In the Region of Ice

(All characters 18+.)

The girl's tongue labored upon the boot's dark hills and valleys. Soon she left her mother behind and came to the edge of the sole. There her nose caught a whole hidden pasture: turned soil, dry manure, moss crushed underfoot.

She chewed slowly like a cow and spat out the grit. The men had taken a ride, their trousers damp and flecked with straws. A riding crop leaned nearby, its handle still warm from use.

Up there the cutlery clinked in a distant battle. The men smoked. Her nose was full of their cigar's fog. The men talked. Oak logs cracked and spat in the hearth, fresh cubes of ice chimed in the wine chiller. The girl pricked up her ears. They were arguing about science, women. Science and women.

Her mother didn't see how lucky they were, thought the girl, to come to this chateau and serve these eccentric lords. Her pale lips pressed a trail of skittish kisses across the leather.

How she dreamed of being broken in like a pair of boots, scuffed in places, her tough hide softened and stretched to her master's will...

The dinner bell rang. A cordial voice called from above, their master's.

"Lady Pavlova. You can come out now."

A hairy hand reached down, with ring-adorned fingers, as if asking for a dance.

The girl's wide eyes flared up, then dimmed in resentment. Next to her, the older woman lifted her chin from the boot and offered her hand. The master held her wrist tightly like a scepter. Slowly she crawled out from underneath.

Whenever their master spoke, he always sounded like reciting from a book he wrote himself:

"So my method demands a tabula rasa, an unspoiled blank slate. But alas, the modern woman is steeped in bad schooling. Her very flesh bears the imprint of discontent, the jealousy carved into her bones. To find a true specimen of Grecian beauty, one must look not to shores of the Aegean, but past the Black Sea, into the boreal forests and the region of ice."

There stood the mother's small feet in white knee socks next to the lord's dark boots. It unsettled and thrilled the girl, seeing that poised woman stand with knees pulled in, like a scolded schoolgirl.

"I've never seen one so pallid yet so beautiful," said another voice. "Shame she was only bred once! Pray, tell us what age is this particular specimen? She strikes me as no older than my Theresa."

"Then you're off by a wide margin! Even that girl of hers is nineteen." the master laughed. The mother, following some signal unseen, lifted her dress and placed a foot on the table. For a moment all noises ceased. The girl stared at the bared knees and suddenly wanted to reach out and caress them.

"Good Lord!" the voice uttered. "Such tender thighs. Put a sack over her head and pimp her like a virgin, the idiots would start a brawl to pay double."

"A tempting trick, I should try it someday. She had been in good care when I found her in Constantinople. That old Turk fox knew his goods' worth." said her master.

The mother's foot was back on the carpet again. She was turned around, with that part of her dress lifted again. Her buttocks were round and pearled like moon.

The master assumed the authority of a lecturer's:

"Lady Pavlova comes from a long line of fecund noble matrons, whose clan still owns a vast expanse of land, though, to be fair, land is never in short supply in her country."

"Nor women who don't look like a piece of loaf, and thicker than lard!" someone interrupted. The master paid no heed and continued.

"Don't be misled by appearance. Like most women, her mental development plateaued with the arrival of her first blood. Nature, ever efficient, rerouted all the energy to her hips and breasts, and left her mind capped at that tender, juvenile stage.

"Now, now! The fair sex won't hear that. Eliza will tear off my ears for hearing this blasphemy!" a man chuckled.

"Women, your sweetheart included, might come to acquire rich personalities through a combination of socialization, imitation, and make-believe. But, put in isolation, she quickly regresses to a childish, almost bestial mindset. Knowledge and foresight don't stir her brain as much as it does ours. Her mind shines brightest when fixed on a simple task."

The master let his words settle.

"And now, the lady will show us exactly what I mean."

The girl watched the mother struggle to climb onto the table. They were kneeling for too long and she was like an infant learning to walk.

"Noemí! Give her a hand."

At his command, a woman stepped forward silently in black maid's flats. She guided the mother up and slipped her dress loose. Above the girl's head the muffled crawl of limbs moved toward the table's center.

"Good. Now show us how to present yourself properly."

