Any Body

photo by susan sugar©️

There are some words you never want to hear, especially when you are bound and gagged, bloodied and beaten and these words are spoken by your attacker.

He’d convinced her, if she’d just let him tie her up and restrain her, she’d be ok.

It began with a keg hours earlier, maybe even days earlier, certainly there were drugs. Harsh things like meth entered the equation, as it had on occasion before.

This man busked in the tourist resort village tolerant of drunks and dissolute types. She had a job somewhere sometime ago but that was gone now down the drain of recent events.

This new love story with her sailor man, they lived aboard his sailboat in the harbor, a dinghy to reach the docks, this had her full attention. Young and attractive and that’s what you do.

He had been violent before. Then again so had she. It was their Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf, if they knew the reference or not. They were playing out that predictable human vignette we call ‘falling in love’ and which is easily ridiculed by those rescued from such a calamity and those who will never know it.

They were in love and this granted them the freedom to attack each other. They believed the affair was some sort of license for misbehavior. They were the stars of their own production and sure enough the standing ovation curtain call was the best sex they’d ever had. Or so they told themselves.

The tensions grew and that night, after the poisons had mixed, the violence errupted. Blood was found on the ceiling. 

What she knew was her survival was ebbing.

‘Honey,’ he said, ‘I’ve never crossed the line like this before. No one can see you.’

And she’d agreed to let him rope her, she agreed to anything he said until he calmed down. Right before he fell asleep he uttered the shocking words, ‘I can’t believe I have to get rid of another body.’