When I was twenty I got my entire back tattooed, the first pain I paid cash for. Every week, I went to the oldest tattoo shop in Manhattan and sat in a padded leather chair that smelled of iodine. I smashed my face into the upholstery and hunkered down for several hours of paying attention only to what the pain felt like. I did not listen to music or chat with the tattooer or ask for breaks. It took sixty hours over half a year.
Later, when I was thirty, I paid a woman to strap me to a leather cot and hit me with a stick. Stripped of context and ritual, everything in S/M sounds ridiculous. Without any of the euphemistic and oddly formal jargon S/M people are often attached to, the mechanics of the acts sound counterintuitive and depressing. I wanted to get hit with a stick, but I needed it to feel sexual, because I didn’t understand any other context for such a desire. The woman was about my age and made more money than I did. I knew this because I used to do her job.
When I was even younger, still a teenager, I was paid many thousands of dollars to hit men with similar sticks and whips, to punch them in their faces, to kick them between their legs with all the force I could muster. But by thirty I was an adult with a regular job, so I paid the woman three hundred dollars to hit me with the stick for an hour. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. But it was the only thing that felt clear to me: corporeal tests of how much my body could endure. The sexualizing felt important, but it was just a foil for something deeper and more shameful, of which I had only a fleeting understanding.
In the late nineties, before tattoos and getting hit with sticks had occurred to me, I met Dean. In the back of his metal shop in his building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he had an old forklift. Its transmission did not work properly and it was largely useless for the task of transporting metal around the shop. He had bought it at the city auction in the Bronx where you could get worn-out generators and school busses with rusted engines, the sort of mechanical refuse no one wanted to deal with, worth more as scrap. The-raise-and lower function of the forks worked fine. He hung a chain fall from the forklift and used it to dangle girls like me, girls who felt lucky to be there, up off the ground with rope.
When I first met Dean, I was so young that I had never yet been with a man who did not live in his childhood home—I had never yet been with a man. His building was fantastical, empty of anything practical, full of giant machines that loomed like figures in the corners of the shop. The floor in the loft above the shop was espresso-colored hardwood, the shower head industrial and so powerful I had to kneel under it. He was terribly serious. I didn’t see him smile or laugh once until I had known him for weeks, until he had done things to me I didn’t yet know the names for.
I adored him almost immediately, but I didn’t understand why. It was not a warm love feeling. It was more like hunger. My feelings for him made no sense: we hardly spoke to each other, and I felt incredibly anxious and off-kilter when I was around him. He was so much older than me that we did not share cultural references. Also, he hurt me. My feelings, and my body. He hurt every soft part of me. I left his loft splattered with quickly blackening bruises in the places my clothes covered. Five-finger handprints around my biceps, clicking jawbone, wide bruises and thin red stripes across my ass and thighs. I always dropped everything when he called me. I mopped those espresso-colored floors for him after he fucked me and if he would have asked me for a kidney, I would have found a way to give one to him. He knew this. I was not, it was clear, the first of his acolytes. But I was young and unspoiled, desperately eager to please, and I asked nothing of him, not even to talk. I said yes to everything, so we fit easily, because he was a solid object and I was water and there was nothing I could not shape myself around.
The problem with habitual pain is that you quickly become habituated to it. What at first feels shocking and world-altering becomes routine. When Dean told me to strip and to stand in the corner to wait for the camel whip, I did it. The first time, the hurt of it was so intense that I lost myself. The whip was from Palestine, he told me. It was long and thin and cruel. A camel must be really big, I thought when I first saw the whip. I was still half a child, and I thought a child’s thoughts. I stood in the corner. Sweat beaded down my ribs and the insides of my thighs. But when it happened, everything changed. One moment I was a person with thoughts and a body and anxieties; I was wondering if I looked ridiculous, standing naked and barefoot facing the wall, I was wondering if my body looked right, if I should have put my hair in a ponytail, if we were going to fuck first or after or at all. I was wondering if I should have been doing something else, thinking something else, if I should have been trying to flirt instead of just obeying like an automaton and then he said Hold still, which he didn’t have to say because I hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes. And then everything was gone except one thing, it was only the hot electric agony stretching from him through the camel whip to the flesh of my ass, there were no words or thoughts, just a high-frequency cracking feeling; something in my core felt caved in and I was falling into where it had collapsed. He was gone and I was too; the feeling was the entire world. I was not in pain—I had become pain.
