Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau Page A

capable of surviving them. Once I even tried on myself the things I do to you. Whipping myself with a silver chain, I became fascinated by the stopped seconds of pain that opened my mouth and closed my eyes. Afterwards I was left looking down at my thighs where the circle of the chain I had snapped down my body had left a perfect imprint of itself, pink like a rubber stamp, like one of those playful rubber stamps with happy faces on them.
    When the pain stopped, time moved again and I wondered if perhaps in our time together you felt this also, this stopping of time as it races past you now that you are middle-aged and some of your friends are already dead. Perhaps only the absorption of pain can distract you from the details of your daily life — the necessary hours at the office, the teenaged childrendemanding money for concerts and clothes, the golf lessons on weekend afternoons. All this leading you down the road of increasing age, minor illnesses, and death.
    “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” Thomas instructs sternly. Perhaps only in the clutches of pain, when your eyes are closed and your lips forced apart, does the day seem long. Perhaps this is what you seek, this element of immortality, the way I do by writing poems. I tried that day to understand what it must be like for you when the pain hits, when you protest with a convulsion in your voice that stops me because it is no longer a pleasurable pleading that runs out of your mouth like water or thin blood.
    It is easy to become addicted to hurting you, to aching for that moment when you take off your clothes and lie on my floor. There is a slight roundness to your stomach and a soft field of black chest hair that sharpens into a tiger’s stripe running down your belly. It appears knife-like, sadistic. I could picture you with a black beard, trying on black leather vests and turning in a mirror like the men I watch downtown in the shops I frequent now, fascinated, struck by how warmly this fringe community welcomes me. I had never been accepted so unquestioningly elsewhere. I finger the bewildering chains of my new trade, and talk to thewomen behind the counter who are pierced and smiling and who recommend books that make me realize I am only on the circumference and that the center has no bottom. You could just as easily have been one of those men who advertise for young blonde slaves to torture, who read magazines that teach them how to build benches and restraints and instruments of pain. You could have turned out like that, and I am given to understand that perhaps even now, one afternoon you will. Some nights I pace my apartment and wonder if one day I will push you too far and you will lunge up from the floor and hurt me. There is no way either of us can tell, because we are each other and there is nothing restraining that moment when we exchange power as others do body fluids.
    The power floods into me warm and soft and golden, dusty as pollen. I had not realized previously the extent of my emptiness that no kisses could fill, no flowers or brave words of love. The emptiness sang hollow and blue and then turned red as rage. I knew from the first session that I could have killed you, and that, indeed, you were not letting me go so far as I needed. Looking down at your muscled body on my floor, I wanted some of that red inside me to bleed out through you, in slashes and strokes of thudding color.
    You bought me a bracelet the other day from one ofthe sex shops downtown. It was sitting curled up in a dusty corner of the glass case, half-concealed by wrinkly dildoes and packets of Day-Glo creams and lotions. I was browsing impatiently, needing to use the bathroom, my feet swelling in my heels, bored by the plastic-coated magazines and the multicolored underwear nailed to the walls. The woman behind the counter had a toothless glazed expression and eyes that looked like they were made of glass. I did not particularly want to be there and perhaps