The girl knew the pose by heart: hands laced behind the head, chest forward, legs parted, poised on tiptoe. Tiptoe--such a silly word. It had been beaten into her, a muscle memory now. She could no longer squat flat-footed if she tried; that, her master had said, was the posture of a shitting barbarian.

Her mother, then, must have squatted like one. A hand reached for the crop. Three dull, heavy strikes followed.

Stupid cow! the girl thought, heart pounding at each instance of her mother's gasps.

"Apologies. She's been rather slow at acquiring the correct manners," the master said. "With time and the right stimulus, any behavior can be learned."

Then his voice softened, as if addressing a frightened child.

"Lady Pavlova, do you remember what we practiced yesterday with your other mouth? Why don't you tell us its name again?"

"Yes," the mother replied quickly, her voice small. "Anus." How it sounded like an Egyptian deity in her mouth!

"She says so," someone said, "but we shall test for its truth."

The master nodded. "Indeed. Noemí!"

The maid came close. He leaned in as she bent down and whispered something just for her ear. She straightened up. "Now don't take too long," he added aloud.

She took the empty wine chiller from the table and disappeared with hurried steps.

The master went back to his audience.

"One of my theories is that a woman's psyche is more than anything obsessed with her own anus."

"Now that's a theory we like to hear more about!" one of his guests laughed.

"Then you are guaranteed to like it. At one point we were all tiny things floating in the sea, so insignificant that they only needed one orifice. With this single opening they took in nutrition and released the waste. It was a busy two-way street and its most vital organ."

"One of my theories is that a woman's psyche is, above all else, obsessed with her own anus."

"Now that's a theory worth exploring!" the guests roared.

"Then you're in for a treat. You see, in the beginning, we were only pea-sized creatures adrift in the sea, creatures so simple they required only one orifice: one entrance and one exit, a single tireless gate for both feast and waste. This busy two-way street was thus its most vital possession."

The girl tilted her head, drunk on every word.

These were the lords who ruled her tiny world! How much she could learn just by kneeling beneath their table! She longed to speak like them, to belong among them. And it gnawed at her that she could do neither.

"Now consider this," the master continued. "Since it is widely accepted that woman has evolved to a lesser extent than man, it follows that the most ancient traits persist more vividly in her, not in the body, but buried in the folds of the subconscious. And among these, none is more salient than the ring of her sphincter. The ring governs her actions, dominates her thoughts. Even without knowing it, a woman finds pleasure in the act of defecation. At that sordid threshold, her brain is lit with the same spark as when we read an immortally genius line from Shakespeare."

"Bravo!" a man burst out, clapping. "It's true! I never once dozed off at his play--not with all the kissings, stabbings, and kings going mad!"

The maid had returned from her task. She set the bucket on the table, directly beneath the mother. This time, she did not leave but remained at the master's side.

"As pleasurable as a woman's bowel movement might be," the master said, "it lasts only a few fleeting seconds, far too brief to satisfy the hunger of her subconscious. I would even risk my scholarly name to say this: the modern woman's greatest misery stems from her inability to live as her ancestress once did--free to obey her anal urges whenever and wherever they struck."

He leaned back slightly in his chair. The maid's feet seemed to have trouble staying in place. One of his hands had vanished beneath her skirt, moving with the slow intent of scratching an itch.

Beneath the table, the girl watched. She slipped her hand between her legs and scratched blindly, not yet knowing how to soothe the unnamable that began to stir inside her.

"But what if we could prolong her experience, stretch those fleeting seconds into hours? Better still, what if we confuse her little round mouth so thoroughly it no longer knew whether to eat or release, when to shut its eye or open for work? And what if we sever its control from her feeble mind entirely, placing it under the guidance of an external command, making it the only voice it would obey?"

The girl held her breath and listened with wonder. She was at the ground zero of a great revelation. Though she didn't fully grasp the mechanism he described, she liked the sound of it. She wanted to be confused. She wanted to be exhausted.

Let her be the lab rat! The sacrificial lamb! The broken wedding plate!

Then the master's words came stabbing at her young heart:

"And that was what I managed to achieve yesterday with Lady Pavlova. Now she will demonstrate the severance, so you can all see with your own eyes how it works."