I did not move.
He stopped after not too many strikes. Later—years later—he told me he had been afraid, that my refusal to say no had frightened him. That no one had ever not said no before. I took this to mean I was special.
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Later, when I was in my twenties, we lived together in a rambling farmhouse in upstate New York, five hours northwest of the city. There were wildflowers growing by the side of the road, large mossy yellow fronds, pink bell shapes bobbling on thin stems, lacy off-white disks that crumpled in the heat. When we first moved to the farm, I cleaned and baked every day. I fed the animals and filled the enamel pitcher with wildflowers, placed it in the center of the sagging wooden table with the carved legs. I imagined that if I acted like the kind of woman who would be treated gently, I would become her, shedding the soiled skin of everything that had already passed between us, stepping into a new life where the air would be warm with sugar and baker’s yeast, the touches soft and painless, the tones calm and even. My desire for tenderness was a poorly kept secret, and I understood gentleness, love, and care to be things I had to earn. I was afraid I was undeserving and it frightened me to desire softness, so I bought lots of antique tea towels and I took plates of roasted pork out to him while he was working in his shop, trying to play the role I wanted to be cast in. If I squinted, I could almost see a future: me pregnant, him kind, both of us utterly changed.
At the farm, we had a dog, and the dog developed a problem in his hip. One morning I watched from the loft as Dean pulled him carefully up onto the white linen couch and tucked a down pillow under his haunches. Dean held our dog’s face in his big mean hands and stroked the dog’s jowls. I couldn’t see Dean’s face, but I was sure he was crying, those silent tears his sort of men so rarely allow themselves. Max, he said to the dog, over and over again. Max, Max, Max. I could hear him choking on the tears. Max, Max, Max. I love you. I love you, I love you. The dog was in pain and we knew it and it broke something open, some new channel that hadn’t existed between us before. Taking care of the dog was the kindest thing we ever did together. Dean built the dog an enclosure where he could be outside without hurting himself. He fed him expensive meat and wrapped him in a Pendleton blanket at night. I started to think maybe we could be different, that the man who liked to hit me with his belt had given way to a new man, one whose heart was growing, one who was so broken up over the dog’s pain that he could not think of anything else. He was calm, sweet, reasonable. He had feelings just like mine. I stopped baking every day. I forgot about best behavior.
And then it happened again, so fast I lost my breath before his hands even touched my neck. I could always remember the catalytic piece of nonsense, the exact thing that, if I could have swallowed it back down and made it unsaid, would have made everything calm again. This time it was about plastic packing boxes. Sometimes it was about the bumper of a truck, or the mail delivery, or a tone of voice. Once anger sparked, neither of us could control ourselves, we were both picked up by the gale-force swirling of fury between us. My voice became high and accusatory, his eyes went wild, mine streamed tears. He bellowed and I screamed. Once it started, I knew what would eventually happen, and the worst part of me genuinely wanted to see how far it would go, how hard and long he would squeeze his hands around my neck and shake me: until I went black and dizzy and silent? I knew he would not strike me in a furious state. He never did. I knew if he ever hit me out of pure anger I would leave and not come back. At least I thought I knew that. But it was moot, because he didn’t, not ever, not once. He hit me only in bed, where the sexualizing rarefied and exonerated the violence, where I could never know if he had saved up all his rage for those moments, or if it was altogether different.
In bed, he always said Ask for it.
Please, I always replied.
In anger, he did everything but hit me, which was confusing, because he didn’t appear to be in any kind of control.
