Owner. The word lands like a blow. I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. Using the sharp, metallic pain to ground myself, to keep the tears that are welling up from spilling over. I cannot give her that. I cannot give any of them that.
I shut my eyes again as the maid applies the cold cream to my legs. The razor follows. It’s a swift, practiced motion. The sound of the blade scraping against my skin is obscenely loud in the quiet room. I feel the drag of it, the slight pull and then the strange, naked sensation of the air on a patch of skin that hasn’t felt it since I was a child.
I try to disconnect. I think of the orchard behind my parents’ house, of climbing the old apple tree and feeling the rough bark against my palms. I think of the sun on my face, but the memory is thin and fragile, and it shatters as the razor moves up my thigh. My breath hitches. I am trembling again, and the maid pauses, her hand steadying me with impersonal pressure.
They do my arms next, the pale hair on my forearms vanishing in swift, sure strokes, then my underarms. Every stroke of the razor feels like it’s stripping away not just hair, but a layer of my humanity. Reducing me to something smooth, unmarked, and passive.
Then it is time for the most intimate violation. The maid’s hands are firm, positioning me. The cream is cold. I flinch violently, a full-body shudder I cannot control.
“Hold still,” Mrs Vale’s voice is a whip crack. “You will be still.”
A tear escapes then, tracking a hot path down my temple and into my hairline. I am powerless to stop it. I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that I see bursts of colour against my eyelids as I try to leave my body entirely.
I am not here on this cold mat,
I am not in this gilded cage.
I am anywhere else. Somewhere nice. Somewhere warm, where the sun shines and the birds sing and….the razor moves with a terrifying efficiency, cutting through the desperate images I try to conjure in my head.
It is clinical, methodical, and utterly dehumanizing. The sensation is bizarre and unsettling, a profound vulnerability that makes my stomach clench. They lift, they slice, they shave around me and I can feel it; I can feel that blade gliding over my flesh, touching the metal bar that is hidden there. It’s sensitive, too fucking sensitive. Even this, as unintentional as it is, sends a sensation through my body that feels far too fucking close to something like pleasure.
I see them look; I see them exchange glances. I can even guess the thoughts in their head. That I’m already so close to a jezebel that I deserve the hand I’ve been dealt.
When it is done, I feel exposed in a way I never knew was possible.
The torture doesn’t end there. Once I am shaved, they do something else, theyusesomething else. I don’t understand what the fuck this procedure is for, why I would need water up there and why the fuck I would be flushed out?
Mrs Vale stands and watches the whole thing and if anything that makes this even more degrading, even more dehumanising.
I want to scream, to yell, to lash out and demand that these people treat me with respect. I’m a person after all, I’m a human being, not some piece of meat.
But to them, to the Brethren, I am not. No, I remind myself. I am a prize, captured, and about to be sold.
They dry me again, patting gently now that the scrubbing and shaving are done.
Then comes the oil. It is poured from a crystal decanter, warmed, and rubbed into my skin by four hands. They massage it into my shoulders, my back, the length of my legs, the soles of my feet. The scent is jasmine and sandalwood. Rich, heavy, and expensive.
No doubt it’s meant to be alluring but to me, it smells like surrender.
The perfume gets caught in my throat, and I have to fight not to cough, not to show any more weakness.
They lead me, slick and shining, to a full-length mirror framed in gold leaf. I don’t want to look. I keep my eyes downcast, fixed on the intricate pattern of the rug.
“Look,” Mrs Vale commands.
My eyes, against my will, drift upwards.
The woman in the mirror is a stranger. Her skin glows under the bathroom lights, flawless and unnaturally smooth. Her hair is slicked back from a face that is pale and drawn, but it’s the eyes that undo me. They are huge in her face, pools of fear so profound it seems to swallow the light.
They are my eyes.
This is it.
This is what will be paraded, examined, and bid upon.
This polished, perfumed shell is what I have become.
I thought I had come to terms with my fate. I had wrapped it in logic and necessity, a bitter pill I convinced myself I could swallow but now, staring my future in its terrified, glassy eyes, the numbness shatters completely.