Unfair god of fate! She wanted to break his ribs and cripple his hips with a club. It should have been her on the table, not that old cow. The girl slapped her face and wailed silently, nearly tore her hair out. If only she had the courage to bite the boot in front of her face.

"Noemí, start with a smaller one," the master said.

The maid reached into the bucket. There came sound of jostling ice. She plucked one out. Around the table, the guests dabbed their mouths with napkins. No one remembered the raging creature trapped beneath it.

"It's round as an olive," someone remarked. "She's so tight, even this won't go in easy."

"As with most untrained women," the master replied. "Now watch."

The dinner bell rang. Chairs scraped forward.

"It sucked the ice in like a mouth!" "No woman could do that. That was the anus talking." said another.

The master smiled. "Increase the size now, Noemí. We haven't all night."

More ice was chosen from the bucket. One was the size of a fig. The maid pressed the ice gently against the ring, and it too disappeared inside the mother. With teary eyes the girl felt a faint tremor spreading from the center of the table like the rattle of a boiling kettle.

"Welp, she's stalling now. That little mouth just won't stay shut," a man observed, not without amusement.

"One more," the master said, his voice gone oddly flat.

It was the final piece of ice in the bucket, the size of a small apple. The moment it met the mother's opening, the mouth responded eagerly but was soon troubled by the girth of the ice. The ring of skin was stretched so thin around that it appeared bluish with veins.

Would this be the last straw? The mother's eyes were calm and unwavering. The men watched until the last tip of the ice was beyond sight.

"The time has come to test our theory. Noemí!" the master raised his hand.

The maid took a candle from the table and waved it below the mother, just close enough to cause a sting. The woman's face betrayed not a shade of stiffness, as if she's wearing a mask. Sweat like pearls had formed on her forehead.

"She has completely lost sensation down there!" a guest exclaimed.

"The proof of her severance." The master turned to the mother, "Lady Pavlova, would you care to sing us a song?"

The tall, grey-eyed woman began to sing, slowly and softly like a ghost.

The girl recognized it at once. Her mother used to hum that same tune while knitting and watching her play. She'd always thought it was a happy song. Now she heard the lyrics for the first time. It was a song about nostalgia.

"What a pity!" a guest murmured. "Such a gentle tune, but I can't make out a word of it."

The dinner bell began to ring in the master's hand.

"Open sesame!" he called out.

As if awakened by a spell, the tight mouth began to relax. It unsealed slowly, then opened in full release. The ice emerged from between the mother's thighs, first piece by piece, then in a sudden spill of thuds struck the bottom of the bucket.

The guests leaned in. The ice had melted and dwindled. Around them the water carried a faint murky tint.

"Even the most divine creatures still piss and empty themselves like livestock!" The master took the mother into his lap and combed his fingers through her hair. "I aught to write that down, and frame it in my parlour."

The men saluted him. The maid refilled the crystal glasses, her own legs shivering.

The master was teaching the mother new words, when he looked aside and suddenly cried out:

"look who's been eavesdropping all along!"

It was the girl, who had her head stuck out from under the table and had been watching for some time. She was grabbed by her braid and pulled out like a small potato.

"Well, well!" a guest roared. "The sneaky hare! I say, you better beat some sense into her little brain."

The master waved his crop. "On the contrary. Curiosity like this must be encouraged." He turned to the girl. "You must like what you're seeing. Why don't you take your mother's place on the table?" his tone was dangerously soothing.

The girl was not ashamed at all. She climbed onto the table with ease and squatted over the bucket, then spread herself so hard that the pale shade around her anus stretched into a triangle. The welts on her back had yet to heal fully.

She tossed her gaze back at the men, eyes all honey, begging for a bone. The master frowned.

"What a little whore! I dare say that young Anna already shows signs of surpassing her mother." said a guest.

"You may jest, my friend, but sometimes I worry about the daughter. You see, the Turk who sold me Lady Pavlova claimed she'd been cast out by her clan for attempting to elope with a foreign sailor. Fortunately, the mother's stock prevailed in this case, but one never knows. The mystery in her blood has yet to reveal itself. Perhaps a Dane--a descendent of the Vikings! Now that would make for a truly fascinating breed."

"Viking or not, let's put her sphincter to the test!" against the fireplace the guests' eyes shone like wolves.