Chronicle of A Kidnapping.

The old mat keeps rolling up against my back, I push it out of the way with my shoulder, but like me, it has little room or opportunity to settle, so it rolls right back. For what it is, this space is capacious, but I’m not sure it was meant to have enough room to accommodate a grown woman and all her regretful junk. It’s always odd to be in the trunk of your own car, surrounded by these things that you keep in there just in case you need them on the road someday. Like this extra yoga mat I keep, just in case I’m hurtling down the highway to get to a shoot and I am overwhelmed by the need to stick my ass up in the air and liken it to a religious experience. I also have an extra leash for the dog, for any urgent need to tether a creature who spends almost no time on the road. My favourite aspirational item is the set of plastic wine glasses that we keep just in case we’re stranded and overpowered by the need to consume some wine in appropriately-crafted vessels. Maybe I just like the idea of being this person, I think what I am doing right now would be more amusing to me if I were this person.   

He slams on the brakes harder than he needs to and I thrash around with the other objects. It's not customary for him to drive this way, I think he is doing it just to see if he can hurt me. I struggle against the tape that binds my wrists and ankles, not because I want to get free, it just feels good to reinforce to myself that I am bound. He took his time binding my wrists, then my ankles, ripping the sleeve off my shirt, stuffing it into my mouth and taping it shut. He even took the time to put a blindfold around my eyes. He picked me up in the same area where I perambulate on a daily basis, looking for wildflowers to set on my nightstand so I may witness their senescence until they slowly die beside me. Dead flowers make me happy, there's something about the way they crumble from florets to dust without any outward force that makes me want to keep plucking the life out of them. He didn't even bother to look around when he knocked me down in the street, which is a testament to how deserted this place really is, in a country of over a billion people, we somehow live in a place where you can violently and elaborately abduct your wife in the middle of the street, right underneath the spotlight of a street-lamp. Somehow that is the best, and worst thing about this odd little town.

As we stand still, I try to listen for sounds of him getting out of the car, it's so dark, I'm convinced that I won't be able to hear anything. That's a strange feature of darkness that is practically obsidian, it tricks you into believing the entire world has disappeared, it makes you think there is silence even when the ambient noise that surrounds your existence is still ongoing. It makes me believe the sound of his closing the car door will be so strident, my ear drums will explode, but it is a mere thump. Like a pin dropping in the engine room of a bulk carrier. As he pulls me out of the trunk, I realise how hot I had been feeling in there, the cool breeze makes me shudder as it makes contact with the sweat in which I am drenched. I trip and fall to the ground as he pulls me out, he kicks me and pulls me up again, but I cannot walk with my feet bound together, so he pushes me again, and I fall again. This time, I scrape my knee, and I can feel his exasperation with the limitation of movement he has created of his own volition. It's not as easy to kidnap a person as it seems. He seems to decide to just drag me, over the gravel, and through the grass, and towards what seems to be the back door. As fake as this abduction is, I still defy you to be dragged over gravel and not want to escape. I'm always dealing with people who are worried that scripting their fantasies will make them feel less real, scrape your knees and twist your ankle, my loves, the panic you want will come, reality will follow and every fantasy you have ever had will turn into a maudlin nightmare you couldn't have possibly scripted.

As soon as we enter the house, he lets me fall onto the floor. I, sometimes, cannot believe he just lets me fall. You know those trust falls they have you do at every damn retreat you're forced to attend with your colleagues so you can "bond" (which really just means see how many of the people you work with you would fuck if you just add proximity at bedtime to the mix)? I cannot do them because the only thing I trust, with him, is that he will let me fucking fall. I curl up into a ball, like a little worm, as the dog and cats all come over to sniff me. He can treat me like a stranger, but he can't make this home do that. Not yet, anyway. It's so familiar, yet so odd to visit in this capacity, it's like being introduced to your mother. A profligate and completely unnecessary performance, yet it works. While the house feels familiar, he feels like a stranger. There is a difference in his grip on my hair, in the way he maneuvers my body, in the force of his blows, in the angle of kicks. It doesn't feel like the violence of a man I love, or one who knows me, and beats me with concerning regularity.

Before he cuts open the tape around my feet and wrists, he puts a bag over my head, and ties it around my neck. It's jute and it scratches me like a kitten so vicious, it could even turn me into an ailurophobe. He begins to cut off my clothes and it's the first time all evening, I feel myself tense in resistance and attempt to retreat. It's not because my clothes are valuable in any way, it's because of which clothes I am wearing. This is not an outfit I pulled from the back of my closet for the explicit purpose of ruining, these are clothes I wear every day, I will still need them tomorrow. My master wouldn't do that, only a stranger would. As he begins to cut, I flail around, he hits me with the back of his hand on my jaw. I only resist a little more, until the scissors scrape against my skin and I realise that I will cut myself. As soon as I am naked, he grabs me by the hair and begins to pull, I run on all fours, I didn't know I could do that. He raises me to my feet and pushes me into a door that flies open the moment I make contact.

I know, immediately.

There's someone else in here.

