SHE COULD tell; tonight would be one of the nights. One of the nights he would cross the bed. Now, he would not cross the bed to put his arms around her and hold her and try to make her feel safe, nor to kiss her and remind her of his adoration of her—but he would, instead, lay on top of her, and call upon her to perform her wifely duty to him. He would beckon her to execute the responsibility of a woman to her bridegroom that her mother had tried to bring up while they waited in the narthex before she went down the aisle on that fateful day that she left her childhood home to take on the role she had prepared for her entire life. The appeal to her to submit to the head of her household’s will as the apostle dictated would come about tonight, with the expectation that she could so easily do something that was surprisingly simple to perform, such that an objection to this plan would be unheard of. All she had to do was lay there, and not interfere with what he was trying to do. If she could find a way to be pleasant about it, so much the better.
The devoir would happen as it so regularly would, and they wouldn’t talk about it. Oh, they tried a time or two, and found they had nothing to say. It was what it was, and it would happen when it would. It was never referred to in any kind of polite conversation—along with politics, money and religion—and if a depiction of it should ever cross their path for whatever reason, they would both turn their heads away and ignore it without remark. It was unspecified and undefined, and not dwelled upon, even in their own privacies to themselves, let alone, god forbid, each other. Or anyone else, for that matter. It was the unspoken right everyone had understood she was pledging to him before all other men when they marched away from the front of the sanctuary, in full regalia, surrounded by flowers and fugues and families and friends. It was the silent secret of marriage.
But none of the conventions of avoidance ever stopped the unmentionable from happening on his sense of timing. Which she could set the clocks by.
The way he wouldn’t look at her at certain moments during the dialogs at dinner invariably tipped his hand. She would catch him gazing into space dreaming whatever it was he dreamt of when he would call upon her obligation, and he would startle up to her with his eyes slightly wider than usual and his lips pursed, his breathing would stop, and she would know. She would convey her assent with a slight smile, and a tipping of her head down and to the right, averting her gaze from his, fluttering her eyelids a few times, followed by a slow roll of her eyes back up to him and a relaxing of her own facial muscles, with a final leisurely double-eyed wink. He would exhale his relief at her time-honored acceptance and look away with a slight nod, and she would lick her lips in a way that he wouldn’t see, and everything would be set. Normal discourse could again be broached, with concerns for health and the weather, all of which would wend its way back to the casual and mundane events of the day from both of their worlds for the rest of the meal. He would congratulate her on yet another fine culinary effort and excuse himself to the living room. She would finish the dishes as he fitfully read whatever it was he was reading these days, and at the end of a generally pleasant evening, she would pass him with a feathery trail of her fingertips across the back of his shoulders on her way to the bathroom to prepare herself.
She would take a quick shower and brush her hair and her teeth, and put on—only—a long flannel nightgown that was conducive to her commitment as well as a spray or two of that perfume he liked, and close the bathroom door with a distinct click when she was finished, to signify that she was ready. She would leave the curtains open for him to close, as a sign of respect for her privacy. She would be gazing at the ceiling, waiting in the bed for him to come in without the lights on, and, after fulfilling his mission of excluding the neighbors who couldn’t see in anyway, he would fumble around in the dark in his efforts to change into his bedclothes. She would close her eyes and turn her head away from his side of the bed, and listen to the sounds he made as she imagined him stripping entirely bare and standing there, naked in the dark, looking at her where she should be, building himself up into a prohibited rudeness, pulsing, audibly breathing through his open mouth, before redressing in his silks to crawl into bed with her. He bounced on the mattress as he climbed in beside her, and after all this time it finally struck her that his mood was that of a child, getting to do something he had been desperately wanting to do and had to wait such a long time for. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel him grinning as he settled into stillness beside her, and she smiled back in the dim. She would breathe deep once, and then longer and slower into a second time to kindle the joy she had surmised she should have for this commission, with the idea that, if nothing else, she would be giving something to him, something perhaps wonderful, and he would begin to cross over.
He would advance his column and kiss her once, and then a second time, longer and slower in what he had understood to be his responsibility to her in this transaction. He inched his way toward her, pulling the covers up and over them both to preserve their dignity, so that, in a pinch, they could roll away from each other as though nothing was happening, should one of the children once again find their way in without knocking, and want parental attentions for their own inevitable needs for assurances that there were indeed no monsters, and that it was just a dream, and yes, of course, you can sleep with mommy and daddy, which would thwart some scheduling, but not the intent, and they would pick up again where they left off on the following night. Even though the children had long ago left home to make their own ways out in the world, there was still some tradition and ritual to go through here.