Soon after we moved to the farm, he started smashing things. An ironstone serving plate, a slow cooker, a Mason jar, a ceramic vase. It did not seem to matter what the object was, only that it was hefty and brittle enough to shatter at my feet or on the wall behind me. He did not ever throw anything directly at me, and this felt important, and it took years for me to understand that the importance of this distinction was sad.
There were phases to the rage, and after he smashed something, if we did not stop fighting, at some point he would draw his body very close to mine and wrap his hands around my familiar neck.
It was different that way. There was, I struggled later to explain to a therapist, nothing in common between this choking and the other kind. There was, I told her, a big difference between choking and hitting. But there was a muscle memory, and the lines of demarcation around my body had been irrevocably blurred by so many years of asking him to cross them.
The upstate farm was where I first felt a shock of recognition at something I saw on a plate. A whole life of eating thighs, breasts, tenderloins, and sweetbreads, served on the bone, black and blue, au jus, and yet I had never fully connected those parts to my own. It was not until I learned to slice into the spare haunches of a spring lamb with a boning knife that I felt an eerie sense of familiarity with the meat. Once it was not neatly parceled out for me by a butcher or a chef, it became parts of a body. Loins and sinews and buckled joints, known to me from my own. We didn’t talk about it, Dean and I—about the accumulating of animals, the slaughtering, the butchering. We didn’t talk about it the same way we didn’t talk about his hands around my neck.
Aren’t you troubled by all the death around you? a friend in Brooklyn asked me.
Sometimes I wonder if I will die up there, I considered saying, about the farm, but did not. She was silent.
You are so melodramatic, I chided myself.
On a Saturday morning Dean and I killed a pregnant ewe. She had been gestating for so long that the carriage had wasted her body, and all that remained of her apart from her swollen middle were sharp angles under burry chunks of matted wool. To my untrained eye, more than half the weight of her body was in her womb. The ewe was so weak and swollen she could hardly rise from her knees, and the visibility of her cartoonish roundness and alarming bones in such close proximity was grotesque. We had been hoping she would lamb in the night like most of them did—without fuss and without evidence, except the lamb and sometimes a small patch of glistening fluid in the straw. But she didn’t lamb and she didn’t lamb and she didn’t lamb, and every morning when we went out to the barn to check the animals, she was lying on her side, each breath heaving her like she was a great billowing sail. We threw down some grain for her, which was all we knew how to do. She had worms, probably, but we didn’t know what to do about it.
Everything at the farm was brutal and undiscussed. We went out to the barn in the morning, me with a bucket and a skinning knife, Dean with the big blade that was just for killing. One of his boots was untied and he had forgotten a belt. His pants sagged as he ambled out past our big turnaround gravel driveway and the stripe of flesh between his pants and jacket was white like a baby’s, the only soft part on him. I was drinking coffee out of an undersized cream-colored cup with a delicate handle and a painting of a bluebell, the sort of cup I associate with softness and femininity, an object of delicacy that wouldn’t long survive the lives we were living. In my other hand I held the skinning knife, which was glazed with blood from the last time we did this.
Look at your feet, a shrink with an office that smelled of mold told me. It was an exercise in embodiment, a fix for disassociation. When you cannot feel your body, look down at your feet, acknowledge where your feet are, and remember that you are where your feet are. The “you” she was referring to is something skittish and philosophically nebulous. The psyche, the self, I imagine she meant. She did not parse the word. What she did not understand was that the last place I wanted to be was where my feet were.