I don't know how I know. The precision with which one knows their primary living space is much less visual than it seems to be. There's a scent that does not belong in here, there's a weight upon the air in the room, there's a distrubance in the melody of white noise that lives here. I know this room, it's my home. I don't know why I feel that so strongly when, really, I've only lived here for a little over a year, and a year later, I will leave and never come back here again. Strangers will move into this home, just like strangers lived here before I did. I got rid of most of the signatures they left, but I let some be too. I let the colourful squiggles of their toddler stand on my door, I let the heinous scraps of wall-paper that cover the main electric circuit stay, I kept the one dustbin they left in the guest bath. Sometimes, I am sentimental on behalf of other people, I want to keep a little part of them alive in what was once their home, maybe I wish someone would do the same for me, because maybe sometimes I worry that our little lives will all be forgotten and I wish there was a way I could talk to the future right now, the same impetus, I suppose, leaving a time capsule. I know that the truth is that someday our collective history will be the story of our wars, our diseases and our demise, as it has been for every era that came before we did, but my life feels so real to me, so tangible, and so significant, that I am fearful enough to attempt to seize history while it's still the present, lest the etchings of my tears across this floor be forgotten forever. Who will tell them? Who will tell them about this?

I need to tell them.

I need to tell them how I attempted to run away the second I realised there was someone else in the room where I had been hooded and brought, and as I spun around, disoriented by my lack of vision, I ran into my chair where I sit when I do my daily crossword puzzle. That's where I sit! I need to tell them how two pairs, or maybe three, of silent hands grabbed me and forced me onto the table where I keep promising myself not to dump my books and notes so it would be tidy enough for the eye to focus on my glass box full of light. I need to tell them how they choked me and slammed my body against the floor, while the dirt from someone's boot was rubbed against my cunt, and how in my attempt to get away I knocked against my desk and shook my pen-stand onto the floor where it shattered like a disintegrated floret forced to die too soon. That's the story of how my stand broke and surely it needs to be told. I need to tell them about how they forced me onto the edge of my bed and tied my arms to the posts I had built for this explicit purpose when I requisitioned the bed; of how they forced my face onto my pillow so they could keep me from breathing. Someone needs to know how easily you can find terror inside the familiar odour of your own nightly comfort. I need them to know that this is my life! This is my own life, upon which they reduce me to a faceless, bad-headed hag, in an overly literal realisation of my greatest fear. They're erasing me from inside my own life.

I need to tell them.

But my need to be known disappears the moment I feel a cock up against my asshole, in radical vacillation, I immediately feel the desire to be forgotten. I wish they wouldn't do this to me. I remind myself that it has to be my husband whose cock is up against that hole, there is some consolation to the idea of familiar trauma, he wouldn't let anyone else do this to me, would he? He wouldn't. I tell myself all the time that I could tell his cock apart from any other cock even with my eyes shut, but I cannot. I cannot tell right now. It must be the panic, it has to be, I don't think I can live with the idea that I can detect my home with a mere whiff, but I cannot detect the cock of my owner even if it is inside me. What does that say about me? Does it need to say anything at all?

My mind is clouded by thoughts of derision and my screams are muffled by the fabric in my mouth, but my throat still feels hoarse like I am evacuating my lungs in an attempt to scale sonic capacity that eludes my kind, and I can still feel every inch of the invasion of my insides. I shake my legs, but someone grabs hold of them. I cannot shake the feeling of being made to step into boiling water, and being forced to stay there. I worry my entire body will start to rip from the strain of the reticence and panic. My head feels like an empty chamber within which the words 'you have to make this stop' ricochet and echo off every barren surface, but nothing happens. Nothing stops. I feel a cock inside me. Then another. I feel a cock inside my cunt. And then another in my asshole. How many people are even in here? How many people have been inside me? Do I need to know? Will it even matter? Does the abandoned house really need to know how many people once lived inside it?

I am still reeling when I realise that the room seems to have gone very quiet, even though they weren't speaking amongst themselves at all while they fucked me, I could still hear their bodies shuffle around and assault me. I cannot hear a thing, but I have no idea when they stopped. I have no idea when the last cock left my holes, when the last set of hands pulled away from me, when this vacuum of evacuation was created inside my chest. I begin to relax into the pillow and drift off to sleep. In a second, I feel a set of hands untying me from the bed, I know who it is, he feels familiar again, and as he unbags my head, rips the tape off my mouth and removes the blindfold, the stranger in him disappears.

But I am blinded.

The room is dimly-lit but it feels like too much, I cover my eyes, and still look around. Through gaps in my fingers, I try to find the men who were so readily laying claim to my body just moments earlier.

"Where are they?" I ask him, as he hands me a bottle of water.

"What do you mean?" He asks me.

"The other people!" I say, straining to speak out loud, "Where are they?"

"What other people?" He asks, transparent in his nefarious intentions, yet still effective somehow, "Have you lost your mind?"

I know he is fucking with me. I know. I know, right? I know it like I know the contusions on my hips and the bruises on my arms, like I know the layout of this room without sight, like I know the touch of my lover. I know those things, right? My brain is abuzz with adrenaline and sensory overload, so I cannot fight him right now, I cannot investigate. I do not comprehend why we are playing this game, I am not sure what the game is anymore. I sink into my side of the bed, holding my throbbing head, as I begin to regain some awareness of my body. I can see too much, so much that the world feels too quiet, funny how that works. I turn to my side and notice my little vase has fallen to the floor.

"My flowers," I say out loud, pointing at them.

"They were dead anyway," he says.  

That's what happens in this home. Wildflowers are forced to be ornaments and then put to death for amusement. That's what we do here. Will someone let history know about our quest for beauty? There was more than war and death here. They need to know.

......