, and with this final blow everything came tumbling down in currents of sensual velvet.

Escape has born a child too.

      Trying to release the demonic pain, the young girl pressed her rough palms to the sides of her head. As the intensity of hurt increased, she simply constricted her cranium with greater viciousness. White, turned the columns of her temples, as if the harder she squeezed, the more likely some divine presence would slither out and grant her reprieve. Nothing came.

      Nothing, and she drove her head into the sterility of her pillow. Dams of blood rushed laterally downwards with the force. Katrina bit the inner meat of her lip and let the violently-rushing blood crawl out of her mouth in ribbons. Streams of crepe paper fluid sank into the fibres of the cushion. Katrina’s eyes watched, intoxicated, with the aggressive hues. Eyelids pulled by the gravity of her face, the red in her vision slowly turned to black. And Katrina began to sleep. Sleep, as her body released ten pints of the most vital liquid. And as she released the years to come.

Lillian Podlog