Robert Colpitts

She’s extremely _______–all tied up like that.  Sitting in a wooden chair.  Hands tied together, and tied, longingly, to the middle spindle.  Legs roped against the front legs.  Upper thighs duct taped to the seat of the chair.  Neck pulled to the top rail by a spiked collar with leash attached.  Chest fasted to the back of the chair by an anchor chain.  Her ears fastened to two sleeping hamsters resting on the floor to the left and right of her chair.  Feet pasted to the floor with Elmer’s glue.  All that is free is her jaw and her tongue.  In one word:  she is not going anywhere.

I look at her, and she looks at me, and I hope it is enough.  But it’s not.  She makes me feel so guilty all the time.  Like binding an imaginary dream woman who I am told says cruel things to me is wrong. 

“I woke up to someone snorting the pledge of allegiance as if it were a cure to cancer,” I say smartly. “The words freedom and liberty are in a playpen smoking Queen-Anne’s Lace.  A title, called Former Love, unites the heavenly people listening and watching, and the ever-non-cynical-tip-toeing-livers do what they do and die black, sad, deaths.  This, you understand, is my justification for you being there.”

She offers nothing.

“And therefore, the question on the table is whether or not I love you.  The question there asked now lies–there.  For showing me THAT.”

It is true what I said about the pledge.  I heard it.  Some woman called it like Baptist-calling-Jesus-of-the-Black-caller-inspired-vociferous-type.  “I pledge allegiance..” with an especially hard hit, “…with liberty and justice for all!”  So I tied Faith up.  You see, such grandiosity cannot be but revenged.  Someone must suffer for the sins of the sisters.  So Faith there.

“So the question, as I said, is whether or not I love you.  If you walked like sunlight from my translucent male skin, which you did, and took all the dreams I had of ever being you with you as you wander the streets and say everything I wish I could say, which you do all the time, and will came and will went and will stood and will watched, then how do I know if I love you if not because I simply need someone to envy?”

Faith is silent.  She will not beg to be let go.  And any word–ANY WORD–would be begging.  She will sit there for a hundred years.  A million.  And never speak.  I will feel guilty, and I will let her go, and she will walk away without saying a word.  And she’ll ignore me–FOREVER.  So, I’ll have to pretend it never happened, which, to the man who ties up women and makes them do whatever he wants, should be a great thing, but we all know, yes we do, that the conscience nicks a bit every now and then at the soul, especially for things like this, so I will, oh so badly, want her to talk about it, to admit it, to share it, to blame me, to convict me, slander me, belittle me, hurt me, beat me, lock me up, something, anything, just so she acknowledges that I tied her up in a chair like this, THAT AT LEAST I HAVE POWER OVER MY MANLY IMAGINATION, that I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I DID tie her up, and she DID hate it, and it DID happen.

“Don’t wake up the hamsters with all that thinking.”

I fling my head about, and stare at her profusely.  She has her eyes closed.  She is napping. 

“It is a simple nature, that of the dog,” she sniggers. 

If she’s not careful, I will wake up the hamsters.

“If you’re not careful, the hamsters will wake and free me.”  Now divinely serious.

The hamsters wake.  They stretch.  They yawn.  They analyze.  They plan.  They climb up the string that holds them to Faith’s ear lobes and free her ear lobes.  Then working together, they take off the collar.  The leash and collar fall to the ground; on the way, the spikes from the collar cut the rope binding Faith’s hands to the middle spindle.  By this time, the hamsters have gnawed through the linked links of the anchor chain, which falls softly to the ground.  Then, amazingly, they split up:  one hamster licks the glue off of Faith’s feet; the other unties the rope binding her legs.  Faith smiles at the hamsters.  Then she looks at me (as the hamsters release the duct tape), and stands and walks away.

I keep watching the black distance as if there is something to learn from it.  But all that is left is my emptiness.

You see, that is why you can’t be nice to women.