Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau

club-goers who appear startled in their states of transition, many carrying changes of clothing draped in rustling bags over their arms.
    Outside, taxis line the block. People emerge from the change room at the rear of the club, unrecognizable in shirts and slacks, jeans, pantyhose and trench coats. The sky is lit by street lamps and a light, cold rain has begun to fall, sticking in the air like snow. Justine waves at a taxi, digging her other hand into her tight leather pants for warmth. Someone touches Sabina hesitantly on the arm and she turns to find her slave with his eyes lowered, handing her a folded piece of paper. She opens it to find his phone number, but when she turns to say good-bye he has already disappeared, down the block or into a cab, or back into the shadows between the broken, shuttered buildings in the neighborhood. As sheslides into the waiting cab, Justine points out the man who had been whipped on the table. Sabina would not have known it was him, otherwise. He is fully dressed and walking with an easy, swinging gait down the street, his denim-clad, de-wigged lover beside him. As they round the corner she notices they are almost the same height, their shoulders bumping gently as they disappear from sight.

MERCY
              I t is your wife’s fortieth birthday, and I am torturing you to the sounds of a tape of Dylan Thomas giving a poetry recital. His voice is theatrical, and at times it hovers at the edges of breaking into song. “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light … .” His words, charged with command, seem to pulse through my own body. Obediently I slip the spiked heel of my shoe into your mouth. You are watching me with confusion because I am drunk and balancing over your naked body takes more skill than you think. I don’t want to fall on you with my weight and the stabbing silver of my bracelet, injuring you, making it impossible for you to meet your wife later in the evening for dinnerdown by the harbor where the white ships come in. She will chatter on about The New York Review of Books, literary magazines, publishers’ conventions, and other things that bewilder you because you decided to make money in medicine instead of writing poetry. Neither of us knew when we made our respective choices that we might be equally unfulfilled. I do not want to hurt you, at least not clumsily, not out of drunkenness, not because the high arches of my feet prevent me from balancing in spike heels. I want it to mean something when I hurt you, I want each transgression to be a deliberate one that cuts both ways, something that neither of us will be able to blame on bottles of wine or the fact that when I am in this position, one foot balanced on your neck, there is nothing nearby to hold on to and the only thing stable is the floor which seems a long way off from up here.
    I will not go gentle into you. The high heel of my shoe is in your mouth, and it is cutting the roof where the flesh is ridged and ticklish. You suck the heel as you would a phallus, and I wonder what you are tasting, what grotty remains of dust and dirt and sidewalk you are swallowing down the soft pinkness of your throat. Up here I can see you are going bald, the expanse of your forehead with your gray hair tossed backwards onto the carpet is wide and gleaming. With your eyes shut and your mouth working to please the point of myshoe, you could easily be an inflatable doll or a cartoon and I am able then to withdraw my heel as carefully as a penis and rake it in pink crescents across your cheek and down your chin.
    In my sessions with you I search for the evil inside us that we share like kisses between our open mouths. The boundaries I once saw as steel fences in my mind turned out to be sodden wooden planks when I reached them, easily kicked down. Each act of pain became easier to inflict once the initial transgressions had been committed, and we had understood ourselves