My feet were standing in a rapidly widening puddle of blood. My cup was on its side, flecked with errant pieces of urine-soaked straw, a small chip missing from its lip. My knife and bucket were in the corner of the milk room, and each of my hands was holding half of the ewe’s body cavity, wet and steaming and incredibly resistant to what I was doing, which was spreading it open like I was a heart surgeon, my arms the retractor, straining her open against the laws of anatomy and geometry. Dean sliced into the amniotic sac. I understood that he was trying to save the lamb. The ewe had been dead for two to ten minutes, depending on how you define dead. Blood was still pumping out of the slit he had cut in her neck, but it had slowed to a dribble, flowing down into her sodden wool like ice cream down a child’s chin into their shirt. I could see the baby lamb through the filmy sac, not details, just form. It reminded me of the posters outside Planned Parenthood, the ones anti-choice protesters try to crush into patients’ lines of vision on their way into the clinic. I could see the lamb’s parts. Fluid followed the line of Dean’s knife. I was in the way as he reached greedily into the sac, spreading it like the peel of an orange, grabbing for the lamb.
I watched his big meaty hands as they stole the lamb from the messy pile of ewe and sac and fluid and I did not gag. I did not ever feel sick to my stomach. Time had sped up, such that the entire horrific procedure had already occurred in the time it took me to weigh the potential dangers of telling Dean to stop. There was nothing to be saved by stopping him, anyway. I stood there, a mute accomplice, stunned by my silence and my order-following hands. Time had also slowed down, such that I could not yet tell whether the lamb was dead. The motions of its body were slow spasms that may simply have been reactions to all the chaotic movements of the other three bodies around it. Its eyes were sealed shut and its body was covered in so much biological jelly that there was no way to quickly discern the things that indicate life—a suppleness to the skin, pink mucous membranes, a kinetic vibration almost too subtle for the eye to pick up, noticeable only in absence.
When Dean realized the lamb was dead, he placed it on the smooth concrete floor of the milk room, more gently than I expected. His arms were red-mud brown up past the elbows. Mine were still inside the ewe, I realized with a start. The silence in the milk room was round and swelling, pushing out into all the small cavities, tight to the sashes, rafters, jambs. It rose and filled the room, displacing everything else until Dean stalked out the door without a word. I moved to follow him, but the slam of the door sounded like a personal rebuke, so I sat down in the soiled straw next to the ruined ewe, and I waited.
When the sun was hot and high and the stench of deadness in the milk room became unbearable, I finally left. I cleaned the blood off my hands, my arms, my neck, my clavicle. I threw my clothes in the big industrial trash bin we only remembered to take to the dump when it teemed with maggots. Dean was in the house while I was doing this cleaning, but we did not speak. I went to sleep alone that night, feeling mute and heavy, leaden with the confusion and sadness of the day.
It was impossible for us to speak to each other for days afterward. I tried to think of words to crack the seal on the silence, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound ridiculous, so I said nothing. What had happened on the floor of the milk room was a lurid dramatization of our incompetence, our recklessness, our selfishness. We both knew it, and so we could not speak. This was how we lived with bruised cheekbones, dead fetal animals, broken ocular capillaries. We starved these evidences of oxygen with our prickly silence until they only existed in our discrete imaginations and eventually vaporized, absorbed into the atmosphere of our simmering discomfort.
Dean and I had been doing eyebrow-raising things together for a while, ten years by the time we careened into the tiny hamlet in central New York with his pile of city cash and a truck full of machinery. His rage problem was barely contained and he had been hitting me in my face since the nineties. He was my boyfriend by this point—I wasn’t just one of a bunch of girls he hired any longer; he had chosen me, so I did my best to acquiesce to everything he demanded, no matter how painful or humiliating. I had a web of social, sexual, and emotional difficulties I liked to think of as very complicated and exotic, but which reduced to the uncomfortable truth that I was only attracted to men who were mean to me. I felt that I had to hold on to Dean, because he was truly, deeply cruel—diagnosably and gleefully so—but he had another side, too, the side that kept me relatively safe. He had a conscience, or at least a sense of consequence, which is the thing so many men like him lack. His was intermittent; it went into remission for long periods of time and it disappeared in the dark, but it was in him, somewhere. I was never quite afraid of him, though I’m not sure why. Like me, he was smart and self-reflective. He hated the part of himself that was drawn to violence, the part that seemed like it should have belonged to people screaming on daytime talk shows, not to two private-schooled city people who enjoyed bloomy-rind cheeses and Jeff Koons. The part that, for him, had landed him on the wrong end of the worst accusations enough times to constitute a pattern.
