A diagram of the body By Rebecca Serle Does he want to set her free? If he wanted to, could he release her? Could he tear through wire and lace and pearl and hold her in is hands, lay his palm flat on her belly? Could he trace the indents of her stomach with his tongue, caress the lines of her ribcage and run his hands down further and until they rested in the folds that refuse, like her breasts, to be locked away? No. How could he when the thing that drives him to her, which makes him weep and beg at her knees is the fact that she is bound at all? But wouldn’t he want that? To see the real quality of her skin, the pure white that has gone unexposed for so long? No, because he does not know it’s there. He takes the coarse bodice for her skin and the pearl buttons for her nipples. He sucks on them, rubs and flicks them and expects her to quiver under the pleasure of some hyperbolic idea. There is something intoxicating about her submission but it is not because he is the one, the chosen king to come to her and draw the sword out of the stone. It is because she shrinks in that divine corset, exhales and exhales and exhales until the inhale is just a memory, the other half of an equation that has already been solved. Is it him that replaces it? Perhaps the inhale was unnecessary now that he can breathe for her. Perhaps it was just a stand-in, a place-filler until the thing that would fill her up all along appeared. Oh, but she knows better, because----- It can’t fill her, how could it when any whisper of an inhale would make buttons pop and lace split? He must fill her up a different way, a less wholesome way. A way that doesn’t have to include the whole self, that can keep her chest pinned even as her hips are lifted. And she is desperate for the contact, desperate for someone to place inside of her that which she fears is no longer there. When he does she is reminded of not wearing the corset. It is a memory of the cells though, not of the mind. There are no images drawn, no date or place or time. It has been too long since it’s been removed to have any recollection of it being put on. It is a shame, too, because they would both get off on that memory. The picking out of silk and pearl. The measuring of her waist, the taking hold of her breasts. The wrapping and packaging and opening and wearing. She, holding herself as a prize. Him, believing it. As soon as he begins to move inside of her he touches something that was there before. Before she was laced up and in and there was no more air and her vision began to blur from the sheer lack of oxygen in her bloodstream. She has long ago resigned that this is not adoration. That in touching something in her he is not trying to awaken anything. It is an unintentional side effect and the fact that her eyes slip closed to him just means the circles are getting their job done and he’ll continue on that way. She closes her eyes to see if she can find it, to see if the world can get dark and quiet enough to tell where it’s coming from. But she can’t. She cannot even move. It takes all the effort she has just to lie with her eyes closed. She will realize, in that darkness, that the power she holds is an absent one. It exists in theory but no longer in physicality: It is not tangible. If she wanted to touch it she wouldn’t even know where to place her hand. Back to The Invisible Corset