The Cyberkink Sideshow by Ophidia Cox Page A

off a dog and using it to hunt for drugs any less exploitative than watching dogs engaged in their natural behavior for entertainment?”
    Sylvia had never really thought about it that way. Perhaps he did have a point. Dogs don’t have taboos and inhibitions about sex like humans do.
    “You seen this?” Victor had produced a long, narrow, yellow rope from somewhere. Its surface looked smooth, like Plasticene. “New kind of microvelcro someone in Germany invented. Pulls apart easily from the right direction, but sticks like glue in the wrong one.” He took hold of Sylvia’s arm. “Here, let me show you.”
    Sylvia snatched back her arm, fearing he would tie her up and leave her there, or worse, try to unmask her. “No, thanks, I’d rather not.”
    “Of course, what was I thinking? You’re the domme. Here, you try it on me.”
    Sylvia stared at him, and at the yellow string he held out to her. There was something tempting in his tone of voice, something admiring in his expression.
    Almost without thinking, she grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back. He struggled a bit, in the entirely predictable way football hooligans do. Sylvia backed him into a guy rope holding up one of the tents and wrapped the yellow rope around his wrists.
    “Wow,” he said. “And you’re calling yourself a novice domme? Dark horse, more like!” He wriggled his shoulders, testing the bonds. “I’m well and truly stuck. Now what are you going to do?”
    Sylvia found herself staring at his gray eyes, his straight nose and shapely lips, the thickness of flesh under his chin. He wore no mask and, like the zebra woman, it wasn’t as though he could shed the aspect that made him bizarre. The night she’d watched from the audience, it hadn’t been apparent quite how big he was as was clear now she was up close. Normal attire would probably make him look even more out of place. Perhaps she only felt this way because he was such a novelty, because on some media-instilled or perhaps instinctual level fat people should be revolting. Perhaps this lust she was feeling was abusive. She wanted him, and it was ridiculous because she’d never before been intimate with someone with whom she wasn’t in an established relationship, but he was offering her exactly that. And this wasn’t really her.  
    From behind a mask, the situation was surreal, almost as though it wasn’t a part of the reality she knew. No one would notice, not in this place where, to her left, twelve nearly naked people of both sexes thrashed in a mud bath. On her right, people played on what looked like a children’s playground object, but had a sign before it saying it was a Fantastic Fucking Robot Swing. Even if someone did look, she’d never be recognized.
    There was something she couldn’t resist about him when he was restrained like this and unable to escape. She put her hands on him, feeling the softness of his flesh under his tight costume.
    Victor’s eyes widened.
    He didn’t know what she was going to do. And it dawned upon her that was the whole point. “You think I’m going to tell you?”
    Sylvia slid her palms down his chest, over his belly to his flanks and buttocks. She watched how his expression changed as she touched him, confident because her own face was hidden from him by the mask. It made her feel the way she did at the end of a hard winter, just before the break of spring, when one can almost sense the new life building in the earth and the air.
    She could touch him anywhere . With his arms trapped, he was powerless to resist if it tickled or made him uncomfortable. Underneath his costume she could see the deep dint of his navel and the points of his nipples on broad, heavy breasts underlined by folds that ran under his arms. She wanted to touch him here, but she couldn’t quite get past the inhibition of it not being right for a heterosexual woman to want to play with boobs, even if they were man-boobs rather than woman-boobs. Instead she