Everything I know about Dean’s life before me came straight from his mouth. I have my suspicions and instincts, and I’ve tried to figure out the truth, but the fact is I do not know anything for certain, as I was not there. What he told me was that when he was twenty-two he woke from a blackout in a jail cell in Vermont, in a town not much bigger than the one we lived in, with a head full of questions and blankness where the answers should have been. A woman, his girlfriend, had called 911, saying he had sexually assaulted her. He had been drunk, and jealous, and unhinged. By the time we were at the farm, he hadn’t had a drink in twenty years, but back in Vermont he had drunk so hard that he’d had to stop. And even now that he was sober, I knew him and his predilections for slippery slopes well enough to be able to extrapolate what the addition of a blackout might have made him capable of. I had experimented with my ability to say no to him enough times myself to understand that he considered it to be a suggestion. My attempts to say no hadn’t stuck—sometimes they hadn’t even made it out of my mouth. She took it back, he was always careful to mention, about his accuser, and indeed, he walked away from Vermont without any charges. She brought cookies to the jail the next day. She was my girlfriend. She was drunk too.
I did not tell anyone about this history. I didn’t know exactly what to make of it. It was his, not mine, and it predated me, but I chose him with the full knowledge of this past, those gray-area altercations I often suspected were darker than he liked to think. My feeling is that he did what the woman who called 911 accused him of, so in the context of my own complicity, it didn’t matter what had actually happened there: my truth was I believed him capable of sexual assault, and I chose to ignore it.
Then there was the next accusation, this one in the late nineties. What he told me was that this woman was drunk, just like the last one, but this time he had been sober. They were involved in a complicated psychosexual power dynamic, he said, and it had gotten too intense for her. He had harassed her, he told me, had gone to her house in the middle of the night and leaned on the buzzer, and then she had falsely claimed to their mutual friends that he broke into her apartment and punched her in the face, which he vehemently denied. I knew who she was, this second woman. We had many friends in common and I often saw her at gatherings around the city. He told me she was known to be erratic and insane, but he was the only person I’d heard that from. To me, she appeared sweet, and delicate. She spoke in a soft voice and tucked her fluffy blond hair behind her ears a lot. I have no idea what the truth of what happened between them was, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire, as the saying goes, and some days as I cooked him eggs in our heavy cast-iron griddle I felt as if I was betraying every woman who ever lived.
But I believed people could change. I had changed a lot, myself. How could I not allow him the same possibility? How else could I parse those terrible stories of his violent drunken youth and reconcile them with the man who bottle-fed our first baby goat when the doe wouldn’t give the kid her teat? He slept in the barn that night, his body bent into an L shape in the corner of the stall, the doe curled up right next to him, the kid nestled between them. Animals felt safe with him. Children adored him. He took his mother to Paris for her birthday. For years I wore a locket around my neck that he gave to me while singing a John Lennon song, trying to be some guy from a movie, a sweet guy, a romantic guy, the kind of guy you didn’t ever have to be afraid of. The kind of guy who would call the veterinarian and make sure the lamb didn’t die. The kind of guy who had never stood over a bloody pile of impotent failure in a mess of his own making. A man who doesn’t think he is a god.
And so I forgave him, every time. I forgave his character defects and his terrible judgment and most of all I forgave his fatal flaw, that oversize swell of arrogant self-confidence that was both his magic and his ruin. I forgave it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Three days after the disaster with the lamb, he woke up before me and did all the barn chores. By the time I crawled down the ladder from our loft, he had boiled water for my coffee and left a wire basket full of warm eggs on the kitchen counter. I made the eggs for breakfast, with the slow deliberation I only ever had at our farm, feeling the faintly scalloped texture of the eggshells as I cracked them in my hand, watching the edges of the whites sizzle and crisp up in the shimmering puddle of bacon fat Dean had rendered from our first pig slaughter. We had ramps growing wild at the boggy edge of the property, close to where Dunga Brook babbled when the rain came in hard. Once upon a time the parcel of land we lived on had been a dairy farm, and some mornings when the wind and the moisture were right, I swore I could smell the sweet sour breath of cows in the air around the house.
