The Brand Ch. 14

I've been starting my stories with the ambition to titillate. In this story, I've learned how I can get lost until I find my way by creating increasingly difficult problems for myself to solve. Gradually, as my characters revealed themselves, their sex and sexuality having become less and less significant to me as the story goes on, I started to want to write something I'd like to read.

You may not agree with the direction I've taken, but this chapter is where I always had the mind to go. I find it irksome that there is nothing new under the sun. If it wasn't for perfectly ridiculous masterpieces like "This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Dude, Seriously, Don't Touch It," I wouldn't believe it was okay for me to try to take a crack at creating my own bit of nonsense. None of us should be afraid to risk failure or ridicule, no one.

As for Victria and Melody, I'm almost done.

Thanks So Much,

Abraxis

*****

It's A Dog Gone Shame

"I am not an angel," I answered; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself."

-Charlotte Bronte, from Jane Eyre

1

Dear God or Goddess or whatever,

Just in case you don't exactly happened to be tuned in to me right this very moment, I am writing this little prayer to you, in red crayon on the back of a paper place mat in a Fuddruckers, yes we stopped here because the name of the place is Fuddruckers, so that I might draw your attention for a minute. I'm not sure if it was your idea to make me such an asshole or if I became one all by myself, but here I am and here it goes.

As totally astounded and grateful I am that some miraculous healing has occurred in my legs, I was wondering if you could, like, reverse it and heal Melody instead. I mean I get that you work in mysterious ways and all, but if you could just give me back the Melody I fell in love with, I'd totally be okay with a really shitty pair of legs. I'd even ask you to take my life in exchange for bringing her out of whatever psychological whole she's fallen into, if that's what it'll take. But, I was really hoping I could be around for a while longer so that I could, you know, enjoy her presence and get back in sync with the beautiful love we'd started.

Just give me a sign, if that's your will, I mean. Oh, and if this message, this prayer or whatever, gets intercepted by whatever it is that functions as the universe's antithesis of all that is good and right -you know, whatever sent that dead little baby bird in the forest that time with Simon, all those freaky crows, that suicidal oriole and that big black rooster- well...never mind, because that would be your will too, I guess. Right? It's you that is the coin, its two sides and its you that is the flip. Death is still your creation. You didn't give death to someone else to run. I mean, you're the world's top CEO. If you don't give the go ahead, it don't happen. Right?

Whatever. Anyway, thanks for everything, all the good times I mean. Thanks for letting me have Melody to love, even for just a little while. Amen.

Kindest Regards,

Victria Charpentier

P.s. Sorry about Simon, by the way, even if he was in the middle of ass raping me. And I'm sorry too about Rancourt, Duffy and Ricchio. As for Yazmina, I really can't see how that's on me, but I'm sorry anyway.

Victria tucked the red crayon back into the box, set it aside and then neatly folded her inscribed prayer into a thick two by two inch square. In their booth, she had positioned Melody across from her in just such a way that it gave the appearance that she was staring directly into her domme's eyes. That was exactly how it seemed, at least for the first ten minutes in their time in the Savannah Georgia Fuddruckers's. But then Victria had finished her written petition to the great CEO in the sky, tucked it away into her shirt pocket, and then saw that Melody's head had tilted back just slightly enough to turn her look sidelong.

Victria sighed, turned to see who or what was in her lover's field of view and saw a table of four older women spiritedly engaged in a conversation revolving around some rumor or reminiscence, perfectly oblivious to Melody's oblivion. Well that's good, she thought. At least they're not staring, like those idiots had done in Harrisburg, Baltimore or Knoxville.

It had been miles back when all Victria had wanted to do was buy a few clothes, adult diapers, books, snacks and some vanilla and milk chocolate Ensure Actives for Melody. But, there were a dozen or so people that just couldn't take their eyes off of them, especially Melody. At one point it had gotten so bad that Victria began to ruminate over her distinct impression that they were either deliberating over some conviction they had that it was her fault that Melody was in such a condition or how she dared to think she could parade such a creature in public. Finally, affronted to such a degree that she felt only contempt, Victria let the last party of guilty spectators take in the sight of her giving Melody a particularly sloppy French kiss, which soured their faces even more before they finally meandered away in shamed disgust.