She had taken to putting her hands underneath her back, right at the bottom of her ribcage, so that they would be pinned under her when he got to where he was laying on top of her. She could wiggle a little and imagine she was actually bound, tied up, being forced into this, and her lips would quiver at the thought. He wrestled around under the comforter and pulled the hem of her nightgown up to just high enough that he could lean over her, with their junctures in proximity to each other as they were at no other time, day or night, so he could get in there, between her legs, and she would spread her knees only just far enough that he could make his way.
She could feel him jerking around and worming his way and settling in, and, when his insolence would touch her there, there where he was trying to get into, it would always come as a surprise and almost a shock; she would freeze up and hold her breath. He would rock his hips forward and impel his way on and she would hold her ground and dent in where he urged and the pressure would build until something would give way within her. They would both gasp at the same instant; it was the closest they got to verbally communicating here. He would hold still and slump for a moment or two as the promises at the altar—of the two becoming one—would come to pass, before he would bulwark back up and commence on his intent. Her spine would lurch around as he moved, until the old familiar pattern would set in and she could finally relax and begin to breathe again, adjusting her own angles and letting go of her resistances so she could make it easier for him and wait it all out and not be a bother to what he was trying to do.
The motions he would make would be small, and it would all be over in a minute or two, and, during that dearest time, her mind would wander. She would imagine pirates or bandits or gangsters, all insisting on doing this very thing with her, er, to her, forcing her legs further apart than she ever had them for doing this sort of thing with her soulmate. A long line of men would parade through her bedroom, in complete silence, one after another, and, after a while, a forbidden word would pop into her head: a word that described the errant women that our lord and savior had such an affinity for spending his time with during his sojourn on earth, along with the tax collectors and sinners. A word she couldn’t even bring herself to pronounce out loud—not even when reading it in scripture—that she had always been guaranteed would be nothing but disgraceful and abhorrent for anyone to ever think of her to be, and so she did everything she could to be the exact opposite of that ignoble state during the day. But at night, when her dream lovers would press her into that…that oldest of professions, her breathing would change, and things would move inside her that were otherwise settled.
The men would begin to make murmuring sounds as they plunged their ways into her, and they would stand around the bed when they were done, displaying themselves and their arrogances toward her and whisper the prohibited word to describe her and what she was doing along with the course and low words for the act itself that were also outlawed. Words that positively burned her no matter when she heard them, either in reality or imaginations—not that they were ever used in her house. Their voices would get louder as more and more men spent time laying on top of her, finding their ways in between her legs, holding her down, taking liberties and molesting her in indecent ways, forcing their obscene tongues into her mouth, prodding her, doing to her what her own man was doing there where her children came from and more, so much more.
The armies that were parading through her bedroom would deride her, making promises to her that this was what she was good for, to lie with men and accept what men want to do to women, that she should perform this…this work with all men, not just the one man she had pledged some silly troth to above all others. The speeches would boom out that she should be so available to every man she knows, and even men she doesn’t know. The scoundrels and brutes would confirm to her that she had no say in it at all, and that she should surely be assured that they would force her to do this, long after her own strength and pride and character had so miserably failed. Her destiny was to lie here as Magdalene did, all day, every day, for all men everywhere: young, old, ugly, handsome, fat, thin, rich, poor, healthy, diseased, living, dying, the very upright and completely wretched of all races and colors; she was here to be filled with them all—boys, too, to show them how to be men—and that she was but a plaything for libertines and criminals to be used for this very act, and she had no rights to refuse anyone, ever.
On top of it all, they expected her to make them feel good about what they were doing to her. There was profit to be had from her enthusiasms.
For this is what she was: a woman, a receptacle of what men could force into her. They would take her, they would take her honor, and they would all know her. They would know as a man could know a woman, they would know her as a man could know a man, and she would know them all with her lips, and she would worship every last one of them with her very tongue finding its way into all who came to her where they were most foul, murmuring her delight at such debasement. And they would water her, too, and mock her as they relieved themselves of the rum and the beer and the wine they had been drinking all night long, showering her in her hair and on her face and all over her body and especially, especially, directly into her mouth, and she would be afforded no choice but to swallow, and to imbibe all manner of impurities with wonder and rapture, lest she incur wrath the likes of which she could never imagine.