He came up behind me as I was flipping the eggs. Tiny sparklers of hot fat gnatted at my wrists. He slipped his arms around my belly. He was so much bigger than me that I could feel him all around me, broad arms around my body, scratchy beard on the top of my head. His body was warmer than mine. We hadn’t touched each other since we lost the lamb. His body felt like the sun, warming my surface and down into the core of me. I tried to turn around, to look at him, but he held me firmly in place. The whites of the eggs solidified and the membrane over the yolks waxed from shimmering liquid to matte solid. He rested his cheek on the top of my head, and I could hear everything he could not say. I’m sorry. I wish I could have done better. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. I heard it so loudly and surely that it melted the cold wariness between us.
I would never have ended up at the farm with Dean if I hadn’t been good at giving and taking pain. Back when I was a teenager, I worked overnights as a professional dominatrix in Manhattan. I worked for a biker named Cliff, who had rotten teeth hidden under a voluminous beard and always dressed in camouflage fatigues with leather wrist gauntlets, like a character in a B action movie. The biker had picked me up outside the pizza place where I used to go to bum cigarettes when I lived at my parents’. He had told me I was beautiful, pretty enough that I could make a lot of money working for him. That, back then, was all it took.
The biker took 60 percent of my earnings for the dubious service of marketing me. The brand story he used to sell time with me was that I was a particularly sadistic dominatrix: one who really enjoyed administering pain. He arrived at this fiction because I was neither blonde nor Asian and I didn’t have big breasts, so I needed a gimmick, something he could condense into one sentence to sell over the phone. This was the nineties, before the internet became what it is today, and most of the men who called had only seen a grainy black-and-white photo of me in one of the oversize paper magazines that listed the dungeons and independent S/M workers in the city. The biker worked the phones, which was off-putting to most of the clients, who expected a solicitous female voice and instead got a gruff Queens accent barking out Hello, Nutcracker Suite. So he had to have a good spiel to keep them on the line, and part of that was a marketing niche for each girl. Mine was pain.
The utterly fictive nature of this story must have been evident to the biker. He had a keen predatory nose for the kind of damage that makes girls good sex workers, and he had plucked me off the street even though I had not only zero sex work experience, but hardly even any sex experience. I was good at acting and faking, especially with the clients, but the biker had seen me as a citizen before he turned me into a domme. He had seen me not know what to do with the crops and floggers and lengths of rubber tubing at the dungeon. He’d heard the anxiety in my voice when I’d asked him what I should wear to my first day of work. He even knew my legal name.
So he knew I wasn’t the pain queen he sold me as, that I was faking it for tips from the coked-out middle-aged bankers who would come by at three in the morning to be beaten bloody with a rattan cane. He knew my supposed sadistic streak was just a plot twist he had authored, and I knew it too. But the nightly reiterative performance of this newly interesting and lucrative personality twist obscured the truth, and by the time I had quit high school and was beating the bankers full time, six nights a week, the only version of myself I knew was the one he described on the phone. She’s very verbal and intelligent, with a mean streak. She’ll hurt you. She’s a real sadist.
At the dungeon, I hurt those men so badly. I was on drugs most of the time, which certainly helped to remove human reactions from the scenes of abjection and agony I was creating, but there was something else, something deeper and more genuine. It wasn’t sadism, but something that felt more frightening, a cold spot inside me that could see without feeling.