Savannah was a respite from such nonsense, a diversion, a few days rest in a place Victria had always wanted to visit just because she liked the name, like she liked the name Fuddruckers's. So, on through Knoxville, Tuscaloosa and Montgomery, she'd driven Melody and Spanky ever southward, fourteen hundred miles from where they'd started in Bellow's fall, Vermont. Spanky had his big bag of kibble, his chew toys and his blanket. Melody had her protein drinks, her supply of Depends and her catatonic distance. Victria had her Melody, her guns, her phone, tablet and her freedom, at least as much freedom as Melody's distance would allow.

The break was certainly warranted, she the only driver, the fully functioning brains behind the operation with the emotional wherewithal to fend off the scrutiny of accusing eyes and the mental land mines of post trauma. I'm the one, thought Victria, that has to look those sheep in their beady little eyes. I'm the one that didn't have to stop back at the house, but I did. Hell, I could have driven clear around Connecticut. But, I hadn't. She couldn't. Victria certainly had plenty of miles to convince herself that it was a bad idea, but all deliberation led right back to her home in Westport, though it had been tainted with the spilling of her own blood and the blood of the intruders she'd killed, the men that would have done no bit of good if she hadn't neutralized their threat.

Her home, a restored six thousand square foot farm house, complete with a barn she used as a studio, Victria had paid five hundred thousand dollars for in cash, at the time, because she could. It was a personal symbol of her professional success, one of the rewards she'd allowed herself as she worked the slivers and shards out of the heels of the hands she'd used to crack the surface of the glass ceiling set above her. It also happened to be the place where Melody had given of herself, relinquished her body, heart and spirit to her beneficent domme. It was the most beautiful thing Victria, cut throat businesswoman, insightful artist and depraved sadist, had ever known. But, it had also become the detonation point at which the Melody she'd come to love had been rendered psychologically mute and disengaged from the world.

Then Cheevers, the head of the marketing firm where she'd risen through the ranks to junior executive, let her go for the stated reason that she needed to concentrate all of her efforts to getting perfectly well again. That, had been total bull shit. He could have kept her on. He was on the verge, prompted by certainly her reputation, but primarily out of his own fear and his perception of a series of unfortunate losses to the company, of making her senior and grooming her to be his right hand. But, the world, God, giveth and taketh away. Victria hit her rock bottom. She had a good deal of fiscal back up in her bank account, but the invasion had essentially dissolved her world, ruined the sanctity of her home, marred her body, ended her work life as she knew it and, as far as she could tell, destroyed the mind of the most wonderful, precious, human being she'd ever known.

The house, filled with its furniture, its ornamentation, her collected multiplicities, the mountainous piles and stacks of her art work, was now empty of all meaning. There were a few things Victria desired or felt obligated to take from the place. She decided that she wanted her camera, her gun safe and that she needed to get Melody's diary. She knew where it was, its little padlock locked, the journal and its key tucked safely in her duffle and set in the back corner of the closet in her slave lover's study. As much as Victria exerted her domme's rights and desires, all within the scope of the contract Melody had signed all those months ago, she had never wished to have access to her slave's diary. Though, she could have. Melody had evolved into a magnificent slave: loyal, dedicated, dutiful and obedient. It would have been a much sweeter triumph if Melody had divulged her most secret thoughts of her own free will. But, Victria was never able to hear Melody read a few passages aloud nor had she ever been granted the permission to look through it herself.

It wasn't until their time at Grandmother's, when Victria had re-read the love poem that Melody had written and Vance had found for her under the Christmas tree, that she thought that perhaps reading from its pages would bring her love out of her psychological confinement. What if it did bring her out, Victria had asked herself. It would certainly be miraculous, now five months into her catatonia.

What if Melody returned to the world with a blank mind, a victim of amnesia? A grim figment in the back of Victria's mind told her that wouldn't be so bad, start her slave from scratch, create in her the safe, clean slate, mentally unscarred identity she needed. Would she be like the house: a place you can never go back to? What if she came out of it a total child or just remained as she was, in her vegetative state? Oh no. Please, no. The line of thought served only to disturb Victria, so she did her best not to entertain it. .