Inevitably, women would come into the room, all armed with what men had between their legs, artificial contrivances so that they, too, could take her. They would bustle away the males of the species so they could be left alone to fill her with manufactured manhoods, and whatever else they could find that could even remotely mimic the pillars of men and the rutting motions such fools make when they can have their nasty and dirty ways with a woman. Fingers, hands, sticks, plungers, broomhandles, spoons, scissors, clubs, hammers, batons, staffs, maces, flails, stakes, knives, swords, guns, lit cigarettes and cigars, branding irons, all were produced and the princesses and dames punched all they could find into their victim to perform violence upon her there where god had blessed her with being a woman. The women were more aggressive than the men were, and they were vicious in their invasions, and spared her nothing. They would spit on her and slap her across the face as they drove their toys into her, scoffing at her petty indignant reactions, and they would pull back the covers and tear and rip at her nightgown until it was gone, as they continued to pummel her between her legs. They would lay their own womanhoods down upon her face, and pull on her hair and choke her and sneer at her as they would keep her from breathing until she renounced her vanities and her decency and gave them what they wanted, and adored the Daughters of Lilith with a reverence of kisses and lickings even unto their selfish feminine ecstasies. They stayed astride her, on long beyond the preliminary successes at their euphorias, until their own pleasures so overwhelmed them, that they gave up on the first lessons of maturity and decorum and made a dishonest mess upon her, humiliating her further with the expectation that she should rejoice as she would at the depravity of the men and their unholy expenditures and reliefs, and would punish her if they were not convinced of her sincerity.
They would swat her breasts with their fingers and then their flattened hands, and they would advance their crimes to their bunched up fists, and she would struggle to drag her arms out and find that she couldn’t. Her weight had become bondage, and she would pull and discover that her hands would be actually fastened behind her, and she would be tied dishonorably down to her own bed, spread wide and open, and all she could do was take whatever was dished out to her. She was abused and beaten and penetrated by the women until the brotherhood careened back, drunk out of their minds, to squander her grace some more, and were dared to do worse to her by the ladies, and the men would take up the challenge. She welcomed them. Her complexions began to change color, from lush and fair and pink to red and black and blue, and then on to the breaking of blood vessels under her skin with bruisings of darker reds and purples and yellows and greens. Her race changed to polychromatic. Her eyes would swell shut, her lips would inflate, her cheek muscles would sag. She would appear to have been so injured and violated that a hospital would be called by concerned parishioners were she to stagger down the street this way: naked, overcome with injury, conquered of her poise and tact, encouraging all to be serviced by her and her entrances. She tried to say something, to protest their treatment of her, and she couldn’t. Her mouth had been stoppered up with something she couldn’t see, and then she couldn’t see anything; she opened her eyes to darkness. She was blindfolded and began to panic, and the strikings got harder and sharper. She could hear, amidst all the insults and suggestions for even worse treatment—not to mention the vile name-calling that broke her—the sound of air parting, followed by a flash of pain across her stomach, her chest, the tops of her legs, and she would thrash about, making what noises she could that only had one meaning.
The pressure would all come off her, she would be lifted up out of the bed, and her hands would be yanked up behind her in strappado. She would get pulled by her arms, up, up, up, until she could feel nothing but cold oxygen around her on all sides, and all of her weight was bearing down from her wrists, threatening to dislocate her shoulders; she was suspended in space. The air would part toward her again, and the stripe of fire would cross her back, and then her breast, and it would happen again and again. She would be struck where she sat, upon her feet, her armpits, indeed everywhere, upon all the places that were hidden by her clothes, and the onslaught set on faster, and harder, and it became eternal. A breeze would be generated by how fast and how hard whatever she was being hit with came, and then there seemed to be more than one, and then there seemed to be more than two, and then four, and she lost count, and whatever she was getting hit with changed size, from thin razor lines of instant lava up through belts with the buckles raising mountainous welts on tender places on to something akin to hands that had hate surging through them, then larger things, not unlike a plank or the side of a barn. The hits circled round her and the barrage came at her from all sides simultaneously, and it went on and relentlessly on as she keened and howled over the gale in the darkness.
