Free Girl by Eden Bradley

and snaps a leash onto my steel collar. She gets to her feet and when I don’t rise quickly enough, she kicks my leg, and I get up and follow her as she tugs on the leash. We go upstairs and into my room, where she hands me toothbrush and toothpaste, signaling for me to brush my teeth. I obey, using a bottle of water and spitting into the now-clean bucket, which she also motions for me to use to relieve myself. Since all I get are hand gestures, I know this is the silent Girl, so I don’t ask any of the thousand questions that wait at the tip of my tongue, baiting me.
    When she turns to start the bath, I notice a second bucket on the floor next to the bathtub, and suddenly I know exactly what is about to happen, even before she bends over to screw the long nozzle onto the faucet. And I blush for some inexplicable reason, as if I have anything left to be embarrassed about. As if this has not been done to me before.
    She waves a hand and I step over the side of the bathtub and squat in it, the porcelain cool under my bare feet. Bending to retrieve the empty bucket, she places it in the bottom of the tub, then she parts my ass cheeks and inserts the slim nozzle into my sore anus.
    The water is pleasantly warm as it begins to fill me up, then uncomfortable as the pressure builds. I do not want this to happen. I do not want this to happen. But it’s too damn late, and too damn bad. I am here of my own accord, because a larger part of me wants exactly this. Requires it. Yes, even this ultimate humiliation!
    I take long, deep breaths, remind myself that everything the Girl is doing to me is at the Master’s direction. But that helps only until she pushes the bucket under me and removes the nozzle. Then there is a single breathless moment where I try to hold it in before my bowels empty into the bucket, and I start to cry. This is no gentle seeping of a tear down my cheek, but horrible, hard sobs. The Girl is unsympathetic. She uses the nozzle to rinse me off, then re-inserts it and begins to fill me up once more. And I hate it, and I hate her, and some completely unreasonable part of me is grateful to her at the same time. For doing what will please the Master. For purifying me for him. For the degradation, which I claim to hate but which I also secretly love. Maybe because it opens me up in this way. Because I am utterly helpless against it—the humiliation and the tears and shitting into a goddamn bucket. But I don’t fight it. Why would I? I am exactly where I want to be. Some part of me stands back and screams that I’ve lost my mind, yet at the same time I feel more sane and centered than I have in my entire life.
    Three more times she fills me up and I empty into the bucket. Afterward, I’m exhausted. She runs the bath, then quickly and thoroughly bathes me, hands me a towel, and I dry myself. She shoves me toward my pallet, and I lie down and close my eyes as I hear her pad from the room. I want to sleep. But too soon she is back with a tray and I have to sit up.
    “You must be hungry,” she says, making my heart leap.
    It’s the other Girl!
    I look at her carefully, making a quick but thorough visual inspection, and I see she has a small mole over her left breast, just beneath the brand. I don’t think her sister has one.
    “Yes, starving,” I say, realizing only then that it’s true.
    “Better hurry. It’s a school day,” she says, as if everyone knows about this but me.
    “What is it, the school?” I ask, pouring a little of the rare milk I’ve been given for the first time in days into the bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with gold raisins.
    “Uh-uh. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” She frowns at me. “Ah, I see you did. Silly Girl.”
    “Am I going right after breakfast?”
    “Isn’t that always when we go to school?”
    She smiles a little, but I know I’m not in on the joke.
    I take a few sips of hot tea, and it feels lovely. Soothing. I am too nervous to ask her more about