Still, what if Melody coming back with no memory required Victria herself to be a totally different person than who she was? I can't do that, Victria thought. Fucking Lifetime channel movie of the week, My Fair Slave, a power hungry sadist sacrifices the person she is to free her slave and create an endless love from nothing, I don't think so. That would be just a bit too Pavlovian for me. It would be like, Bride of Frankenstein or something. Yet truth was stranger than fiction. The truth, what Victria feared the most was the possibility that Melody would forget the love they'd forged, the domination she'd exacted, the obedient deference she'd earned, sweetly painfully intimate, shed psychological skin, never to be remembered again by the slave she'd fallen so deeply for.

It had been a dark, moonless, lonely morning, a quarter to three, when Victria pulled onto her drive, drove around the back of her farm house, and then parked by the patio doors. She let Spanky out for a little run and to relieve himself. Then she'd called him back to the Explorer and locked him inside with Melody. At the back entrance into her garage, Victria used the pen light on her key chain to find the right key. She looked once over her shoulder before finally opening the door and slipping inside.

Her big Lexus was there, she having instructed Vance to park it inside the garage once the driveway was cleared of snow. Quickly, restricting herself to the small flashlight of her key ring, Victria made her way around the vehicle, and then into the house proper. She advanced up the stairs, studying the shadows, listening hard to the silence, feeling the fast thub thump of her heart and controlling her breaths.

At the landing in the foyer, Victria thought she saw a wide splash of blood stain on the front door. But, it was only a trick of her mind, a superimposed shadow of a stranger's death. She'd had Vance hire a specialized crew to do the necessary cleaning. Victria shined her light along all the surfaces she distinctly recalled had been awash with carnage. Where there had been blood and brain matter, lots of it, there was none. Crossing into the hallway to the kitchen, she saw the bullet holes in the walls and the pellet divots in her wood flooring.

Victria stood in the kitchen for a moment and looked around, following the eye of her pen light. There wasn't anything in the room she wanted to take. It was only that she wanted to feel being there, to safely reflect, like a holocaust survivor touring a leveled death camp or a burn victim looking over the charred remains of the place she'd once called home. Then she saw it, the crow mask, its hooked black beak pointed in her direction, the twin shine of her little light reflected in its knowing, ominous smooth latex eyes. It had sent a brief tingle down her spine. Expecting it as much, instantly aware of the thing's harmlessness, her fear faded in seconds. Victria took a deep breath, tightened her jaw and defiantly stared into the mask's eyes. She flexed the muscles beneath the scarred skin of her legs and relaxed them again. We won't be back, she thought. When I'm ready, I'll sell the place. But that was way too much to think about, too far ahead to ponder.

"Fuck you." She whispered to the mask, to its ghosts, "You walked into it and that's what you got. Think of it as my saving your mothers from any further disappointment."

Victria turned on her heels. From the kitchen she retraced her steps back to the foyer, and then hiked up the stairs to the second floor. There, she turned into Melody's room, grabbed the duffle, and then headed into the master bedroom. After grabbing the gun safe from beneath the bed and gathering up a few items, she made her way back down the stairs. Back on the first floor, Victria felt drawn, pulled in two directions: down the last flight of stairs and back out the garage or back toward the kitchen and around to the hall that led back to the living room. Spaced, trying to understand her confusion, Victria headed back toward the kitchen. Still using the pen light for the meager beacon it was, she entered the living room and looked toward the Christmas tree that stood there just beyond the end of the sofa.

Victria scanned and scrutinized. Red and gold balls and strands of tinsel passed in and out of her light. She cast the light slowly downward until it shined upon the tree's skirt. There, laid upon it, was Melody's broken collar. She could only guess that Vance or the detective, Cassy or Kathy maybe, she couldn't remember which, had it returned to them by Peebles: the psychologist in the hospital who most certainly had Victria pegged. Only people I love should have me so pegged, you pompous shit. But, why there though, she wondered, under the tree. Why not? She was suddenly sure then. Vance had put it there because it was there that Vance had found Melody's sealed poem, her lovely, lovely poem, which he'd brought into the hospital for her to read and keep and read again and again and cherish.