She could hear, over the roar of the wind, over her own cryings, soaring over her misery, how the ridicules from the crowd escalated and called for her blood, chanting to let her have it, to really fucking give it to her, that she fucking deserved to god damn suffer, that she should be bawling by now, with deliberations and bets being made about how and when she would break down into making interesting offers of her possessions and her body and her own willingness and complicities toward disgusting and unpleasant actions, and there were endless clamors to "let me do it, I’ll show her how to really fucking hurt," and the assaults and the torments and the torture went on forever until, for no apparent reason, the eye of the storm happened, and all would be silent save for her mewlings, and then what she was truly afraid of began to come about amidst the rising defamation and reproach and utter contempt for her, for her gender, for all that she held sacred. She could feel her feet being pulled, being stretched up in opposite directions by forces unstoppable, rending her apart, spreading her legs wider than she thought possible as she dangled there in space, exposed, taut, aching, whipped for all to see, and the storm came raging back. The focus changed from her front, from her back, from her feet, from her legs, and the hurricane reared up and focused there, right at the top between her legs, at the very center and core of her being, and the firestorm built as the strikes came in from all directions, all landing there where her beloved had been, where all the men and all the women had inserted themselves into her womanhood, and she was attacked without mercy. She begged under her gag, and the crowds laughed as she whined out her pleadings to stop, please, stop, and her agony built on beyond what she could tolerate, long and hard beyond what she could imagine, until at long last, her gag popped out of her mouth, and she could rasp and scream, she could scream out an atrocity to be defiled upon the very name of the lord for abandoning her to these demons, she could scream for all she was worth, and she screamed, and she screamed harder than she thought possible, and she would continue to scream on and on and on, for that was all that she could do.
Her husband, lying next to her, long finished with his chore, startled awake at her tender gasp, and put his hand on her shoulder. She jumped right on out of her skin, and nearly off the bed. Her eyes popped open in the dark, and she would be there, beside him in their bed in their own home, safe and sound, dressed once again in what she slept in on nights like this, with the weight of the blankets bearing down on her, with her legs still spread slightly as they had been when he got off her and rolled over to go to sleep. What he had left her with seeped out onto her nightgown and on through onto the mattress for her to sleep in, to remind her to change the sheets tomorrow, and she rolled around and withdrew her hands out from underneath her, out of breath, and he asked her if she was alright. She swallowed, and caught hold of herself, and latitudinally turned herself onto her side to face him, and she would hesitate only slightly before she assured him, calm again, demure, docile, "yes, yes, I’m fine, thank you, dear."
He would mutter something about a dream—still half-asleep—before he would lean across and kiss her on the end of her nose, and put one hand onto her shoulder, making the slightest of hugs, before turning back away and saying good night, not even finishing his affirmation of his feelings towards her before slurring back off to wherever he had been before she woke him.
She laid there, almost in tears, staring at where a ceiling should be, and, after the father of her children started again snoring up a monsoon, she would creep out of the bed, out of the room, and retreat to the bathroom across the hall in the night, opening it as quietly as she could, to keep it from clicking away her position. She would look toward the mirror in the dark for an interminable minute and not see anything but the abyss. Her breath would come shallow and fast before her face would crumple and she would crouch and then squat and kneel and then lie down on the floor, ashamed of what she was about to do. She would hitch up the hem of her nightgown, and, reaching under it, perform a sin upon herself there was no reference to in the good book. It was of no matter; her faith was sure that her actions here were wrong, and not approved, and immoral.
She circles the precious site her better half comes so close to, but has no care or knowledge of, and beckons the crowds to come back. Not hearing or seeing any of them, she removes her nightgown altogether in frustration, and spreads her legs wide, invading into herself to a hidden place with fingers and a thumb until her whole hand disappears, drenched in the white mud she now possesses that she didn’t have before, and, eliciting moans she does not make for the man in her bed with the attentions of some other fingers she has upon a more apparent and infamous obscurity, she loses herself to what her hands dance to before she spies the villains beginning to crowd around the edges of the room to watch her performance as they pull on their penises, their erections, their fucking cocks, and her breath quickens as they jerk off to the very sight of what she is doing. One after another, they expend, no, they come, no, they fucking blow load after load after god damn load of semen of sperm of jism of spunk of blessed cum onto her naked quivering body, especially onto her face, especially into her open clutching mouth, and they applaud her for being a good little bitch, a fabulous little cunt, carrying on about what a filthy fucking little slut she is, and how they like that, and what fine little whore she will be when they are through with her and how they cannot god damn wait to put her through her paces and fuck her senseless again as she enacts what her long-sainted mother had advised her of—in the back of the church while they sipped their coffee and waited for the time to come for her to make her vow—as to what she could accomplish by herself if she should, perchance, fail to see god when her matrimonial burdens have come to pass, "despite what are and would be and ever shall be, no doubt, your spouse’s best efforts to lay you, my treasure, bare to glory," and she overwhelmed herself and all she had ever been taught as she made her own dishonest, humiliating, and degrading mess amidst her bliss that she made no effort whatsoever to stop. It took a lot of practice for her to get to where she could reliably get whatever this was that came out of her at times like this to accurately angle up and land directly in her desperate mouth, especially in the dark, and she drinks of herself with an expression of evil and elation that she has on her face at no other time.