I watched a thin sweaty man with patches of soft downy gray hair on his chest kneel before me and I beat him until tiny chunks of his flesh whizzed off the surface of his ass. I cut a young lawyer with a razor knife until blood flowed off the table and into the carpet. I kicked a greasy ponytailed man in the testicles over and over again until he collapsed, curled into a ball, and then I pulled his legs out straight and spread them to kick him more. Did I enjoy these performances? I did not. Not in a wet panties kind of way. If they’d given me the same money to just sit and talk, which they sometimes did, I’d have been just as satisfied. But the violence I committed didn’t bother me, either. The desperation and the cries of the men didn’t touch anything, they just floated over me like a toxic fog headed to another ecosystem. Inside myself, I felt unaltered.
No one had ever hurt me like that until Dean walked in. I had never experienced rough touch, despite administering so much of it. The biker didn’t let anyone top the girls—not officially, anyway. It was bad for business, he said. In professional S/M circles, the carefully curated image of the sadistic dominatrix is irrevocably altered by the revelation of her taste for pain. Once you’ve been on your knees, the stain remains. So it was expensive, if you wanted to come into the Nutcracker Suite and beat the girls, and it was also quiet, an off-label backdoor menu offering too sordid to be spoken about even at this place, where getting your face pissed on by a girl in a rubber suit was an utterly unremarkable request.
At the Nutcracker, Dean paid for my time. The biker kept track of what we did there—there were limits, mostly around my subsequent salability. Bruised fruit, that sort of thing. But once Dean started picking me up in front of the armory on Twenty-Second Street, with the pinkish gray dawn light filling his vintage convertible Cadillac and the rising sun holding his profile up with its buoyant brightness as we streaked across the Manhattan Bridge, then there were no limits.
He liked to scare me, but I didn’t like that. I didn’t like getting tied to his bed frame and threatened with knives and needles. I didn’t enjoy feeling afraid. What I enjoyed was how still I could remain while he hurt me. What I liked was endurance: the slow violence of accumulation, time and discomfort building upward and outward and showing me the spaces in myself past where I had thought I ended. I liked seeing how long I could kneel on grains of rice on his hand-hewn floorboards, the skin of my knees dappling in distress, my mouth fixed shut, my voice silent. I liked how terrible it all felt, my face pressed into a musty pile of damp laundry in the corner of his loft, a whip made to spur on a great beast slicing across my small flesh. I liked that I could take it.
Crouched in sweaty anxious fear and splayed out in reckless exhaustion, I found the edges of myself, the only parts I cared to know back then.
When we first came to the farm, I had only hope and a fantasy, roughly drawn with a vague hand, everything pastel-colored and ending with a moral. The longer we stayed, though, the darker that vision turned. The longer we were alone up there, the more lives we took, and the more secrets we accrued, the less I could lie to myself about what was really happening. We were not idealistic artists returning to the land that had borne us. We did not find the authenticity we claimed to be seeking. We were not pursuing a narrow path with love and reverence. This was not Walden Pond. We were two reckless creatures, fragile and damaged, possessed of too much power in a place we did not understand, trying and failing not to damage each other further. The only true question was how far it would go before something even more terrible happened.
The bloodstain on the milk room floor was wide and dark. I avoided stepping on it when I walked through, but I did not scrub it away, and neither did Dean. We had been chastened by the stunning consequences of our ignorance, and neither of us wanted to forget too quickly that we had made ourselves the gods of this place. When anything on those acres needed help, we were supposed to be responsible. The weight of it staggered me. The terrifying breadth of our power and the consequent vulnerability of the animals was a choking yoke I wanted to run away from.
I wasn’t used to holding power—I was more comfortable having it wielded over me. With Dean, I had so little. He was a decade older, nearly a foot taller, and a man, with fancy artist friends and three more zeros in his net worth than I had ever had in my bank account. In our house, there was no illusion of equality. I dreamt of our chickens being eaten by coyotes, our horses tangled in barbed wire, our dog run over by a truck. Sometimes I looked at my feet, like the social worker said to do. They always looked far away, like someone else’s parts.