Victria took a step forward, intending to retrieve the diamond studded ring of platinum. It was then that a sudden cold began to creep along the naked skin of her arms, neck and face, as if an icy fog had just been blown into the room. She stopped, turned her small light from the collar, and then slowly raised it chest high. Victria scanned her way ever leftward, casting brief illumination upon the dusty items on her entertainment center, Vance's gifted snow globe, scattered cd cases, edges of stained and polyurethane oak, the plasma's screen, the curtain that flanked the right end of the living room's bay window and the person standing there.

The cold and the weight of her fear held her utterly motionless. She might have recalled the feeling up in the woods in Vermont, outside the cabin on that moon bright night, the absolutely ascetic shiver in her sex, the feeling that her bowels were ready to release out of pure terror. In that moment, her eyes fixed, the point of her little light shaking across the dark luxurious skin of Yazmina, Victria felt a rush of urine escape, drench her jeans and drip onto the rug between her feet. She wanted to fall to her knees. She wanted to stand. Victria stared, helpless, shaking.

It was Yazmina as much as it was clearly not Yazmina, like a cardboard cut-out, but not; like a wax museum sculpture, but not. Her head was covered in dark red bristles. She was staring out the great window, searching, waiting. Then Yazmina turned to face her. Victria gaped as she watched long lines of scars and open strips of wounds materializing out of her naked skin. The room grew colder, a whole new skin of crawling goose flesh seemed to envelop Victria and then a slimy shit suddenly slipped from her ass. Yazmina smiled, her eyes unreal and smoldering, glowing black like the eyes of the zombie mask of the intruder, the man, she'd killed first on that incomprehensible night.

Victria let the duffle bag fall from her hand. Her keys and the little flashlight were still tightly clutched in her right fist. I will not kneel, she thought. Victria shook as she took her first step closer to Yazmina. She's been waiting for me. She wants a kiss good-bye. Those aren't my wounds. Someone, something, else is whipping her now. I will touch death and I will still not kneel. I do this and she will be gone, she will be free.

A sudden slave to her certainty that she needed to make contact with the ethereal figure before her, Victria's body shook as she stumbled forward. She was fighting her own good sense, the sense that was always omitted from the scripts of all those horror films where the young women just hung around, being stupid and half naked, so that they could die by the hands of one male menace or another. This isn't real. Bull shit. Of course it is. Run, you idiot. No. I have to touch her, to touch what's still caught here in the world, by her love, by her hate. How do I know this? Oh my God, how do I know this? Victria reached, her hand looming near Yazmina's terrible stare, and watched tiny gleaming flecks of ice crystals begin to cover the back of her hand. Jesus, she thought. Melody, I love you so much, she thought. And Yazmina was gone.

The roomed warmed again, though a chill lingered in her thighs and down her legs and in the sound of Spanky's sudden, frenzied barks. Victria shined her light on the floor, grabbed up the duffle bag, and then scrambled through the living room, into the foyer and back down the stairs. Back outside, she locked the door behind her as she looked toward the Explorer. She could make out Spanky sitting in the driver's seat and Melody, slump forward on the other side. Victria bolted to her side, unlocked the door, pushed the dog off the seat, and then hopped in.

As she put the key into the ignition and turned the vehicle back to life, Spanky resumed his uproar, his paws on the dash, his snarling face close to the wind shield, his eyes staring widely at the three figures standing a few yards from the front of the car. It was the Arian, his narrowed eyes set wide apart, fixing his gaze upon her, his two masked henchmen flanking him on either side. Victria felt the tepid squish of shit in her crotch, clenched her teeth, gave the Arian the finger, put the car into drive, and then put the pedal to the floor.

It was miles later, in some gas station restroom beyond the Del Water Gap that she stopped to rid herself of her stink and shit slimy clothes. She had sat in the car for a time, just staring at the gas station's rear wall, wondering if tempting ghosts or running them over with your car was a sure fire way to continue their following you. Deciding that either way, there was nothing she could do about it, Victria finally stepped out of the Explorer and locked the door behind her. After washing herself as best she could, got dressed in fresh clothes, bought herself a coffee and three cheese Danishes, she returned to the car to freshen Melody up. An hour more and they were back on the road, a new day just dawning, Melody strapped in at her side and Spanky sleeping on his blanket behind his mistress's seat.