Peaches
Perhaps this is the manner in which she saves herself. Because all that she senses outside of herself is nothingness. So she goes to him. His use of her makes her solid, heavy, like bodies are intended to be heavy, and how souls contain infinite mass. His brutal management of her breasts encourages her out of her unnatural sleep. Pain is a voice of the spirit rousing itself. Ropes grow luminous in a mind gone dim. Flogging rectifies balance, each strike conspicuous, bright points like Christmas lights strung about her limbs. He decorates her like a tree. He dangles her from her stretched, aching breasts as though she is a dark angel. He walls her into her soft, supple flesh and tastes her like a vintner tests wine. Made manifest on the eve of her destruction, the birthing of her body is more about difficulty than ease. And in her weightless condition of diseased dreams, she must be brought back to herself by the use of extremes. Ropes and straps binding her ankles, knees, wrists, arms, and neck are neither reality nor sleep. The prying open of her mouth with hooks and the compression of her breasts between metallic rungs, anchor her in the realm of the living because of dread and excitement, the electricities of flesh. And pain, that corrective stress, infuses her with breath. As she hangs upon her racked breasts, helpless, bound hand and foot, she calculates the weight of desire. She does not experience relief, only the dead find that. For her, it is dark ecstasy and vague preternatural stirrings, the emergence of life.